By Rean Steenkamp

Many things can go wrong with a self-made wooden bow, especially if you are not one of the best bowyers in the country. You get good bowyers and bowyers of lesser excellence. I am none of two. I am at the” attempting to be a bowyer” fase. Fortunately there is much one can do to salvage a bow and although it might loose a little cast, it can still be a useful bow – patched or not.

I built an ash bow a few years ago, which I laminated with hickory. Backing it with hickory was a mistake, I found out a little later, since the hickory tends to overpower the ash and causes string follow. This did happen, as the experienced bowyers predicted. The string follow wasn’t that much though and the bow came out relatively fine and had a fairly good cast at 50 pounds.

I wasn’t happy with it though and after shooting it for a while I decided to put recurves in the tips. So I cooked (not steamed) the limb tips for thirty minutes and bent the tips into a curve. Everything went according to plan and the bow picked up a few pounds as well as more cast.

But after shooting it a while. I noticed that the one limb had less of a recurve than the other. I will have to do something about this, I thought. This time I heated the limb for thirty minutes with a heat gun and then I rushed the bow to my bench vice and I pulled it into a bigger recurve. But… I also heard a snap – and when I checked the belly, there was fracture.

Well, not to be deterred, I decided to fix it. I did this by filling the limb belly until the fracture was gone. Then I added a piece of hardwood lamination to the belly by sticking it with Resorcinol. I made it rather thick, but compensated for the extra weight by making the tip thinner. This I did with both tips. When the glue was hard I worked the tips into a streamlined shape. This operation added to the bow’s speed since the last three inches of the was now static – although it did not really have much of a recurve.

After shooting the bow for a while I decided to change the riser from a traditional grip to a slight pistol grip with a arrow shelf. I removed the grip, which I glued on with Resorcinol and I glued a new block of wood onto the bow with a more conventional wood glue. The I worked the riser into the desired shape and I cut away an arrow shelf.

The bow shot fine for a while and I could shoot more accurately with it because of the arrow shelf and more modern grip. Unfortunately, as a wiser bowyer might have predicted, the grip came loose after a while.

I did not want to loose the bow. It surely wasn’t the best bow ever created and it did not have a great cast, but I made it myself and that made it special to me.
So I pulled the grip away from the bow as far as I could and forced in as much glue as I could. Then I drilled a hole from back to belly and pressed a glued wooden plug through it. I left it to dry and then worked the plug off with a file.

So far the grip is still holding.