BANG!

I'm a bit gutted, I'd spent a lot of time patching the Molle' and as I strung it the patch lifted. So, I re-did it with a longer patch blended in and sculpted to match the ridges, it looked lovely.
I strung it and it was fine, but when I got it to 3/4 draw BANG and it exploded. Examining the break showed that it was a miracle it had lasted so long. When I made the bow I'd had to graft fresh Yew onto the belly side of the levers as they had long streaks of black manky material in cracks running along the grain. It can be seen from the pictures that this rot extended down into the body of the bow and into the feature "eye" knots.
I was dubious about the chances of a clean repair, and maybe it was an accident waiting to happen. I don't know if it's owner will want it glued back together as a "wall hanger".

Meanwhile may mate JT had got the hazel ELB back to 50# at 24" . Our aim for the session was to get it braced, evenly tillered and back to about 21", that all went too smoothly and we pressed on.
I should have urged him to use the finer rasp and to slow down, we'd taken video but pressed on without reviewing it... all a bit rushed.
A little over enthusiast rasping and pulling it to 55# caused a couple of chrysals on the belly.
This threw the tiller off and made it look very weak in the upper limb. He was gutted ,but we eased off the outer limbs, put a string on it and shot about 15 arrows. It was surprisingly fast, and now the initial disappointment has subsided we've decided to patch the belly and take the bow to completion with horn nocks etc so that we've gone through the whole process.
While he was working on the bow I was refurbishing the drawknife which I'd bought, the main effort being turning a couple of steel ferules on my little lathe. At least that went well!