A Memorial Buildalong... Update on page 6

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I hope you guys that are true craftsmen will indulge me a little...  this build along is underway, but who knows how long it will take...

So to begin with let me share a little background...

My dad passed away 11 years ago today…  He was a craftsman with many talents and abilities… He crafted Muzzleloaders for many years, scales on knives, cabinetry and pretty much anything he decided to put his mind to…  and just the spring before his cancer diagnosis he had “caught” the bow building bug… selfbows particularly…

He had through the years accumulated numerous stock blanks, woods, etc. that had resided in his workshop for years…

I thought shortly after he passed away that I would  love to build a bow in his memory using woods that he had put back for projects he was planning on starting once he retired…  problem was I had no idea how to proceed… knew absolutely nothing about building laminated bows or how to go about it…

So the project was put on hold…

Jonathan

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About 6 – 7 years ago a good friend of mine, Kevin Bishop, formally introduced me to a fellow that I’d known of, and about for 25 years, but had never officially met, Monte Dunaway…  I’d known of Monte through another mutual friend, whose property Monte has hunted for years…

Monte and I struck up a friendship and started doing some bowfishing together the last few springs and attending some local shoots as well as Cloverdale and Compton…  Numerous times we discussed building this bow, but just never got around to starting it for one reason or another…

Jonathan

PS  The next update may take a bit as photobucket is having issues and I have some pics coming up...

[bigbob2]

looking forward to watching your build along. Great sentiments too.

[Roy from Pa]

Very nice, looking forward to the build.

[Bowjunkie]

Good mojo. Reverence. Respect. I like it.

[twigflicker]

This past spring of 2015 we started getting more serious about building a bow…  One on trip to go bowfishing Monte suggested I bring up some of the wood so we could evaluate it and see where we needed to go from there…  Pop had put back a piece of birdseye maple that I’d wanted to use,
 
but after some examination it was really figured on one side of the board and the other more plain… Monte was afraid that it might not be as attractive as I was hoping… so scratch the original idea…

We’d also discussed putting micarta in the riser for strength and Monte set about ordering some from a contact that he had used in the past…

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Another plan began to form… I had some really pretty curly/quilted maple stock blanks that pop had also put back for projects that never came to fruition…  
 
And some figure in it...
 
Another trip to Monte’s and he felt like this piece in combination with the Micarta would make a really pretty riser…

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Monte offered some birdseye maple veneers for the back of the limbs… it is some of the most figured birdseye that I’ve ever seen…

 

and we went on the hunt for some curly maple for the belly of the limbs, which we were able to find on **** for a really reasonable price for numerous sheets of veneer... best of all it was a local place for me and I was able to drive over and pick it up saving the shipping…

 

So all the pieces are coming together… slowly but surely…

Jonathan

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Sorry about the jacked up pic sizes...

Jonathan

[twigflicker]

All right... the stage has been set... the materials have been acquired...

Please forgive for a lack of pictures in the next couple of sections...  I'd not determined to do a build along in my mind yet... so I didn't take any pics...

Saturday, October 3, 2015
This was the day Monte and I officially started to put stuff together… yeah, we probably should have gone hunting, but it was raining and pretty cool for the first part of October, so Monte sacrificed a day of hunting to get the build started…  I showed up at his house pretty early that morning and he started showing me how to proceed…  He had a riser he had built as an “experimental project” several years ago that I fell in love with… the contour… the feel… the look… all of it was just what I was looking for… I’m going to be using it as my template to go by… so we took all of our materials and began getting them square… running them through a profile/template grinder that he made several years ago…  (That will be a theme you hear regularly… that Monte built or made) and also using his drum sander…

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Once everything was square “we” (and I use that term loosely in the beginning as I was watching more than participating) began to cut out the pieces we wanted on the band saw… sorry about the lack of pictures here… but Monte was doing the cutting as I was a bit fearful of screwing it all up from the get go… and I’m a cheap son of a gun… but also because he knew his bandsaw and how it wanted to track and cut…

Once it was all cut out back to the profile/template grinder to square up the pieces again for gluing the riser together…  I allowed myself to do that task as it was pretty hard to mess it up to bad… as Monte again had templates that allowed for precise grinding of both the maple and micarta…

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We were able to get all the pieces ready and Monte applied the smooth on and set the riser blanks up in a set of jigs that he had made… it was square pieces of steel that he had welded, that allowed him to put shims in and put pressure on the blank as it was curing from two different directions… the double approach kept the pieces from “walking” on us… and then we added the extra c-clamps, and other clamps...

