4 Different Methods of Tillering (Tillering Course ep 6)

Welcome to the sixth video. The sixth video of this tillering course. There's a playlist below with all of the videos. You can check that out if you would like to. You can also go to shadowproofarchery.com to get all your archery needs met. And if I can't meet them there today, I'll do my best to meet them there tomorrow. That's terrible. Enjoy the bow making course. There is lots and lots of ways to accomplish a good tiller. And there's four primary methods that I personally have done. So I'm gonna share those with you right now because one way could be more intriguing to you than the other. Also, different methods work better on different types of bows. So let's jump into it. The first method, which we've already touched on, is to use a gizmo or a scraper to mark the wood so that you can see where you need to remove wood, where it's not bending as much. This works best on a D-style bow or a recurve style bow or a bow with sias or something like that where the limbs are bending completely evenly. You can also have a bend-through handle bow. This works well with that as well. But a reflex-deflex bow, you'll get into trouble with that because you'll have a terrible tiller in the end if you try these methods. This method is proven. It's where I would suggest that you start. It is the easiest way to train your eye to look for a good tiller. The second method is to use your eye to gauge where you should remove wood on a bow. I prefer this method with the reflex-deflex style of a bow. But if you prefer to not use those sort of tools like the scraper or the gizmo, you can use your eye to tiller any kind of bow, especially if you train it. Just by looking at the bend on a bow, you can see, ooh, I need to remove wood there. And then you take it off and you just slowly correct it until the bow bends perfectly. This is a proven method if you train your eye to see where the wood needs to be removed. Now, I've heard this taught, I've heard this taught by some experienced bowyers where they think you can't train your eye and you're like born with it. I completely disagree. You can absolutely train your eye on what to see. You just need to know what to look for. Tillering's not some mystical thing. It's literally where does the wood need to be removed? Maybe where is it not bending enough? And by using a grid like this where I've got lines that are level, you could put up some sort of beadboard or a pegboard or something where you've got lines and that can help you see with your eye the arc and where you need to remove wood. The third approach is the mathematical approach. This approach is where you measure everything. So some people, I've met some engineers who just love thinking this way instead of you could say looking at it and just looking at where to remove wood could feel like more of an art where the mathematical approach could feel more securely to some people because you measure the thickness of the wood limbs, the width of the wood limbs on both limbs, one inch from the handle, then two inches from the handle, then three inches from the handle and you make them the exact same thickness. Then as the bow starts to bend, you can measure the tiller which is the distance from the string to the belly of the bow to create it bending perfectly. So if you like math and you want to do a lot of measuring of the thickness of the wood, of how much it's bending, you can do this method and you can get very precise bows and accomplish the same thing. I call this the mathematical method. The fourth method is what I call the digital method, using digital tools. In this sense, I'm gonna bend the bow down, I'm going to snap a picture of it and then I'm gonna put it in some sort of software. You can put it in a ton of different software. Canva is a free one and you can grab two circles and lay them on the bending limbs. Now you don't want to lay it over the handle because that's not bending. If you have a bend through bow, you can use one circle but this can show you the arc on a perfect circle digitally and then you can compare your real life bow to the digital perfect circle, therefore finding where it's bending too much or too little for your liking. Okay, to demonstrate how I would do the digital method, let's use this bow here. This is a reflex limb tips, it's not quite a recurve but it's gonna work really well I think for this because I believe the tiller is slightly off from what I can see with my eye. So let's go ahead and pull it down to 24 inches and we'll take that reading right there. I'm by my computer, I'm gonna show you how I would do this in the computer. This is also an app and it works the exact same way on your phone, that way you could do a video or snap a photo on your phone as you're tillering and you can do this. So let's jump into the computer and I'll show you how I use Canva for tillering. Okay, so the first thing is Canva's free. There's a paid version but you can do all of this on the free version and you can have it on your phone or your computer. So you can upload your media, which is just gonna be your photo and I'll just drag and drop it and throw it right in here and we'll make it nice and big. One key thing to pay attention to is you want your photo to be directly straight on of the image that you're gonna use because if the photo is not on and it's from an angle, the lines will not work well. Okay, we'll go to elements and I search a circle and we can grab a circle and toss it in here. Now that our circle's in there, we want to raise it to the size of the bow to try to follow that curve. Now you don't wanna go in the middle here unless you have a bend through