This morning finally saw stage two of my effort to recover the blank I screwed up by gluing the back glass on upside down. Stage one consisted of cutting a riser cutout into a 2x4, setting the bow on the 2x4's edge so that the back was up and flat, and then running it repeatedly through the drum sander to grind off the incorrectly installed glass. This was possible because it was a straight bow. A bit of the osage thickness got ground as well, so I made two thin .050 osage lams (thank you, Tom Ireland, for the osage) to add to the stack. All of this happened awhile ago, but shooting, gardening, setting up new tools, etc. got in the way of completing the project until this morning.
This lay up, which I'm calling Layup 4.5, went very smoothly... at least as far as you can tell till you get the bow off the form. To recap: Layup 1 was Slowpoke... that went smoothly enough that it lured me into a false sense of security. Layup 2 was the one on which I put a tip wedge in backward, necessitating a major bow shortening that ended up with a heavy draw bow, which subsequently blew up because in addition to the tip wedge error, I'd over pressured the fades, resulting in glue starvation. That one cut my hand pretty badly and will leave me with a scar to remember it by. I think the good limb may end up as an osage and purpleheart walking stick. Layup 3 was the one that didn't glue on one edge, so I cut the good edge off and ended up with Lemonade. Layups 4 and 4.5 are the blank currently in the oven. That little review was as much for my benefit as yours.
This morning's effort felt comfortable, like I'm getting into the rhythm of the thing. I didn't feel hurried. For some reason, I've been feeling like I had to complete the layup process quickly... The glue is drying! Silly, of course, the epoxy will end up taking 4 to 7 hours to cure, so no rush. Take my time and think it through. So, it's in the oven now. I'll turn it off at 7 pm and let it cool down without opening it. In the morning, I'll see if I'm going to have a bow out of this blank or not. What I'm hoping for is a slightly wider version of Lemonade, in the roughly 25# range, though with the extra lam I added, it may go closer to the low 30's. Kind of hard to say with all that extra grinding and nonsense involved.
Since saving this lam, if it works, involved a process of kind of flipping the bow over and grinding it wrong side up, and then in effect "flipping" the back glass, it has somehow become associated in my mind with flipping pancakes, so, if it does end up being a bow, it will be called "Flapjack".
A further report should be issued sometime tomorrow afternoon.
And A Good Day Gets Better…
So, with the potential "Flapjack" in the oven, next up was doing some extremely minimal sanding on Lemonade and getting some finish on it. There's so little to work with on that bow, and I didn't want to risk changing the performance, so it got a light going over with 120, then 220, then 320, then marking: OPA 66" 17@25 on the upper limb above the fade and "Lemonade" on the lower limb, then a coat of wipe on poly.
Note that this is the first bow to bear the name "OPA"... for "Old Phart's Archery". Not that I'm really going commercial, (Heaven forbid!) but, heck, once the name occurred to me, I had to go with it. Tomorrow I'm going to make a tee shirt to wear at Moses Lake. It'll read:
Old Phart's Archery
Building bows for
the weak of:
__ Body
__ Mind
(Check One)
Haven't made any tee shirt transfers in awhile so that'll be kind of fun.
So, OK, next job is to come up with some wooden arrows for the Belfair Wooden Arrow Shoot, the weekend after Moses Lake. To be honest, I didn't want to make wooden arrows for my light bows. They're heavy and even the 5/16" are kind of fat. I have some 30# shafts and was getting my mind around to doing it anyway, when I spotted some woodies I had stored up by the ceiling. These were 9 left from a set I bought at my first Moses Lake shoot. I seemed to recall that they spined about 35#. Hmmm... Went digging in my string envelopes. Yep, here's a 61" one. Twisted it down to 60", perfect for the refinished black micarta 64" Super Kodiak I picked up from Bowdoc yesterday. That bow is 45@28, which makes it 33# for me. Out to the back yard in the rain for some testing. Wheeee!!! A nearly perfect match, burying them in the bear's chest at 30 yds! No need to make woodies for the little guys, I'll shoot the Super K!
So, here I am back in my room, smoking my pipe and enjoying a cup of coffee! :^)
Yep... that's a good day!
Topic: A Good Day Messing About... (Read 173 times)
