form question

[wharvey]

Greetings all,

I'm thinking about trying to build a Hill style longbow, glass-laminate, in a month or so. I have been doing a lot of reading and noticed that there are several ways to make forms to glue up a bow.

The simplest is to just use clamps or stretched "rubber bands" to wrap the bow. This would seem to be only for straight bows. I can also see where this would be prone to warping the stave. Only used to glue backing on self bows?

Others use a form that just have the bottom half and the bow is again clamped, this time pressing the laminations against the form. Either clamps or rubber bands are again used. A metal strip is often used on the belly to distribute the clamping forces.

Then we have the forms that have top and bottom halves and use an air hose to clamp. This seems to be a lot more complicated than the other forms. What is the advantage of this?

What are the disadvantages to using a form with just the bottom part and clamping the laminations to this?


Thanks in advance.

Bill

[Dick in Seattle]

Bill... I'm a real newcomer to building.  I've participated in laying up two bows now, one Hill style and one of my own design, more or less... a wide limbed flatbow.   Both were done on a simple one piece form with clamps.   The Hill has deflex and the flatbow has reflex, not to a great degree, but neither was by any means a dead straight bow.   The guy who helped me make my form and lay up the flatbow makes recurves and RD's with clamps, so that's not unusual.   See if you can't order the Bingham Projects DVD on bow building...  they show a lot of good tricks, though they emphasize the air hose two piece form.  They do show the rubber band form.   THere are lots of buildalongs on the web, this site and others.   You can see the layup of my flatbow and of the Hill style my friend Boyd and I did on my web site.   Here's a link to the pages.. check out New Flatbow and Visit to JD Berry:

 http://dickwightman.com/bulletinboard/bulletinboard.htm


But really, get the Bingham dvd and google for bow buildalongs..