Bow design and development

[willie]

Steve,
I guess it is safe to say that most of the fg guys utilize the precast lams that come in a couple of uniform thicknesses from a just a few primary suppliers.

Are you aware of designs that use fg of varying thickness? custom fg or otherwise?

[Stick Bender]

I think most dedicated FG bowyers or for that matter wood lam bowyers grind there own lams in any combination they want ,I have grinding sleds to grind from .001 to .010 taper rates or any combanation including parallels or supper lams with power lam & wedge tips ground into the same lam I can grind a typical 4 lam limb profile for about $12 as opposed to buying them  with sleds like these !  There are a lot of guys that use various thickness of FG in a design for example .040 on the back & .030 on the belly !

[Badger]

  I made my sleds out of 1/4" plate glass, I used different gauges of wire as spacers to set my tapers and used silicone to glue them together, very accurate but a little on the heavy side which is fine.

[Stick Bender]

 These are vertical grain bamboo ,I'm making matching sleds for the band saw so I can cut the ruff tapers right on the bandsaw saving lam material plus less grinding time , I'm setting my shop up to where I can make them in a short period of time, I like to use fresh ground lams vs leaving the set and get oxides on the surface , re sanding them can get varied tolerances.