“Tequila Sunrise”
I recently sent a 68” 38@28 bow to someone. He liked it, but so did his wife, who appropriated it. He said he’d like to see a slightly shorter bow for his wife, so he could get his bow back. I had just finished “Orion” and felt like doing a lighter experimental bow involving my first use of tip wedges and power lams. Since the bow was experimental anyway, I also decided to make it my second attempt to use the air press/heat strips system... the first attempt having gone badly enough to require moving the layup to my old clamp form.
Here’s the layup:
Glass: .042
Red Cedar parallel: .090
Lamboo power lams: 18” tapered from .030 at butts to zero
Lamboo: .120 tapered .0015
9” Cherry tip wedges
Red Cedar: .070
Glass: .042
Riser: 18” Cherry... cut to overpass pattern, then ground flat on top and used as belly riser
Total Glass: .084
Total Wood: . 315 (includes power wedges)
The plan was to produce a bow 64” long, but not having done tips and wedges before, I did the layup at full length, using very long (too long) tip wedges, then cut it to 64” nock to nock before filing in the nocks.
The air press, on which I had installed crib washers, worked OK. However, the shortened and beefed up layup came out much heavier than I expected... 51# on the first still rough draw test after nocking at 64”. I had made the tips my usual 5/8” wide. I seriously slimmed the whole limb down, especially the tips, getting closer to 3/8”, and ended up after some slight trapping and a lot of limb edge rounding at 40#. I measured the bow as 40@28 at that point and eventually marked it that. I should have waited. In actually final sanding knocked a bit more off of it and it's closer to 38.
Tequila's Red Cedar (lams left over from “Out of the Closet”) came out looking very good, yellow and red, with the cherry riser. I named it “Tequila Sunrise” for the appearance, much like the well known drink.
The experiment with tip wedges, power lams and narrower limbs resulted in some definite increase in speed over my usual flatbows, about 5 to 8 fps or a bit more. How much of that was the new additions and how much the severely shortened working limb (overly long tip wedges, power lams and an 18" riser on a 64" bow) is open to question. I did considerable shooting (hand release... only meaningful measurement for me) through the chrono. TS was definitely faster than most previous bows except for a couple of hot RD's.... that is until I tried an old Kramer built Hill... 36@26, which shot consistently faster than any of them... in the 160's and a couple of 173's! Had tip wedges, no power lams, but incredibly thin limbs with a fair amount of reflex. One thing I did notice very clearly in this shooting exercise is that the faster bows are clearly more stressed designs, and this shows up not just in performance, but in the smoothness of draws, which is critical for me. By and large, I'd take smoothness over fps at field distances unless the speed gain was very large.
Tequila Sunrise was a real fun experiment and will lead to some more playing with variables. In fact, I'm sending Tequila off to the couple mentioned to play with and test out for me for awhile.
When I can get around to it, I'm going to do some work trying to duplicate that Kramer. I’ll have to learn how to build a shaped, i.e. not flat, form first to get the reflex the Kramer has. Another learning experience.
Topic: Experimenting with Some New Features (for me) (Read 335 times)
