Archery
The 30lb and 50lb bows I have are a bit much for a 7 yard indoor basement range. So I decided I'd build myself a light pull weight bow. Here's what I did and what I learned.
My wood shop manifests my personal anti- consumerism ethos, which means I buy as little wood as possible.
I looked at a couple websites and YT vids (references since lost) and decided I had some stuff I thought was maple, which would do for a weak little bow such as I had in mind. But no, it wasn't shaped right and was too short. Ok, discovered some nearly square (in cross section) poles of some sort of oak which I decided to use. They were each just short of 3 feet long which would make a nice 60+"-ish longbow. And being appx 1" square in section it wouldn't be too strong.
But the challenge here would be to join the 2 limbs together as firmly as if they were one stave so they wouldn't break at the join when drawn.
I visualized it like this, with a 2 piece grip serving as a splint across the join of the 2 separate limbs (below). Going to make the front of the bow to the left, with the thin / long part of the grip to cover the screws (see later) that hold each limb to the back part of the grip, to the right. Notice the parallax of the cheap phone camera...
Drew a taper on each limb which went from full width a few inches above and below the grip, to appx 1/4" at the tip. Details and measurements later.
I didn't want to mess with a table saw cutting the tapers on these 1" sticks so I planed them down along the lines of the taper. I noticed that the grain of one of the sticks seemed to catch the plane most of the strokes and the other stick almost resisted being planed. Guess I'll eventually learn how to line up the grains.
In the end I did get them planed to the taper I wanted and sanded everything pretty smooth.
Might be able to see the limbs laying face to face here, with the taper coming in to the center line from the outside.
Other sources had talked about tapering the bow stave in 1/3ds with the center 1/3 untapered. But they had whole bows too work with, not these two separate limbs joined at the grip. So I just eyeballed the proportions based on some mystical sense of what the wood would do when bent. Don't take that too seriously; I didn't...
The note says, "Limb length 33 1/4" [taper begins] 6 3/8" from end", being the center end of each limb.
Went to assemble the parts. Was going to put a screw on the inner end of each limb, attaching it to the back portion of the grip. Drilling the lead hole in one limb and it cracked... oops.
View from the end of the stick. Next time will drill the lead hole further from the end!
Got the limb screwed down with plenty of glue in the crack.
I had a choice of glues between Gorilla White Glue and Elmers ultra blah blah (pics coming). They both had the same instructions to moisten the wood a minute before gluing so I figured their formula was about the same. I'd heard a recommendation of Gorilla but all my life I've been using Elmers for wood projects so decided to go with that. We'll see, eh?
Everything's clamped into place, trying to make up for lousy measurements with using a lot of glue and squishing everything together. See you again in 24 hrs!
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