Friday 18 July 2014

Osage NA Bow

We were woken in the night by a thunder storm, it seemed to be set in, so we went downstairs and watched it for a while. The sky was lit up spectacularly and the occasional be long thin bolts cutting across the sky, I hadn't seen a good storm for a while it was a great leveller and made me feel nicely grounded, tired too when I went back to bed. The cat was safe and dry tucked up in her safe spot underneath the couch. It made me muse that Mr and Mrs Caveman must have huddled together too watching in awe.


The Osage bow is coming along, that stuff really responds to heat bending, a sideways bend at the grip (about 1" square) that would have taken ages with Yew, or needed steam, just went easy with five minutes of heat gun whilst brushing some sunflower oil on it to help the heat penetrate and stop it scorching or getting too hot. I corrected a nasty deflex twist/dip on the knotty end of the stave. I hope to have it up on the tiller later.
I can see why the guys at the Tennessee Classic tended to use a scraper a lot, I've been using my drawknife with the blade upright like a power scraper, it takes of nice fine shavings without digging in or tearing, it just seems to work very well on Osage. (You can see in that pic one of the fine checks (splits) in the end of the stave. I've put some low viscosity superglue in there, the tips may get bound with sinew anyway, or the y may lose the odd inch.
The pic on the right shows the stave after straighteneing and the last pic shows the tip clamped to take out the deflex dip/twist.

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