Bows from Miran

[Stephen Selby]

Are overlaps inferior to splicing the parts together? How come?

If you can choose between a V-splice with a long total surface area (sometimes enhanced with surface grooving), there is less to go wrong than numerous joins of overlapping parts. Multiple joints increase the overall risk of failure. (In my post, I was referring to numerous overlaps found in Central Asian bows rather then a single one.)

In addition, if you have just two major components to glue together, you can do a better job of removing air bubbles using heat. This is another way to reduce risk.

So it's not so much that one way is automatically better: just that simple V-splices carry less risk.

[Hermitking]

The first thing that I noticed was the opposing diagonal wraps on the first few bows. It looked as though they extended this wrap all the way to the nocks on the siyahs.

Two speculative thoughts spring to mind, could opposing diagonal wraps be used in order to keep each other from unwrapping, much like the opposing wraps of reverse twist braiding on bowstrings? Or like the reverse twist braiding of japanese bowstring, where the innner strands twists in reverse of the outer strands?

I also have considered trying to braid sheets of sinew and glue them on as a backing that is less likely to have longitudinal seperation cracks. I wonder if that was ever tried on any sinew backings of older bows.