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Main Boards => The Bowyer's Bench => Topic started by: KentuckyTJ on March 25, 2011, 11:15:00 AM
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Bowyers, I recently sent a riser flare design to my bowyer that is making me a bow and asked if he could do it. He graciously told me it was way too much work. Haha. How do you guys put up with us? What are some of the crazy requests you get?
(http://i52.tinypic.com/2mch7o5.jpg)
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Hey TJ... It's not really a matter of whether a bowyer "Can" do it or not. It's just that each bowyer usually makes footing jigs, or patterns and uses a profile cutter or a profile sander to fit these parts together. some of the big dogs use CNC routers too....
But doing a custom footed riser like that from scratch and sanding all that stuff in by hand does take a bunch of time.
But... there are guys out there that will do it for you. I'll bet Sixby would tackle that no problem. He still does all his footings by hand, and i've seen him do that very design before...
i could do it too, but you wouldn't like the price. :scared: ... now i have to figure out how I'm going to wrap the the rest of the snake down around the limb. :eek:
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Kirks right, I have done a ton of them with that design plus. Go to my webpage and check them out. Actually my prices are right in line with everyone elses that does the same kind of work. As far as making up jigs ect. I am just to independant. I hate cookie cutter jobs. I do this because I enjoy doing it and if I cookie cutter the bows it would not be nearly as interesting.
I just love taking a saw to a 300. piece of Koa . Haha.
God Bless you all, Steve
Kirk the snake is simple. cut out the snake from ebony veneer and knife it into the limb veneers. make half the snake on the bow and half in the limbs with the head being the limb tips. It would be really cool. Ebony snake with myrtle wood or curley maple back ground. Or you could use wenge instead of ebony. When I do veneers like that I usually cut them at about .030 glue them up and then I can lightly sand them together. I glue them by tackingthem together with superglue and then coat them with smooth on and rub it into all the cracks You could cook the lams with a heat strip in nothing flat.
Or even easier you could saw it out of a 1 by , mate the two together and glue with smooth on and then cut the lams out and grind them. that way all four lams would be the same./
God bless , Steve
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Or, You could make the belly lams and the back lams so that the snake curls around the limb. Lay them out side by side and draw the snake on the two going from one to the other. It would come out like it was curling around the bow. Incorporate that from one end of the bow to the other and include your riser in it.
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TJ,
The hardest part of making that flare is extending it through the limb wedge and having everything line up. Plus, if you miss poundage you end up with a set of limbs that wont fit anything else.
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I just visited Savages website and it is amazing what he can do. Sounds crazy but I will be placing a couple of orders through him. Awesome work he does. Semo is completely right!
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Thanks for the compliments. The rest of the content has been deleted.
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I just glanced at the pic of the riser. Looking again I would never break the wedges right in front of the bolt at any customers request. Maybe in back of the bolt but certainly not in front of it. That is an accident made to happen. When I first started building bows I had a customer send me a similar drawing but much more complicated. I built the bow . I found out a couple of years later that the design was defective and that risers built that way lined the bed of the limb up too close to being in line with the deep part of the grip. Any riser built like that had a much greater probability ob breaking because the grain of the wood would be taking direct pressure to the weakest part of the bow with the most compression forces. That bow broke.
Kirk has seen the riser. It broke through a purpleheart I beam , several piece of cocabola and six pieces of phenolic. I would have thought the riser to be bombproof.
Now I am extemely picky about how a riser is built. Looks are secondary to proven design and engineering .
God bless you all, Steve
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I'm having problems posting here ....test, test test
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I'm going to try this again... Thanks for the suggestions Steve. This one is going to be interesting.
now you bite your tongue about the cookie cutter business... you know dad burn well old Kirk here doesn't build cookie cutter bows. :p :p :p
btw.... as far as running an accent through a wedge like that goes is simple... you just say "No Thank You, It ain't going to happen."