Final maple selfbow design, finishing the bow.

Hi,

Yesterday I posted some images of the maple tree staves and how I started on making a flatbow/selfbow. The rough shape of the bow is ready, now it is time to tiller the limbs by using my tillering tree.
It's made of a simple 2 by 4 inch beam with markings every inch. The top of the tillering stick holds the bow in a horizontal position.

Before you start to tiller on the stick, you should floortiller the bow, so you can see if the limbs are bending. If the limbs are too strong, you should remove some wood on each limb and tiller it again:

Here's a video on how to tiller your bow. This is part 4 of a series, you can watch all episodes on youtube:

After a few hours of tillering the limbs were bending pretty evenly, so I sanded the bow with different increasingly finer sandpaper.

Finally I wanted to put some color to the almost white bow and decided to use brown shoeshine. A couple of coatings were rubbed in and it was finished with 4 layers of clear lacquer.
I wrapped the handle with a piece of brown leather and the top and bottom of the handle with nylon string.

The bowstring is made of two red strands twisted together. The bow has a drawweight of 30 LBS at 28 inches. Here are some pictures of the final bow:

I'm working on a new bow at the moment, so maybe I can show you some more pictures soon.

Kind regards, Mark