This is a bow I saved from becoming wood worm food
I was going through a whole load of billets I had stashed in the rafters and hadn't looked at for years. There is some nice stuff that I had forgotten about. Anyway these billets had a few worm holes along one edge and of course I feared the worst...upon closer inspection I found for some reason they had only gone along the very edge of one of the billets. I was able to get rid of them on the first pass cleaning up the split corner.
The early/latewood ratio was pretty terrible and the rings were thin but overall the billets had a nice shape and a good ring when bounced end on off the floor. So I recurved them, heat treated the roughed out limbs into an elliptical reflex, spliced them in deflex with MT13 (excellent splice glue). The tips sat about 3 inches forward of the handle after all that.
I tillered it to 40#@28 due to the pretty poor wood. It now holds about 2 inches of reflex and shoots 10gpp at 175fps. Not bad but not great. The Elm here is a bit like that mostly excellent, some so so and some pretty poor
Heat treating (however it is done wink wink) brings all of it up a notch. trapping the back is another great way to help with the compression but I kept it pretty tame on this one. With a good thick ring on the back I am happy to take the back down to 5/8th to 3/4 the width of the belly or find a high crowned piece to start with.
