An "old" Hungarian bow

lurz · Post by **lurz** » Fri Feb 15, 2013 6:26 pm

Congrats, very nice bow!
I think Adam K warns very explicit against fastflight on composit bows?
Regarding silk I'm under he impression that it was widely used historicaly. I have made only one silk string yet, but did not experience exsessive stretching. But the string was made from monofilament silk, not spun. If I remember rightly it was around 140 strands made for a 53# MB-type bow, and weighs very little if you exclude sinew stringloops, thickness is about the same as dacron. It has made maybe a cuple of dozen shots without breaking, but I'm not using it for day to day shooting.

Uli · Post by **Uli** » Sat Feb 16, 2013 12:10 am

great bow Paku !

silk string is secure.

Dediu00ro · Post by **Dediu00ro** » Mon Feb 18, 2013 2:13 am

I have used spun silk maybe that is why it was stretching, i will try and use monofilament silk. Thanks for the insight

.

jbl · Post by **jbl** » Fri Feb 22, 2013 3:12 pm

Beautiful bow. Amazing bravo.

dklynx · Post by **dklynx** » Thu Mar 14, 2013 8:44 pm

Dediu00ro wrote:I have used spun silk maybe that is why it was stretching, i will try and use monofilament silk. Thanks for the insight .

Hi
Spun silk has "plasticity" e.g. it will stretch and KEEP the new legth (It will therefore fail at some point). The reason is simple:
The fibres are relatively short and they will slide because a short fibre has less surface and therefore less friction to the other fibres in the string.
This goes for other fibres as well of course, but silk in particular because the individual fibres are very slippery.

Hope that made sense

Beautifull bow, I would like to see it with a shorter string

Bede · Post by **Bede** » Fri Mar 15, 2013 4:39 am

You are definitely right about the slipperiness of the fibres. I have made only continuous filament silk strings. While it was necessary to use beeswax on linen strings to allow the threads to move against each other to even out the tension, pre-tensioning silk strings was a breeze because the individual threads slid over each other so easily. I did find that knotting the tunc had to be done carefully. If the loops are fully served like Chinese strings and some of the ramie strings in Dresden, there is no problem but unserved loops need to be held together by a glue and resin mix as Adam Karpowicz mentions in his book.

An "old" Hungarian bow

spun silk will eventually fail