Originally posted by mikkekeswick:
I've been making wooden bows for about ten years and have made hundreds - trust me your main goal is a good tiller, 2 nd goal is to hit weight. These things can't be changed to suit ones tastes! It's wood not fiberglass! Without a good tiller a wooden bow will break down , sure it might be slow but....
If a bow lasts me the few months or so it will take me to make several more bows and shoots ok, it's good enough for now! Don't take that to mean that anything I learn here won't be applied to future bows. That is, after all, the point of asking for feedback.
Originally posted by mikkekeswick:
It's not that I may be right....I am right! Many hundreds of successful wooden bows and the laws of physics proves it! I'm not making this stuff up it's fact.
Hey, I admitted you are right about that. I didn't even argue the point that an elliptical tiller would have been better in any way. I fully admit that I screwed up the design stage there, lesson learned. So why are you acting like that?
Originally posted by mikkekeswick:
If your goal is literally just to shoot then buy some bamboo canes, taper the lengths and bind them together....this will give you a very effective quick bow. One of these bamboo pole boes will reach 40# or so draw and they are surprisingly fast.
Not fun. To clarify my goals:
If I was purely interested in making a perfect bow from the gate it would have been a pure copy of somebody else's bow made from much nicer wood, hand selected to be the finest possible piece of wood I could get my hands on.
If I was purely interested in shooting a perfect bow, I could have set out to buy the best bow I could possibly afford.
No, what I'm interested in is shooting the best bow I can make in a style that interests me, accepting that I *will* make a multitude of mistakes as a novice. I strive for perfection within my personal design requirements. In the beginning, those flaws will be many, but hopefully, each bow I make will be an improvement from the last.
Not everybody's personal goals will line up with yours. You can disagree on this point until you're blue in the face, but it will not change my personal goals.
Originally posted by mikkekeswick:
As I said before a tillering gizmo is a very useful thing. Circular or elliptical tiller. You can choose to learn how to use it or not.
Ok, I'm going to ask you two very simple questions. If you can provide me with two very clear and logically consistent answers, you've made a convert of me and I will use a gizmo until the day I die (as it stands, I think I will use a gizmo when I think it will be useful).
1: The tillering gizmo works on the principle of measuring the perpendicular distance from the center of the chord of a circle to the edge of a circle as per:
http://mathcentral.uregina.ca/QQ/database/QQ.09.11/h/tim2.html The chord, in this case is constant (a piece of wood) and the depth set by screwing the pencil up/down. This tool is used to mark where the depth is too low, thereby altering the radius of the circle. Is this understanding of the tool true or false?
2: If my understanding of the tool is correct, explain the best method of using a fixed chord depth measurement to provide an ellipse, given that moving a fixed length chord around an ellipse necessarily produces an eccentric depth. This must be a method that doesn't replace "just eyeballing it" as I am now with a different method of "just eyeballing it".
Topic: My first bow - Questions (Read 872 times)
