flooring for lam bows

[walkabout]

so ive heard lots of people using ipe and bamboo flooring in building laminate bows, and was wondering if anyone has had success with any other flooring products in builds. if so what species and was it ground/ cut to thickness and what were the results. thinking of maybe picking some up to try if i can get some good info.

[Dick in Seattle]

I think the reason most folks use the flooring for lams is that they can't get bamboo in a good form for resawing into lam blanks. The flooring in this case the flooring is a lot easier to process than raw bamboo, and it works well. I bought a whole box and have used it quite a bit now.   However, if I wanted another wood, I would prefer to get it in planks.  I've done that with yew, walnut, locust, hickory, maple, cherry and osage.  It's a lot more fun to start from a plank, cut out your billets and resaw your lam pieces from that and then grind them down to your specs.  With flooring, you generally have to buy a box of it, which is pretty expensive and you end up with an awful lot of that one wood.  Unless you're going to be making a lot of bows, it's more fun to go to a hardwood yard and pick you own woods.  When I want to build, I like to go down to the shop and look things over and decide what woods I want to use this time.  I generally only use the boo for cores, though I've also made cores from all of the woods above.

[walkabout]

thanks for the reply.i know bamboo is probably the popular one of all them,just didnt know if any other was worth buying. my supplies are pretty much limited to red oak right now as we dont have local lumberyards that have anything else,i might just have to buy some core woods or maybe a few bamboo slats and go from there for my first one.