Last Friday while getting some instruction from Dave Miller he showed me some things. But the thing that blew me away was his "Expedition" bow.
He showed me one of Howard's personal bows. It was signed but didn't have a pet name on it. Dave said it was 69" nock to nock. One of the laminations was coming up so we couldn't string it. Couple things I noticed about the bow. Howard's handle was about 1" wide but much deeper than any Hill style bow I've handled including Dave's Shulz style bows. It also had a very distinctive teardrop shape that Howard preferred. It looks like it won't work but let me tell you...you put the bow up and there's no question that narrow ridge on the back of the handle is either where it belongs in your hand or not. The other thing I found interesting is Howard didn't use a strike plate or rest. He preferred the plain wood shelf of the bow because, as Dave explained, Howard thought that the bow talked to him with a plain shelf and felt he could feel if he was doing something wrong right away. Interesting.
The other interesting feature was the use of a cap plate on the back of the riser to tie in the fibeglass where it comes to a peak on the back of the riser where the handle starts. He essentially glued a small strip of wood over the top of the fiberglass. Never seen that before.
The other thing that is striking about Howard's bow is how thin the tips are (narrow) relative to the current production HH Archery examples and to degree even Dave's Shulz style bows. Dave said Howard had a habit of snapping off his limb tips and rather than make another bow he would simply reshape the tip and make another string groove. But the example I saw had fairly smallish limb tips.
Finally, the BIG difference, according to Dave. is the way Howard made his limbs. They are not simple laminations of flat bamboo. The back of the bow is concave on its Belly side and the back side is convex on its belly side. Futhermore, Howard left the bamboo nodes mostly intact on the back side of the bamboo resulting in small bumps under the surface of the fiberglass--you can see and feel these bumps--the limb surface is not flat like you see on bows today. Dave said that Howard felt that grinding down the nodes flat took away the power fibers of the core. He also used a woven fiberglass mesh not the more uniform product we see today,
So Dave set out to reproduce Howard's bows in as much detail as possible. That resulted in his Expedition model. I can tell you, having held them side by side...if I was a blind man I'd have a hard time telling them apart. Howard's bow uses green and white woven fiberglass and Dave can't source those colors now but he can get black. But Dave has painstakingly reproduced Howard's method of convex/concave laminations. He uses mesh fiberglass and yes--leaves the bamboo nodes on the back of the bow. His tip geometry is almost identical. And the bow bends like Howard's bows. It also has the cap lamination on the back of the riser to lock in the fiberglass.
Like Howard's bow the riser is bare wood but of course you can get a leather strike plate if you wish. Lastly, it a stunning bow.
When I first saw it the only thing I could think of is the first time I set my hands on a really fine hand crafted Bamboo fly rod. Its impeccable.
I couldn't stand it and ordered one on the spot.
Topic: HH bug got me ... Part One! (Read 139939 times)
