I need help with a board bow?

[upatree]

I have started to build a red oak long bow.  I have no knowledge on how to build a long bow but I thought it would be a fun project.  I have made the bow and it shoots O.K.  The question I have is the brace hight is 5" and I hit my wrist when I shoot.  How do I fix this?  :confused:  

The bow is 68" long and the draw is about 27" but I can pull it to 28" with no problem.  I don't know the bow weight.

Can someone help me out?  :confused:        :confused:

[rebelrecurve]

Raise the brace height a little and try again.  Otherwise wear an armguard.  When do we gets pics of the bow!

[Eric Krewson]

I set the brace height above 6" on my selfbows. the other thing you can do is put a DF-97 or other low stretch string on your bow. Selfbows tolerate fast flight type strings well and they don't follow the arrow to your wrist like B-50.

[Dave2old]

I build mostly board bows, mostly osage these days but I've been through a LOT of woods. Absolutely, if you want this bow to last and be as good as it can be, stop right now, flatten the back and glue on some bamboo. I made a lot of bows with pignut hickory (the best hick for this purpose) but got tired of them cracking; it just doesn't happen with boo. However, boo will take much more a "set" than hick, and with a long and straight longbow, hick will likely suffice. It's easy -- just get a thin lam of backing and glue it on with C clamps, then re-tiller the belly until you have the weight you want plus 5 or 10 pounds ... as it will gradually get weaker. This is by far the easiest, cheapest, and highest-odds way for beginners (which I still am, some 40 bows later!) to build a bow: board with backing. Have fun.

[upatree]

Thanks for the replies.  I am as new to this as can be and need all the advice I can get.  I will leave this one more as a display and a reminder of where I started.  The next one will hopefully be a better built bow.  Thanks again for the replies.

Upatree