A few words about some techniques that were new and interesting and of course, tillering.
To remove wood we used the usual draw knife-very sharp, Dean Torgues rasp, cabinet scraper, and Dean's scraper-looks like a spoke shave-but it is a scraper. The most used tool for scraping was a small lock blade knife made by Gerber.
We used lots of sand paper-John insists on removing all toolmarks at the end of each step.
We would remove wood and keep track with tape measure and calipers and carefully eye-ball each limb for a gradual taper down to very small light tips.
We would also 'feel' the wood in our hands to detect peaks and valleys in the limbs.
when we were far enough along we cut in the string grooves and strung the bow-measure for string tiller in two spots-max depth and 14 in from the tips.
We exercised the limbs with the bow laying on a work bench; or just drawing it.
We never used a tillering string, no walkie-talkie, or block; no tillering tree, no tillering stick, and no 'floor tillering'.
John sees nothing wrong with those items, they just didn't seem to fit his methods. For large classes he will use a tillering tree for demonstration purposes.
It seems there are lots of ways to skin this cat-all right and none wrong-and there is plenty of room for all.
Anyway I am going to use some of what I knew from before and primarily follow what Adam and I learned this week with Dr. Tiller!
Topic: Building self bows with John Strunk! (Read 7144 times)
