Two TD-ELB Stylish Bows - Not So Happy End (28.12.2017) - Addendum (05.01.2018)

[Lehtis]

Greetings from Finland!
Dark autumn evenings and some spare time to spend... To make (flight) travelling easier I decided to make a couple of TD bows for myself. The project started by selecting suitable timber from my workshop corners and I made the sticks 4 cm wide and 1 m long. Both bows will have Hickory back, ca. 5-6 mm thick. One bow will have ca. 5 mm Cumaru core and Osage Orange belly. The other one will have ca. 5 mm Osage Orange core and Bulletwood (= Massaranduba) belly. I glued the parts with Unibond 800 and squeezed them together with rubber stripes cut from bicyckle tubes. I bended the nock ends ca. 7 cm upwards. After couple of days curing I narrowed the limbs to 30 mm wide and now they are waiting for the metallic connector pieces to be fitted on. Until then...

[Lehtis]

Some progress... Connector pieces fitted and glued with slow Araldite. Limbs ca. 27 mm outside of the connector pieces. Next to draw the string line and saw out the limb shape...

[Pat B]

Looking good. Can't wait to see the completed bows.

[Lehtis]

Thanks, Pat.

Now the connecting pieces fitted and limbs band sawn to proper width.

[PEARL DRUMS]

Very clean work. I appreciate that.

[Lehtis]

Slowly proceeding... limb backs rounded and smoothed and ready for bending. Next rounding the bellies and tillering during December...

[Lehtis]

That bulletwood bellied didn´t want to co-operate. Tillering with long string went OK but when trying to put short string on I got some firewood... :-(

Perhaps that hickory was not best quality, some starting rottening or something. At least that piece is darker, as seen in the earlier pictures, and it exploded just there.

Now I’ve decided to try to make new lower limb to pair it with the undamaged upper limb.

[Lehtis]

Osage bellied one is in better mood and now at adult poundage waiting for horn nocks and fine tuning of tiller.

[Pat B]

Lethis, looks like the back failed causing the belly to fail. Too bad. Hope the other 2 hold up better for you.
If it is OK with you, I may move this post to "Bows" so you'll get better coverage. Let me know if it is OK.

[Lehtis]

That’s OK to move.

And I’m going to try to make new low limb to pair the undamaged upper limb.

[FilipT]

How wide and long are the bows when assembled and what poundage you want from them?

[leonwood]

Darn! hate it when that happens! Lucky the osage one seems to work out well! Those takedown things look good too, been wanting to do one for a while and looks doable the way you set it up. Nice!

[Lehtis]

To FilipT: The bow(s) will be man tall, a bit over 180 cm, so the halves with normal travelling stuff will fit in 40 inch bow bag made for travellers with two compund bows (I don’t have any). They are ca. 28 mm wide just at the handle peaces and narrow to 14 mm at rounded tips. They should be ca. 80-85 lbs @ 28” when ready for shooting.

[Del the cat]

Nice looking work, shame about the blow up
Del

[FilipT]

Lehtis, I thought they were much wider, that perspective played tricks on my eyes. For such narrow bows you will get pretty strong bow, that is really cool.