Thanks for the kind welcome as a sponsor.
We are very happy to be here on TradGang!!
I'm Jon Warwick, inventor of the StavePress (
www.stavepress.com ).
I am a bow builder a lot like you all (although probably not as talented as many of you), and I live in Mississippi.
I've been launching arrows across my back yard with longbows, recurves, compounds, and self-bows since I was seven or eight years old... Archery has played a big part in shaping me, like family, and Mississippi have.
I learned to build bows by reading books, and a class presented by Jim Hamm at Screaming Eagle Archery in Pennsylvania years ago.... the class was a great experience, and I'll always value it as a turning point for me. I saw that I could fulfill a life-long dream to build a deadly bow and hunt with it to kill game successfully.... and I have.
From the beginning of my bow building start, I saw that holding the wood during construction of the stave into a bow was a big hassle, and possibly harmful to the wood grain. I tried the old workmate workbench, the shavehorse, and the shop vise. All methods have their issues of not holding securely, or working in a cramped posture, or crushing the woodgrain accidently.
The StavePress is a new product on the market, but I've designed, re-designed, re-designed, and tested, tested, tested this device over the past several years.
I really have to say that its the ticket for holding a stave while you're working it down to a bow... but I know that guys like you who test it, and report on it here on TradGang are the real judges.
Unlike a shop vise, where you have to carefully set your wood in the jaws each time you re-set, you can just throw the wood in the StavePress and tighten- it will hold anywhere on the bow with no damage... snakey part, straight part, it doesn't matter. This is a much faster and safer process for the wood fibers.
It will hold your wood firmly but gently- never crushing the wood fibers like a shop vise, and since it binds from the top and bottom instead from side-to-side, you can really bear down on the wood with your hand tools. Its portable, can be clamped anywhere with C-clamps, and is heavy enough to hold a big piece of timber... it weighs 27 pounds. It has padded jaws that won't dent or scratch the wood at all when you get close to the final bow tweaks.
If you are curious, please go to my website and see the demo video and other good information about the StavePress here:
www.stavepress.com I will also post some pictures here shortly.
Best to all, Jon Warwick
Topic: StavePress... New Product! (Read 1721 times)