 

then it went in the hot box…

Actually two risers went into the hot box…  During our discussion, Monte had mentioned that it was just as easy to build two at once… so I decided I was going to surprise my wife with a bow as well… hers will have the curly/quilted maple on the back and micarta on the belly… and mine will be micarta on the back and curly/quilted on the belly…

And then we kindly interrupted this build for this past bow season ;-)

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Saturday, November 21
So bow season is over and the men of orange have now invaded the woods…  I lived in Ohio almost 25 years ago and because of those 5 years of living there… I’m still spooked to hunt during gun season… I didn’t know that many guys could be in the woods…

Anyway, Monte had cleaned up both blanks and traced the pattern onto them…

 

We then cut some with the band saw and then took it to the profile/template grinder to grind the limb pads to the correct angles… again, Monte had a jig that makes this a precise grind… if you look closely you can see a rub collar at the bottom of the sanding wheel that rode on the bottom of the pattern… made it possible for even hacks like me to do the job right…

 

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Once the limb pads were ground, Monte broke out another jig that he had put together…  It was a jig that allowed us to place the rise in it and secure it…  Then we were able to drill holes for both the limb bolts and the pins for the limbs…

Here’s a pic of the jig

 

And the jig with the riser in it…

 

Monte drilling my riser… showing me how it’s done…

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I really do some work… I drilled my wife’s riser (ok… that really doesn’t sound quite right, LOL)… As Monte assured me it was pretty much impossible to screw it up…  the jig is made of steel and the collars that you use as guides are hardened steel to keep them from wearing…

Here’s the riser drilled and ready to be tapped…

 

Once the riser was drilled, we tapped the limb bolt holes…  Monte takes brass rod, turns it down and threads it on the outside… drills out the inside and taps it as well… then it’s epoxied in late on… that is coming down the road at some point…

 

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We then broke out a small router to cut the shelf out… Monte again has a jig that bolts into where the limb bolt will mount that allows the router to follow it for again a very precise cut that crowns the shelf perfectly…

 

And here’s a pic of the shelf after being cut…

 

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From here the band sawing begins again… here’s a pic of Monte cutting the riser closer to profile…

 

Remember I’m a cheap son of a gun… so Monte’s been cutting mine… and I’m cutting my wife’s… thinking if I jack it up to bad… well, I guess she’s out of luck…  did I really just say that… LOL

Then we cut the sight windows into each of the bows…

 

And the sight window cut out… and the bows cut closer to profile… getting it down close to the pattern so I could take it to the pattern/template grinder and grind down to the lines…

 

 

And that wrapped up the day for us and I headed back home…

[scrub-buster]

Great build a long.  Thanks for posting it.  Good luck with the rest of the build.

[Mad Max]

Awesome

[twigflicker]

Thanks for the encouragement... glad you're enjoying it...  now for more...

Monday, December 28

Monte and I both had the day off with the holidays… probably should have been hunting again, but by this point I’d pretty much hung it up and calling it another year…

I again don’t have many pics of the time at Monte’s as I was working on grinding both the riser’s to profile on the template…

Monte was working on a knife that he is donating to the PBS banquet coming up in FL this spring… so while he was working on that I finished up the risers… once they were down to the template lines, Monte then broke out the oscillating spindle sander and said… have at it… just start taking off everything that isn’t a bow…  yeah, right… you remember I’ve never done this right…

So he started knocking off some of the edges and whatnot…  then he handed it over to me and I was to put it no other way… paralyzed with fear… thinking… man it wouldn’t take a whole lot to jack this up royally…  And the whole time Monte is simply reminding me of a truth my pop had said a thousand times…  “You can always take material off… but you can’t put it back on.”  Great!