Pat, A fret is tough to swallow after so much work, want to guess how I know.
On several occasions, when the fret was caught early enough in the tillering process, I was able to scrape away the fret and then weaken both side of the limb. The fret area became 1-2 inch non-working part of the limb. On a couple of other bows when I wouldn’t make weight with the first fix or it wouldn’t work, I cut out the fret area and replaced it with a patch/plug. I read about the patch/plug technique on the other site, before this one existed, and then a couple of years later Dean Torges wrote an article on the process in either TBM or Primitive Archer. I had mixed results with the patch/plug method, with a 50/50 success rate before Dean’s article. After reading Deans article and following his method I was successful on two of three repairs. The patches/plugs are not aesthetically pleasing, so when I became proficient at the fish tail splice and making takedowns I quit using this method. Now I cut the bad limb off, throw it in the scrap pile, and set the good limb in a bucket until several discarded limbs become available from other attempts, and then either splice together the good limbs or make takedown bows. The final product looks and performs much better.
The other thing that might work to save this bow, if the first technique described above is not viable, is to add sinew or another type of backing that works (Hickory, Boo, ect…). This moves the neutral area to the back of the bow, or father from the belly, and might allow you to use the first technique described above. This has successfully worked for me twice, both times with sinew.
Topic: Christmas Exchange Bow fro Primitive Archer (Read 1036 times)
