About this time last year I build my first bow. If you do a search you can find the thread. It was a learning process with many mistakes made along the way. In the end the bow shot well....right up until I had an area of the lower limb delam. There were some small suspicious foggy spots on the limb that I was not sure the cause of. One of them grew slowly and eventually caused the limb to fail. My guess is that the problem was caused by using an oil based stain on the laminations. I wiped them down well with alcohol after staining and no residue showed on a white rag but apparently it was a bad idea. Now I know.
So it was time to try again so I could take a diy bow on our elk hunt this year. I tried to apply everything I learned last time and push myself for a better end product.
This bow would be made from some walnut I got at an estate sale and some maple I cut in chandler, tx. Once again the bow would be essentially a copy of a bob lee. This time even more so than last time. For this bow I build a form based off of a bob lee limb.
I built the form to utilize clamps rather than a fire hose. Some people have great results with this but I can't say I loved it. I have fire hose now to use on the next build. I actually had one limb that was note useable due to some micro bubbles under the glass in the deep part of the curve. I had to order more glass, grind more lams, add another clamp to the curve and try again.
The last bow I built I had felix40 order all of the supplies (except riser wood) from binghams for me. This build, I ripped and ground my own lams on a homemade lam grinder that I frankensteined from craftsman 4x36. I also made a jig to cut wedges on the table saw. j
These limbs I used parallel lams rather than a parallel and a taper. Why? Well because as best as I could tell with a micrometer, bob lee uses parallels. I based my stack off of measuring a 49# limb and a 58# limb and figuring out the measurement per #. I added the what was needed to the 58# measurement for a target weight of 64#s.
I did not have any walnut large enough to make a riser from one solid piece so I laminated 3 together.
So it was time to try again so I could take a diy bow on our elk hunt this year. I tried to apply everything I learned last time and push myself for a better end product.
This bow would be made from some walnut I got at an estate sale and some maple I cut in chandler, tx. Once again the bow would be essentially a copy of a bob lee. This time even more so than last time. For this bow I build a form based off of a bob lee limb.
I built the form to utilize clamps rather than a fire hose. Some people have great results with this but I can't say I loved it. I have fire hose now to use on the next build. I actually had one limb that was note useable due to some micro bubbles under the glass in the deep part of the curve. I had to order more glass, grind more lams, add another clamp to the curve and try again.
The last bow I built I had felix40 order all of the supplies (except riser wood) from binghams for me. This build, I ripped and ground my own lams on a homemade lam grinder that I frankensteined from craftsman 4x36. I also made a jig to cut wedges on the table saw. j
These limbs I used parallel lams rather than a parallel and a taper. Why? Well because as best as I could tell with a micrometer, bob lee uses parallels. I based my stack off of measuring a 49# limb and a 58# limb and figuring out the measurement per #. I added the what was needed to the 58# measurement for a target weight of 64#s.
I did not have any walnut large enough to make a riser from one solid piece so I laminated 3 together.
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