STOP Breaking Bows Do THIS instead | My best bow making advice (Tillering Course ep 7)

Welcome to the seventh installment of this tillering course. This is two videos combined. I'm covering the biggest problems that I commonly see, the biggest ways I've broken many bows and gotten messages. So many people have said these have been their major problems, as well as the massive three things that you should pay attention to to not break your bow. So this is basically the best advice that I can give you in order to help you not break a bow, all in a nutshell. So I hope this helps out. I will see you inside the video. And if you want access to this entire course, you can easily find it in the description in the playlist. All right, go make the best bow you can. The idea behind this segment is to give you an idea of why bows break or what's the most common problems. I've been privileged to help a lot of people make bows and teach it a lot. And there seems to be reoccurring patterns that happen when the bow breaks. And there's three main reasons. So the goal here is to cover those three reasons. And hopefully that can help you foresee them before they happen to you. The first and probably most common reason a bow fails is because a hinge is created. And a hinge is only created when too much wood is removed off a single area of the bow. So this is just from not having an even tiller. But the key with the hinge is it's normally created because the bow was overstressed. And so if you're shooting for a 40-pound bow, you don't really wanna pull that bow down beyond that 40-pound weight. And if you do, it can overstress a specific part of the bow and cause a hinge. And that part may have been okay. Just going back and forth and tillering it, it might've been fine if you never would've stressed it beyond your desired finished poundage. And so to avoid creating a hinge, use tools that are controllable, take your time, and don't pull it past your desired finished poundage. I'm gonna create a hinge in this bow so you can see what it is or what it looks like so that you don't have to later on. This is a bow I built about a year and a half ago and I don't actively shoot it. And so I can use this as a demonstration. So what we'll do is we'll create a hinge right here by doing what you shouldn't do and attacking it with a bandsaw. No, not the bandsaw. We'll attack it with the belt sander. So I only had this on the belt sander for a few seconds and you can see where I removed wood. Let's see if this changed anything. So my prediction is we're not gonna see too much at the beginning, but as you exercise the limbs, it's gonna forget that memory and then you'll see how the bow is affected. So you can see it start to form right there on the left limb. If you're tillering and you see that right there, you may wanna stop and adjust it as quick as possible. What really shows how the tiller's changed is how much that left limb's bending more than the right, especially the middle of the left limb. That is where a hinge starts to happen. So I'm only pulling this to 20 inches. If I were gonna pull this down to the 28 inch draw, that would create the hinge. But I can see the problem now before it's even fully developed and I can go ahead and go remove wood off this right side and then remove wood on the two sides of the hinge and we can correct this and have a good shooting bow still. But if you pull it too far with too little of wood in one area, the bow may break. And this is because wood has memory. It wants to remember its previous position. It's looking for that equilibrium or what it's used to. And so when you overstress a limb, that specific area of the bow, that specific wood, it's thinking, oh, this is my new normal. But the problem with that is if that goes beyond the stressing point of your finished bow, that's the hinge. And so leaving that at 20 inches, that's probably gonna be okay because that point is bending at that specific level of stress, but I can equal out the other limb and right next to it to have the whole bow at that stress level and that's gonna drop the poundage to maybe a 25 pound bow, but it didn't create the hinge. But if I draw that bow down further to that 28 inches, it's creating so much stress in that one area. If the whole bow was tillered to that, you're not gonna have a bow left. And an extreme example of this is the bow breaks, right? And so that's how you wanna avoid the hinges, just by paying close attention, know the wood's got memory because the more I draw that down, the more that hinge is gonna get more prevalent and more prevalent. I don't wanna do that yet because I might wanna fix this bow later on, but that's the quick example of how to have an eye for a hinge starting to form so you can correct it before it's a unfixable problem. My absolute favorite way to make sure you don't remove wood in the area you shouldn't is not to mark it and say, don't remove wood here, but it is to put a piece of tape where you don't want the wood removed. And you literally can't without removing the tape. That's the best way to make sure you don't continue making your hinge worse because you'll need to remove wood on this side of the hinge and on this side of the hinge to even it out. And to make sure you don't make this part worse, just throw some tape on it. And that's gonna help out a lot to not remove wood in that area. Second thing I see quite often is that the bow just breaks near the handle. And with a D bow, this happens quite often. And the reason is because it can be deceiving on the tiller because the