Take down recurve build

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I've wanted to build a take down bow for as long as I have been shooting one. I have just put it off and put it off for one reason or another. I really wanted to get my shop to a point that i could make as many of the parts as possible before i started. I finally gave up when i got everything besides a lam grinding setup built. I'm far from wealthy so I slowly acquired used tools, most of them broken or dilapidated, which i repaired.

Since i wanted to mill the riser wood myself, I would need a jointer and a planer to true up rough stock. I came across a 1950s craftsman 6" jointer at a garage sale. It was pretty rusty and the stand it was on was a joke. I disassembled the entire thing and treated the parts with an electrolysis rig that i built. Once everything was stripped to bare metal, I painted, reassembld and built a stand for it.

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I then found a delta 12" planer online for $30 that had gotten wet when the roof of the shed caved in and it got rained on. It would run fine, but could not be raised up and down. Once again i disassembled to whole thing and cleaned the parts. Come to find out, I'm pretty sure it was just the carrier chain that was horribly corroded and was binding the system. Could probably have just replaced that and been good, but i was already disassembled, so everything got cleaned. No picture, but in the end I had a planer in perfect working order for $30.

It would also help to have a bandsaw. I wanted a better quality one but couldnt justify the expense. I found one on craigslist that needed some love and got it for $65. It was very dirty and had some rust. Both pulleys were missing, the table top was missing, and it didnt have a stand. Apparently i really like making work for myself.

It got the same disassemble and clean routine. Picked up some pulleys at tsc, built a stand for it, and built a table top. The table top i built out of two layer of 3/4 mdf. It's not done in this picture, but I routered out a spot for a custom mahogany insert i made. Eventually i will router out a miter slot.

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The riser wood i got from a chandler, tx. A guy who i worked with took me to his brothers house who had had a large maple tree fall. I took a couple large logs home and rough processed them with a chainsaw and a tablesaw. I painted the ends and left them in my dads shop for the last 2 years or so.

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Pieces were then taken to the jointer to get two true faces 90 degrees to each other. After that, the planer trues up the other two faces. You end up with some stock like this. There is a piece of mahogany on the right that a friend of mine gave me a hunk of. He said it was from the floor of an 18 wheeler. The outside of it was it bad shape and got planed off.

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From here, I selected the pieces and pattern i wanted to use. I then cut them all to size. This was my first mistake. I planed them all down to 1.75", giving myself no room for error in glue up. Lesson learned.

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There are also two fiberglass accents that went into it. It was time to break out the smooth on. Glue up did not go as planned. I'm not sure if some of the faces were a hair off of 90 or what, but they were not laying up flat. I wasnt planning to cook the riser in my hot box, so I clamped everything to my table saw surface (saran wrap covered) to try to keep it true. Well then I got scared thinking that it would be better to cook it. So i improvised a heat box in place out of a shop light, a small heater, meat thermometer, and a canvas drop cloth. It worked great.

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You can see at the end of the block where i did a test run of the stain I planned to use. I also stained my maple cores for the limbs. I used minwax regular stain. I wiped it down really good and then wiped it down with alcohol. The alcohol towel was pretty much still pure white, so i felt pretty good about it.

I do not have any pictures of laying up the limbs. Felix40 helped me with that part since he has built several bows. I also used his form. We did not employ any techniques to keep the lams aligned and my first limb had the lams slide pretty bad. This caused problems down the road.

I made a very basic sled for my tablesaw to cut the limb pads with. They came out perfectly square. I was happy.

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This is the point were most people would drill the riser and limbs, and install hardware. However, I had some inserts that i had planned to use but changed my mind. So i was waiting for binghams to send me some. I also did not have my drilling jig built yet. I am a big fan of bob lee bows. That was the first recurve i ever owned so i guess im a little partial. One of the features i really like is a double bolt. I insisted on my build being a double bolt design. Well you see that's a problem. Not only is binghams jig not designed for a double bolt, but i was also not about to spend $60 for one. So i cut some steel out of a circular saw blade and got it all trued up. Why out of a saw blade? So i can harden the steel around the holes when it is done. I drilled and tapped the sides to accept screws to center it with. The picture is just it layed up. It is not welded or drilled. I had to build two of these. One for limb holes and one for riser holes. And they had to be exactly the same spacing. I layed them out very carefully with a micrometer. However, all precision was lost in the inacccuracy of my center punching and drill press. Hmmm what to do. The it hit me. I'd me absolutely stupid not to build one jig off the other one. So i clamed them together and drilled the 5/16 holes through both. Then i just enlarged the holes on one of them to 23/64. Bingo. I then welded the sides on, heated the area around the holes with a torch to proper temp, and quenched in peanut oil.

