Ottoman flight bow's #1 & #2

[JNystrom]

Hello everyone!

I'm Jere, another facebook "refugee" from Finland, who still 2018 believes in forums and less market-orientated layback communities.
I have been a reader of atarn for some quite while, enjoying the more historically accurate and in depth conversations you don't get to have in fb, for example. It's been nice read about your bows and especially kviljo's 31 page topic about his hornbow's. It shows you can go quite far with consistant effort in a matter of 10 years!

Personally, I have made some 60 bows of wood and sinew, but for the past 6 months i have been putting endless hours to my first two horn bows!
I have been posting about my project to our new, Finnish primitivebow forum https://keskustelu.primitiivijousi.fi/t ... -ja-2/1090. Even though it is in Finnish, you can still see some pictures if you are interested in my so-and-so journey.

I have stubborn head and i like to dive straight ahead to the most hardest part. I'm not trying to build a 40-50 pound bow but atleast a 100#.
Dimensions are following:
108cm, sal 16mm thickness, 7mm horn (of which 2mm is grooving), 100g of sinew
114cm, sal 15mm thickness, 5mm horn (of which 2mm is grooving), 100g of sinew

Both have matching horn and made as accurately as possible to Adam's book guides.
They have now seasoned for some months and are rock solid. Obviously the sal's are way too thick, but i find this good since i have plenty of room to tiller horn and even sinew back, to chase for high poundage. I actually ended up stacking sinew a bit too much on sal sections, going from 10,8mm (core+horn) to this 16 and 15mm. I'll bring the sinew back down a 1mm and 1mm of horn and go from there.

[KenH]

Glad to see you here Jere!! I admire your dedication of heavy-draw bows, but at a wimpy 70 years of age I'm trying to make my first hornbow in the 25-35# class.

[JNystrom]

Thanks! Myself i also admire anyone who manages to make a proper hornbow at any poundage!
Why i wont personally have much use for lighter bows is because, foremost i want to flight shoot and i also can draw heavier bows. Just recently i shot 313meters with a sinew backed osage recurve, which was about 90-95# @23". Heavier poundage gives you such a nice head start, i want to keep it.

[mikekeswick]

Good effort for your first try!
16mm thick sals on that length of bow will be a fair bit over 100# 14mm mid sal will be better.
In some ways a 100# er is easier to make than a thinner bow but on the other hand.....stringing that for the first time will be 'interesting' especially if you have any twist.
The shapes look good at this stage. You will find it useful to significantly reduce the reflex in the sals. I would recommend using the asi gez tool and heating the sals to kasan eye transisition equally, alternating heat between both limbs until the whole bow is hot. Obviously when you have more experience stringing these bows leave all the sal reflex. You can safely remove the sinew wrapping at the end of kasans/tip bases. Your tips seem short (better to leave them with an extra 2 inches for tillering) and of a strange configuration (end view)? Why have you built up the tips in this way?
Good luck and keep posting pictures of your tillering.

[JNystrom]

Good to hear.

I totally agree. I started with 10,5mm core+horn, so i thought i would end up somewhere ~14mm. I must have put too much sinew on sals. Well its okay, i need to sand the sinew back down more, since i feel its a total pain to even heat manipulate. With the shorter, 5mm horn bow its harder to get it weaker, since it has quite plenty of core wood (7,5mm minus 2mm grooving).

Anyways, i have now thinned the bows down considerably and opened them up with asi gez about as much as is necessary. End results: every horn belly is about to delaminate! Its cool, atleast i get to do them again all at once!
I wasn't too confident about the bellylam since the glue i used was just some hide glue of ebay. I found out too late that these bows are all about glue...
I might now just try to gently rip all of those horns off and glue them again. This would also allow me to thin the core on the thicker bow couple of mm down! I just made my second patch of tendon glue, which im confident will hold on second gluing try.
Didn't expect this would take so long... But, now that i look at these bows, i would manage to re-do both for 25% of the time i have spent up to this day.

[JNystrom]

and here is the other, shorter bow

[JNystrom]

Oh, i forgot. The tips are as they are, cause i thinned them down too much and had to add all kinds of reinforcements. I think they show the struggle.

[JNystrom]

Glueline survived! I'm really reliefed.
Both bows had one of their horns re-glued and multiple sinew courses to repair some lifting sinew or air gaps. But finally i got them to 12,5mm sal thickness and braced them with tepeliks and peg board. Jason Beever's instructional video on youtube really helped me to use the tepeliks properly. I enjoyed the kinda "tepelik platform" where you are capable of bending the bow while also able to wrap the string. I don't know if its Jason's invention, but anyway!
Both bows are somewhat thick at kasan eye/kasan area, so there would be quite a lot to optimize. Problem is, horn is running out from kasan eye area. I've tried to heat them more open, but it doesnt seem to work. Its really hard for the sinew back, a those 16-18mm thicknesses im starting to be scared of....
They might be fine with quite rigid kasans, I just need to spread the load of sals to a bit bigger area.
Both have quite makeshift string bridges, i've never made them before. Those might just work fine, i need to experiment with them some more. This just made me do some string bridges on my couple wood-sinew flight recurves also, that are shedding the string on release.

