Trad Gang
Main Boards => The Bowyer's Bench => Topic started by: Burnsie on October 09, 2024, 10:55:44 PM
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Working a pretty kinky/wavey piece of Osage - one of the limbs has some nice natural reflex the other had a good bit of deflex about mid limb. I used heat to take out the deflex and got it close to straight, but no reflex. When I put a long string on it, I heard a crack. Where I applied the heat and made the correction there were two vertical cracks on the back of the bow that run perfectly with the curvey grain. I ran water thin CA glue into the cracks, they do not go through to the belly. Picture of the cracks is below - can I still get a usable bow with these cracks?
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Keep going! unless that right side runs out to the edge id so keep it moving unless it cracks with some visual displacement. And if shes destined to blow keep tillering nice and slow and watch the thing explode on the tiller tree. Youll get a nice adrenaline rush and learn a lot once it fractures out and you can see splintering and where the bow gave up and that varying thicknesses at play that lend to failure as well as how cracks like that act for you in the future.
If you do feel like failure is imminent on the tiller tree take it off, its not actually that fun when the now nunchuk bow decides which direction to bounce
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I would keep going. Probably a torsion crack. I’ve had this pop up on wiggly bows and at doglegs.i would either tiller as or fill the cracks with CA glue and continue until your at full draw and shot in so you know it can hold up then give that area a wrap of some sort to give extra assurance of holding.
Kyle
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Thanks guys, I'll go slow and see what happens.
I've had one explode on the tiller tree before - that will definitely get your attention. I was finding pieces months later when I was cleaning up the shop.
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It definitely gets exciting when they go boom. I went through a phase of wanting to build a 100# English warbow out of black cherry. After about a half dozen detonations I gave up in that idea. But they all made a nice big boom and pieces would go flying. Usually around the 20” mark.
Kyle