Beautiful bow, Kirk, and beautiful wood.
Do the limbs have an unusual shape, or am I just seeing things? Is that typical of your bows or unique to this one? What is the purpose of that shape, and how does it affect the performance of the bow?
This original limb design, like all my designs, started out with a pencil, some butcher paper, and a handful of nails. I used full length fiberglass to get the shape I was looking for and maintain a smooth transition from the riser section to the limbs.
This hybrid design was originally intended as a one piece recurve, and I was pretty conservative on the recurve tips. The very first bow out of the form came out seriously over weight. I’m talking 90 pound draw weight. It also had a completely different look to the strung profile.
It had a wide limb width profile to start just like a std recurve limb too. Keep in mind, my experience in those days were limited to pretty much typical long bow designs, and I was totally experimenting on this one. I wasn’t too happy with my first attempt and missing draw weight so badly, so I took it over to the sander and started narrowing the width profile until I got the weight down to 60# and I could draw it easily…..
By doing this, it changed the bows shape of the limbs dramatically. The recurve tips had very little hook shape at all….. but…. When putting it on the tiller tree I was very happy with the string angle this unique looking limb was producing at 30” draw…. So I put the tip overlays on it, balanced out the limbs, and did some shooting with it….. This turned out to be a very impressive bow that shot heavy arrows much faster than my D shape long bows…. Noticeably faster… and it was dead silent….. Hmmmmmm….. I think I got something going here.
So there is the story of the first Sasquatch hybrid long bow. Deep core, narrow limb profile, and very unique limb shape. Of course I spent a lot of time after those first few I built tinkering with different taper rates and moving wedges around and testing them as I went for performance….
The intriguing part about this limb design was how far they would draw without stacking at all, and still hold such a great string angle for a 60” bow length.
It was during the development stages of these first few one piece bows that I came up with the name Big Foot Bows too. I had a bunch of black walnut and curly maple I was using for riser wood. It didn’t take long to figure out that this wood was just not strong enough to hold up well on a bow riser without reinforcing it.
I had a completely finished bow I was shooting when I noticed a crack in the riser at the back of the shelf. There was no doubt this riser would fail in a matter of time, and it was a beautiful piece of work. So rather than hang it on the wall, I decided to cut a radius footing through the grip portion to stiffen it up.
It was a “Big Footing” job on a finished bow. But I pulled it off, and the name stuck…. The mystical legendary creature known as “Bigfoot” fit well being from Oregon too. So I named the bow Sasquatch…..But you’ll notice the name I use is “Big Foot bows”…… not Bigfoot…….
So now….. you know the rest of the story…..
Here is the First Sasquatch hybrid long bow with the Big Foot.
Here is a left handed Hybrid with the limbs unstrung that shows the limb shape. notice the limb pad angle and the forward position of the riser vs the limbs. This particular bow will be drawn to 32” smooth as silk. It should be arriving in France any day now, and you’ll see more of this bow in the future. The Macassar ebony has been popular lately….. Kirk
https://photos.app.goo.gl/tQdGTUmdg93coAuTA
Topic: Ebony Sasquatch Hybrid LB (Read 1472 times)
