Untwisting the Flemish twist string???

[Russell Southerland]

I've always twisted the string after the stretching as ended, but never untwisted one.

I have a couple of strings that are a little to short so how much can you untwist a Flemish and still not jeopardize it?

Thanks in advance.

[McDave]

The strings I build have a bunch of tight twists near the string loops that go 5-6 twists more than needed to hold the tag ends of the bundles.  These tight twists stay in place when I untwist the string.  If your string also has these tight twists, then you can untwist the main part of the string quite a bit without compromising the string.  If your string does not have these tight twists toward the end, then I would not untwist it past the point that it has 1 twist per 2”.

Note that the serving will still have the original twists underneath, so there will probably be an imbalance between the twists under the serving and the twists outside of the serving.  As these equalize over time, it could affect the serving in some way, possibly necessitating a replacement serving, I really don't know.

[Orion]

I'm a little more conservative than McDave re no. of twists per inch.  While one twist per two inches will probably stay together, it looks a little weird.  I try not to go below one twist per inch.

[Russell Southerland]

Thanks guys.

Dave, I also know that the serving on all the strings I've had are much longer below the nock than above it, so it's kinda off balance to start with.

I'll check out the number of twists and see what happens and I'll report back.

[Russell Southerland]

OK, the string is brown with a black tracer of a couple of strands so it's easy to see the  number of twists.  I was able to untwist it 18 times on both ends and there is still plenty of twists per inch.

It helped some, but I needed to leave it strung on another bow as the string is for a selfbow and I'm not about to leave it strung for days to stretch it out.  This longbow is about 5 pounds heavier at 62#s and my self bow when the Osage selfie was 57#s when I finish it years ago.  Osage is suppose to gain 3-5#s as some of the selfbow guys have said over the years, but I have no interest in scaling it.  They are both in the ballpark.

I will report back after it sits for a few days and I shoot it a few times to see how much stretch I get out of it and how close to my desired brace height it is.