handle on a traditional D bow is gonna be non-bending. And so right after the handle is where it starts to bend. So that section there can play tricks with our eyes. And it's easy to think that first four inches needs to bend more than it actually does. You want it to taper off gradually from the handle into the limb because you don't want that first four inches bending as much as the mid-limb. Because if it is, then it's gonna be holding more stress and it breaks there all the time. At least that's the reason I think probably 50% of the bows I see that break when people make them. It's right at that handle. I've done it myself. Keep that in mind that if there's any part of the bow you're gonna be cautious about and remove wood a little slower, it's around that handle because that just is prone to break. And the third reason I see bows break all the time and this is why the Willow Bow Series doesn't work a lot of the time is because there's not a sufficient bow backing for the bow you're trying to build. So a bow backing could work for a 30-pound bow, but maybe it's not a very strong bow backing and it wouldn't work for a 60-pound bow. You've gotta have a strong enough bow backing for the specific type of bow you're wanting to build. If you're wanting to build a 10-pound kid's bow, you could probably do the entire thing out of a two-by-four without a bow backing because it's going to be strong enough to handle that stress. But if you're gonna build a heavier poundage bow, you're gonna wanna look into those stronger bow backings or wider limbs. So if your bow breaks, take it as a learning experience. Figure out why did this break? Was it an insufficient bow backing? Did I just do a bad job tillering? And then from there, you can move forward and make a much better bow. The big three, this is crucial. This could be the most important video you watch before you start tillering because there's the common problems that happen, but there's the big three we can pay attention to in order to stop those common problems from happening. The most common problems. Well, we've got limb twist. We covered that in hinges and the bow breaking and overstressing the wood. How do we avoid those common problems? Let's jump right into it. The first thing we wanna do is exercise the bow limbs. Wood has memory. So when we remove wood, it's going to remember the last time you bent it, not in mind with the wood you just removed. So to get it to shape to its new form, we do what is called exercising the limbs. Basically, we just want to stress the limbs to an appropriate poundage 20 to 30 times, and then we can take a new reading. But when you're exercising the limbs, you're not taking a reading of how the wood is bending. You're getting it to realize that you removed wood and find that as its new stress point. If you do not exercise the limbs, this will happen to you. You remove some wood, you go to pull it to check it, you check it and nothing changed. So you remove more wood from the same location and then you check it again, nothing's changed. Remove more wood from the same location, put it up, and nothing's changed. What's going on? Let's do it one more time. Remove more wood, put it up, check it, and then you've got a hinge. It happens that quick when you don't exercise the limbs. The first way to avoid problems when tailoring is to make sure you exercise the limbs. There's two ways to exercise the limbs. The first one is to pull the bow back. So basically you could measure the distance from your shoulder to your hand. And for me, I've got about 17 inches. And so I know 17 inches is to my shoulder. And so I can pull this 25, 30 times at 17 inches. I can come back further, further to where I need to, depending on where I'm at in tailoring. And that's the quickest way to exercise the limbs is just to give it a pull and you work out your arms and you get exercise the limbs. You'll be doing that a lot. It's a physical way to do it, but it's a fast way to do it. The second way is to throw the bow up and then you can put your scale in between your pulley and the string. So you know where your finished draw weight is. Boom, let's say I hit it there at 35 pounds. Now I'm not gonna go past my finished draw weight. This method right here takes a little bit more time, but the nice thing about it is you can stand back, you can look at it and you can see your poundage as you go. So I do this with the tailoring tree. I use my arm method when I'm using a tailoring stick. The second thing, which we already mentioned, but that's to not pull your poundage past your finish draw weight. So before you start, you know that your poundage is gonna be 30, 40, 50 pounds, 45 pounds, whatever you decide you want your finished poundage to be, do not draw the bow past it and you will avoid creating a hinge. Very important, but very simple to follow. And then the third of the big three is to check the thicknesses of the limb. So check the thickness for limb twist and you can also check the thickness from the upper to the lower limb just to make sure they're pretty even and consistent. You can do those checks every once in a while just to make sure you're not getting off track. So to avoid problems when you're building the bow, when you're tailoring the bow, think of the big three. Exercise the limbs, don't pull past your finished poundage and check the limb thicknesses. And with that, you're gonna be so much better off than so many people building bows because you're checking the three most common problems and you're preventing them before they happen to you.