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I'm getting ahead of myself though. I did not have these built at the current stage of the build. I couldn't stand to wait though. I just had to work on that bow. So I decided to go ahead and cut out the riser and start shaping. I just left the area of the limb pads untouched so that they would be square to clamp and drill later. Also in this batch of pictures is a riser template i made my tracing my bob lee and then transferring it to some hardwood plywood.

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At this point i started to worry about the integrity of the spalted maple. I did some research and it seemed that it was only recommended for 55# or less bows. I really wanted to reinforce it but did not havy any phenolic or fiberglass that was suitable. So i thought on it for a while....and I had an idea...a pretty crazy idea. What if i removed some wood from the front of the riser, cut strips of canvas, saturated them with fiberglass resin, and then clamped them to the riser with a jig? I've looked at a LOT of build alongs and have never seen this done. Probably for good reason, i thought. I couldn't stand the curiosity so i just had to give it a shot. I had some brown canvas at the house and I had a brand new painting drop cloth. I cut them into strips and planned 3 layers per layer of "phenolic". I drew a line on the front of the riser where i wanted to remove material and did so on my frankensteined homemade edge sander. I then used a scrap of 2x4 to make a perfectly matching jig. That was a challenge but i got it done. Now the tricky part about fiberglass resin is that it sets up in 12 minutes! Seemed like plenty of time but man it was tight. I would not have made it if I had not talked my wife into helping me smear resin into the canvas. We got all the pieces saturated, stacked on the riser and clamped down. All of the precision of the jig was lost when I had a thick slab of goobered up canvas sitting on the riser. I couldnt tell if it was positioned correctly or not. Honestly, I'm not even sure that I didnt put it on upside down. I was kind of frantic because it was setting up rapidly.

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This would have been much easier if I had not already begun shaping the riser. Since i had, the excess cloth pushed down around the non supported ends. It did not appear to clamp up square and i was really doubting it at this point. I let it dry for the night and attacked it the next morning with the dremel. Lots of excess to remove and I had to match the contour of the already shaped riser. In the end, I was pleased with the result. As you can see, it is very fuzzy and dull when sanded. Not cool. That's because fiberglass resin is not what is used in phenolic. We will address that later.

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Somewhere along in here I finished my drilling jigs and got the everything drilled and mounted. Once again i went agaisnt the grain here. The norm is to cut out the limbs and then mount them. In my mind it seemed better to mount and then get a center line and then cut. All of this was complicated by the fact that those lams had slid previously. I had ground a lot off of one side of the limbs to try to get to where it was all glass and not partially smooth on. I was getting worried about missing weight. I did not mess with the other side of the limbs too much. I planned to mount the ground sides flush with the sides of the riser and then the other side would be cut when the limb pattern was layed out. It was a mess.

When i drilled the riser holes for the inserts, I'm not sure if the riser moved some or what, but one of the holes wasnt even close to square. # Face Palm#. I modified the corresponding limb hole and it worked out fine.

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I had this crazy idea that I could just stretch a string line to establish center. That was a stupid idea! String lines and curved objects do not mix. I used a string and eyeballed center as best as I could. I made a template from a bob lee 62" limb by making marks every inch, measuring with a micrometer, and transferring it to a template. I traced around the template onto the limbs and started grinding. I could tell at this point that things were quite off somewhere. I mean it was bad. My center line was way off or something. It did not even look salvageable by the time I got the limbs profiled. Frustrated would be putting it lightly. I just had to walk away from it for a day or two.

After i settled down I started just eyeballing center and taking off material accordingly. It started to look better. I felt like if i could establish a center line somehow, that i could make it maybe work. Hmmmm...

I had an idea. I sanded the bases of the limbs flush with the sides of the riser, ripped two pieces of scrap hardwood ply, and clamped them to the sides of the bow down the length. I used the micrometer to get them even the full lenght by adjusting the clamps. I then made a very simply jig, sanded to the thousandth, to hold a pencil at the center between the boards. This was just pulled between the boards to mark a line down the true center of the limbs. I then flipped it around and did it again, in case the pencil jig wasnt perfect.

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No that i felt confident in my center, I made another limb template off of a 60" bob lee limb. It was a fair bit narrower and I was to the point that I knew i'd have to sacrifice some lenght. Traced the new template on and started grinding. Things started looking promising. I started to get a little excited. This thing might actually propel an arrow. I filed in some crude nocks and got her braced. It actually looked like a bow.

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I even shot it a couple times....wearing safety glasses. I gradually worked up to full draw. No explosion. Didn't want to shoot it much before I got some tip overlays done.

Once again I did homemade "phenolic". This time, I pre made strips and then clamped them to the limb tips.