Well, lets proceed from here. The longer one (111cm, 43,5") has been pulled to 68# @23", but the shorter one has been only at brace. They are both somewhere at 12,5mm on the thinnest part at sal. Shorter one (106cm, 41,5") feels quite a lot heavier. Lets see if they survive till 26"! Its really been fun this far, so anything more is extra.

[JNystrom]

Here is some more pictures.

[JNystrom]

Here are some of the pictures from tepelik and peg board session. Both bows had quite a lot of twist as you might see from the earlier picture. I think that the 106cm bow was pretty much fucked from the beginning well im used to heat bending so ill make it work.
1st picture is from the 106cm bow,
2nd and 3rd are from the 111cm bow.

[lurz]

Looks promising! Good luck

[JNystrom]

Thank you! I might need some luck...

So far i have been using bcy 452x strings (dyneema, vectran) because the bows are sooooo much easier to string with them. I would like to use dacron for shooting, but i don't have any. Do you think i could shoot these with the non stretch "fastflight"? Nocks are bulky 14x20mm and i'm thinking about making the loops quite much thicker. Even to around 3-4mm thickness.

mikekeswick at least has shot with fastflight, what is your opinion?
You recently said to get rid of sinew bindings, but maybe those would with fastflight prove to good use....?

[JNystrom]

Oh well, found out both bows kasan eye's and kasan sections sinew was really badly glued. I think the original problem was i didn't reflex the bows enough when i glued 3rd layer of sinew there. This then delaminated and when i repaired the sinew layer i STILL didn't put on a string and reflex the bow properly. I think i did this delaminate/air bubble -> repair -> delaminate -> repair quite multiple times. Well. Now i feel like a dummy. And this is not my first time sinew backing, hah! Sometimes you just guess forget something really vital when you just want to quickly repair something. Now that i glued once again all the kasans and reflexed the tips together, i got a nice gushing sound of glue between the layers - perfect... Now i feel a lot more comfortable about the bows when heading to the flight shoot on weekend. I will open the bows on thursday and finish tiller them to be ready for the weekend!

[mikekeswick]

Good to see you are still at it! Making your first working horn bows is a fascinating journey however it can be a problem filled, frustrating journey if you try and re-invent the wheel! Remember the way to make these bows has been worked out to perfection by all the cultures who used hornbows - you just need to follow these methods. I made many mistakes coming from the wood and wood/sinew bow mindset. i'd made hundreds of bows of all styles,woods etc and pretty much had things worked out. It was only after making a handful of failed hornbows that the methods in Adam's book started to make full sense. I understood all the information in the book at first reading but I didn't give enough credit to the details. If you follow the methods TO THE LETTER you will get a fine bow at your first try (I understand this is much easier said than done!).
My advice with these bows is get the tiller as good as you can for practise and set them aside as wallhangers. This may sound harsh but it is dangerous to shoot these bows unless they are perfectly straight and stable. Sometimes you can get a bow that has twist but seems stable enough to shoot, over time it will get worse. It is possible to do quite surprising things with heat on these bows BUT they must have dried correctly in the first place as not fully dried glue isn't able to withstand the required heat. Then the bow must be equilibrated at around 70% r.h., this can take some time... Heating must be slow and gradual, heat pads for reptile tanks work very well wrapped around the limb. Time your heating sessions so if a correction doesn't hold you can increase the heating time on your next attempt. Be systamatic. If your gluing methods weren't perfect to start with you are onto a loser unfortunately.
My advice for these bows is open kasan eyes further, making sure both limbs match. Shape the bellyside of your tips into a trinagle all the way to the base eg. remove the flared section on yours. Remove string bridges. You may be correct that it is a good idea to re-wrap the tips with sinew after shaping them. Remove all sideways bends and twists by eye before trying to string them again. Once you have them as straight as possible you can put them on teplics and reasess straightness/twist. Only once they are again showing no twist on teplics move onto stringing them. I know this can be frustrating when you just want to shoot the thing but patience is a virtue!
As you mentioned high quality glue is absolutely essential. The best way is to make your own, it is really very easy and you get the very best quality possible. I personally wouldn't use any bought glue.

[JNystrom]

Wise words Mike! Thank you for your long answer.

I actually managed to get the lighter bow (111cm, 68# @23") to a flight shoot competition on saturday! Like you said its not safe or wise to shoot a twisted bow, but luckly i got the bow really stable to shoot. Only after the flight shoot when we were just discussing about the bow and pulling it a little bit for show, some twist came back. While in the competition i got to pull it to 24-25", this scored me 291 meters. I think its ok for my first hornbow! I could have pulled it farther, just that my fingers were so wrecked from a whole day of 3d shooting with a 60 pound shortbow and 1.3mm thick string on it...
I won the competition, cause we don't have almost any flight shooters here...
In the end this was a good shoot, now i get to start finish the bow properly, open the kasans, thin the tips and eventually pull further! I think i will immediately also start to train the thumb ring and siper with some light wooden bows.

Summer is always a hassle, since you kinda want to make improvements for your flight gear and craft some bows, but still you are attending many archery competitions and also doing all kinds of stuff not related to archery. Winter time is perfect for relaxing and taking it slowly with the bows.