So the tiller is done. It survived and I've taken it to the range to shoot it. It's still unfinished in that I haven't thinned down the tips, fully finished shaping the handle, made a proper string for it (just used the tillering string), or put any finish on it. Based on my initial impressions and observations, I've met many of my goals but also had some failures that I've learned from.
Goals Achieved:
So based on initial impressions, this bow shoots *much* straighter and faster than my last bow of similar layout and this is directly due to the tillering and timing tutorial linked in the OP. I don't have a chronograph, so I can't say exactly how fast it is. What I can say for sure though is that arrows that where over spined for my last bow are in the ballpark for this bow despite the fact that I haven't even lightened the tips yet and the handle is a little bit thicker.
The overall workmanship of the bow is much better than the last with a notable exception that I'll get to later. Everything is straighter and more symmetrical, and just done better. While I thought the last bow was ugly, this one has something intangible about it that I find attractive despite being very similar bows.
Using the glued in reflex, the bow sits almost perfectly flat, but just a hair reflexed after an hour and a half of shooting. After sitting a while, it gains about a half to three-quarters of an inch reflex. This is much better than my last bow which ended up with a good three or four inches, at a rough estimate, of string follow.
One of the things I thought about was that red oak is a sort of mediocre compression wood and needs all the advantage it can get. To that end, I really went to some effort to make the belly side as flat as possible in order to distribute the work along the whole width of the belly as evenly as possible. I suspect that the way my last bows belly was more rounded has much to do with the amount of set that it took.
Now, I'm happy with all of that, but it would be dishonest if I didn't cover the next bit.
Where I failed:
So there I was trucking along on day 2 of the tillering. I was at 20" or so and everything was going pretty smoothly but suddenly, I started completely misreading the tiller for no reason that I can pin down. Maybe I was just getting tired, I dunno. All I know is that somehow things got switched around upstairs and suddenly I thought the bow needed exactly the wrong thing. So I caught this major mistake at about 24". This really just didn't give me enough room to fully correct the tiller. Ironically, this is the first time the tiller didn't turn out exactly the way I envisioned it, despite this being almost certainly the only time it was really right.
So I'm thinking I may bring it down to 35# to give me a little more wiggle room, but it will frankly just never be perfect. At some point I'll have to just live with it and move on to the next, chalking that up to a learning experience.
I'll try to get some more pictures up tomorrow and finish it up in the next few days.
Topic: My next bow (Read 964 times)
