Wookies Words: Recurve Build #16. Trying new things.

The Best Bow Yet

It's been a while since I had time to do a build of any kind. Since I had some time off over the Christmas break, I thought I would spend some time in the shop and enjoy some time building another bow. I have been thinking about a few different things I wanted to try on my next build, so a lot of these new things went into the new bow. In fact, this was a bow full of new things.

A while back, I was at a warehouse in SLC (MacBeath Hardwoods) which is loaded with all kinds of wood, both exotic and domestic. I was looking for a cool wood that might look good in a bow. There were a lot to choose from and I was like a kid in a toy store. I could not make up my mind. I grabbed a few really nice boards and kept looking around. I wanted to use one of the varieties of African Blackwood that I saw. It is very beautiful, very hard, and also very expensive. Instead, I found a small board make of Mun Ebony, which I discovered is a wood from Madagascar, I was not quite 3" tall, but I wanted to use it anyway and felt I could either make it work in my recurve design, or use it in a longbow. So, this board has been sitting around for a while until I could find a chance to use it. The time had come to try to use it!

My wife has a brother who is an excellent guitar maker. He gave me a piece of leopardwood that I wanted to use in a bow, but it was a little too short for the 26" that I need for the riser. So, I came up with another plan to do something that I had not done before. I cut the leopardwood board at a 45 degree angle and put in a piece of purpleheart, which is also a wood I have not used yet. I decided that it would look better if I used a piece of black phenolic on both sides of the purpleheart to create a nice border. I sandwiched these pieces together and then planed then down to a single thickness and used this for the center of the laminated riser. I also added a couple more thin layers of purpleheart into the laminated riser to give it more color and character.

I usually add some type of curve, stripe, or other decorative detail to the riser. I like how it looks. The one I like the best is a couple curves that start in close proximity and then diverge as they proceed down the riser. This time I thought that I would try to cross the curves and see how it turned out. The difficulty in doing this comes from also adding the 45 degree section of purpleheart into the middle section of the riser. Each time a curve is cut and then re-glued, great care must be taken to align the parts exactly or else the lines and curves will show the error once the window is opened up to reveal the center woods. Also, I decided to use a medium brown (kind of mustard colored) phenolic strip instead of the normal black phenolic.

The last new thing about this bow came from my research on the Bingham's Projects web site. I found that there are were new products which they now carried. I was excited to try the new olive green bow glass and also a new lamination wood, called Ebiara or Red Zebra. I love using zebra wood, so I wanted to see how the Ebiara looked. I also like the green glass on various old and new Bear bows, so I wanted to give that a try.

Like I said, lots of new things were tried on this bow.

When I got to the part of the process where I work on the limbs, I was amazed that they were almost perfectly straight. They required very little adjustment. Also, when I checked the tiller (bottom-to-top), I was again happy that it was already correct. This has never happened before. This is by far the best bow I have built to this point.