handle. This one, we don't have a bend through handle. This is a reflexed bow with a stagnant handle, which is great. So let's line this up, make it slightly bigger. First thing to do is to line it up on one limb. Check out that bend though, huh? That's pretty good. Okay, so about right there, looks about the right size and then we wanna duplicate this. So I'm gonna hold down option on the keyboard, click and drag. Boom, we've got a duplication and we can put this on the upper limb as well. So now that we've got these lined up, can zoom in a little bit, check it out. So what's really interesting here is you can see this bend on the left limb goes and continues to bend through here. Whereas on the upper limb, we stop bending right here and then you can check these reference lines. On the left limb, we're past this line quite a bit more than on the right limb. So this right limb is bending less and that is due to it not bending right in this area. So I would definitely take off this area right here in order to make this bend to even out on the bottom limb because this is the top limb and generally I like a positive tiller, which means the top limb should bend a little bit more than the bottom limb. This tiller is almost completely done, but with this method, I can now see, I need to remove wood off the top limb right before the curve, right before it curves because we don't wanna remove wood off the curve, we just wanna get it right before the curve here to make this bend slightly more so even out on that limb. Couple things to make sure is that your circles are the same size and that's why we duplicate this one right here with option and drag. If your circles are different sizes, it's not going to work. So adjust the first circle and then drag over here, that way you can see the difference. Okay, now there's another method, another type of bow we could do here. Let's go to my uploads. I'm gonna delete this footage or that bow there. I believe I have a bend through handle bow. Okay, here's my bend through handle bow right here and let's bring this up and let's go grab another circle. Now on this one, you can use one massive circle as your reference. So I'm making the circle really big, but that's because the handle is a bend through type of handle. So you can line that up right where the handle's at, like that. And what do we already see here? We see this left limb is bending more even along with the circle than this right limb is, plus the left limb's bending much more. This right limb bends most right in the middle here and then comes back and it's not as even. So you can kind of take a peek at this and use this to know where to remove wood. Well, we wanna make these equal, so we're gonna wanna remove wood where the gap is a little bit bigger, so it's bending more. This is bending a lot more here, so remove wood off this left limb, keep putting it up and down until we have an even bend. So as far as the digital method goes, that's how I would do it. You can do it completely free with an app on your phone or on the computer. I would, they're both good. If you're out in the shop, the phone is nice if you can't bring a computer out there because you can quickly look at it. But also the computer's nice because you can zoom in and get it real big and you can see more in depth. This is really good to do on the last few inches of a tiller, on bend through handle bows, D bows, recurve bows, or reflex bows. But if you have any deflex in the bow, a reflex, deflex bow, I would definitely be careful on that because the bend at the finish is not going to be arced. It's going to be a little bit different. And so just be careful to not use this method on that type of bow. Personally, I like to use all the tools at my disposal. So I use all four of these tools, no rhyme or reason, but kind of depending what I'm feeling like. So if I'm having a hard time with the gizmo or something just feels off, I might throw it in the computer to double check it. A lot of times for speed, I've trained my eye to see the tiller. So I'll do the first 20 inches of tillering at least with just my eye. There's a lot of different ways to tiller and I encourage you to use all the tools you can or the ones that are most comfortable for you or you feel most skilled at. There was a, who was it? There's some YouTube videos, some of you guys might've seen this, but it's a descendant from the Comanche Indians, I believe. And he has had tradition passed down to them how they would make bows and they would make these Osage bows. And he said that how you find the tiller is by training your fingers. And he'd rub his fingers along the thickness of the bow and claims he can feel where it's too thick and that's where he removes wood. And so that's like the far end of intuitive tillering that obviously they've made some fantastic bows and their life was dependent upon them having bows to hunt with. So from that to using a phone and a computer, there's a big spectrum. We're using calipers to get down to the thousandths of an inch to measure the wood. Use what you like, what excites you, what's fun and what can help you accomplish your goal of making a bow and use the tools you have at hand because it's real interesting to me like you might not have calipers and you might not have all the equipment, but I guarantee it's kind of funny. You probably got the phone and you probably got a computer and you could even use that method to get more technical than maybe going out and buying calipers or making a gizmo or things like that. So use what you like and have a great time tillering. But if you have questions, just feel free to ask I guess is what I'm saying because I wanna help you.