Good new and bad news on this build. The good news is that it didn’t explode! The bad news it’s not stable. I got to 40lbs at 25” draw today after about 50 pulls. And slowly developed a start of a hinge on the outer of the top limb. Tried to even it out and carefully scrape strategically to balance the limbs out. Got it looking good at 27”-28” at 44 lbs on the tree. Went out and put few dozen shots through it and it shot ok. Not at all what I was hoping for with the reflex I worked into this bow. I fired 400 grain arrows and was drawing it to 28” and seemed to get warmed up and shoot little better. If I were to guess around 170-180fps. Nothing spectacular but decent. Upon inspecting the bow I noticed the top limb inners start to bend out of balance. Not a hinge per se but a pronounced bend on the inners compared to The bottom limb. After leaving it rest at brace it balanced out again and looked ok. Here’s what I think happened…. I had purposely left lots of belly wood to tiller down after the sinew in hopes to not stress the belly fibers for enhanced performance to balance with the sinew. This would normally have been fine but I was getting so thin trying to get within the 45-48lbs window that I ended up with the sinew doing the bulk of the work which is not stable. Every time I unstrung the bow to rest it and restrung it there seemed to be some corrections that needed to be made to balance. I realize that this is the nature of sinew and that it needs to be “warmed up” so to speak and work the limbs and physical balancing that needs to occur but even after an hour of this and getting it balanced eventually it was not as stable as I hoped. It shot well though and true just not stable enough to send out this way. The sinew is doing the bulk of the work and pretty amazing really that it comes right back to 10-11” reflex almost right away after shooting. It’s pretty much a sinew bow with a little wood added in it current state. I would have been better off to leave this heavy at say 60-65lbs draw for a well behaved bow. Too much sinew in relation to the dense heat treated wood.
So here’s my options as far as I see it.
1. put a horn belly lam on the bow to add some stability
2. Add a boo lamination on belly.
3. Leave it the way it is at 40lbs at 27” for mediocre performance.
4. Call it a failure and move on.
What do you guys think???
You can see from the pics how thin the wood got in relation to the sinew.
