Day three of my bow making class involved a lot of rasping. A rasp is like a nail file on acid. Believe you me, you do not want to file your nails with a rasp. I accidentally ran the rasp over my thumb and it made a big ragged hole right in the middle of my thumb nail. I didn’t have any clear coat to seal the hole in my thumb nail, so I now have one silver nail.
The purpose of all this rasping to which my thumbnail was casualty was to taper down the arms of the bow and to cut down the draw weight. Once I had rasped away enough material that I could actually bend both sides of the bow fairly evenly, it was time to string the bow. In order to string the bow, I had to cut notches into the ends to hold the string. Once the bow could be strung, I began the process of tillering.
Tillering, as I said in yesterday’s post, is the process of making sure both sides of the bow bend the same amount and with the same curve. In order to test the curve of the bow you use a tillering post. This post is a two-by-four with pegs down one side and a grooved cradle cut into the top for the bow to rest in. The post is held in a vice. To tiller, you put the strung bow in the cradle on top of the post and then pull the string down so that it hooks around one of the pegs down the post. Then you stand back to see how the bow is bending.
If the bow is not bending properly, you mark the offending areas with chalk, unstring the bow, and resume rasping or shaving away material until the bow bends evenly throughout its length.
Tillering can be a long process. You string the bow, put it up on the post, mark an area on one arm, take the bow down, unstring it, cut away a little bit of wood and repeat until perfect – or so near to perfect as to no longer matter. By the end of the day, I had a tillered bow. Now, I’ll be able to smooth out all the cut and file marks, round the edges, serve the string, and add a leather grip to the handle. And then I’ll be able to shoot it.
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