Here comes another longbow (can you tell I'm addicted?).
Given that I'm still a novice bowyer, I'm sticking to fairly simple designs. At the same time, I like to do something different with each bow, so I made this bow 6" shorter than my first two bows, and made the tips and handle fancier.
Now that I've done a few bows the process is becoming much more refined. This time I used a jig to cut the tapers, which turned out perfect.
I also got a card scraper, which has quickly become one of my favourite tools. It only cost $6 and it is awesome! It removes wood faster than sanding while leaving a nicer finish. It's perfect for fine tillering. My strategy now is to use a rasp until I'm getting close to being done tillering, then I switch to the scraper. By the time I'm done tillering with the scraper, all of the rasp marks are removed and there's hardly any finish work to be done.
For the handle I used a spindle sander, which allowed me to get better results than my previous bows and took about 1/10th of the time. Another amazing tool.
Other than those changes the process was similar to my previous bows, so I'll get right to stats and pictures.
The bow is 66" long, with a 6" stiff handle (including fades). It pulls about 45# at 28". It is 1.5" wide to mid limb, tapering to 1/2" nocks, which I later thinned to around 1/4". The bow is red oak with a random dark hardwood used as an accent on the tips and handle. The top layer of the tip overlays is bone, which I got from a dog toy. Bone is really hard, which makes it a great tip overlay, but it smells terrible when you cut or sand it. The bow is backed with paper as I've done in the past, but this time I used a decorative wrapping paper to give the bow some character.
Here are some shots of the handle being constructed:
And a shot of the bone overlay before shaping:
Most importantly, here's the finished bow:
And finally here's a full draw picture:
This picture is not quite straight so it throws things off a bit, but the tiller on this bow is decent. I think it's still too stiff near the handle, but not as bad as on my last bow. I'll try to improve that next time. As always, I had a ton of fun building this bow, and can't wait to build another!