Thanks for the interest, Fujimo - I've got to admit, I'm a bit of a fan of your work.
The bow has an interesting story....
I used to shoot at a place called 'Academie Duello' in Vancouver, BC, with Lykopis Archery. Great people, if you're ever in the city. I was always a fan of the modern laminate flatbow but I had a chance to shoot a horsebow and loved it. So I decided to amalgamate the two concepts, this bow being a prototype. I wanted to have the shelf & locator grip of a laminate flatbow but with the speed & 'flick' of a horsebow. Next step is to do a similar bow to this but with static tips (using tip wedges), then I'll be shortening the design to around 60"ish, first with a working recurve then a static.
The design is based on the Golden Ratio - the length of deflexed limb to reflexed limb is a ratio of 1:1.6 (or close to, 15.5:9.5), the deflex/reflex ratio is 1:1.6, etc. Wherever there's a chance to get that ratio into the design, I did. This particular bow is 68"ntn with an 18" riser & 25" working limbs.
The next bow is currently gluing up but has been delayed due to a house move. That's being sent to my old archery teacher (who also happens to work on a certain archery themed superhero show as the archery tech...) - carbon fibre, prestressed backing, bamboo core, red ironbark belly with a red gum/lemonwood/spotted gum riser. The carbon is much better in the next one and it should be a much better bow, although a bit heavier, coming in around the 40# mark as opposed to 30# for the ugly lemonwood bow in the pictures. My teacher wants a bow around 30# though, so I may have to do some weight reduction (we're target shooters, for the most part. I hunt occasionally but I'm not very good...).
The bow in the pictures was the first I made with carbon, most I've previously made with clear glass. I outline my process to make my glass laminates in another thread on this forum. This bow didn't come out so great but I didn't want to waste the materials so used a bit of lemonwood I'd salvaged from pallets (seriously, they use lemonwood/degame for
pallets in Brazil...
pallets), some bamboo core I had floating around (I keep a bunch of pre-ground cores ready to go, just in case) and the pink ironbark was a chunk of timber I'd been given by a nice bloke down the road. The form is a standard bit of structural ash, belly down and clamped with g-clamps.
The bow turned out alright, not perfect by any means but a sweet shooter you can keep on flicking arrows out of for hours & hours. The double recurve means you've got to be sharp with your form too, which is good discipline.
Glad you liked it! I miss the enthusiasm, camaraderie & encouragement of North America. I love Australia, but bowmakers here have a very different mindset...
Topic: Carbon Backing (Read 410 times)
