Seneca style scalloped hickory bow - progress

I finally moved ahead on this one. Had to go through the usual permutations of getting impatient and creating the beginnings of a hinge (subsequently patiently worked out by cautiously working every other area but that one), dealing with too much inner limb bend, heat treating and reflexing to overcome too much initial set near the handle, twisting limbs, uneven tiller, etc.

Fast forward past all of that stuff: It is now a shooting bow that I feel is pretty well balanced in the hand and bending the way I want. I spent a great deal of time working on the balance of the limbs so that, to the feel of the hand while being drawn, one limb does not tip or tilt before the other. (This technique of feeling the balance of the limbs comes from Dean Torges's Hunting the Osage Bow. I didn't understand it before I tried it, but I do now. Well worth the time and effort, even if it means losing a pound or two in finessing the tiller.) In addition, I tried to bring the bending of the limbs about in the order suggested in Stim Wilcox's The Art of Making Selfbows. He refers to it as his 1-2-3 tillering technique. I've renamed it the MIO method for myself ("mio" conveniently means "my" in Italian and Spanish) so that I could remember what the 1-2-3 referred to: Middle, Inner, Outer. Get the midlimbs bending first, then the inner limb, and then the outer limb in the last few inches of draw.

The most important elements so far I feel is what I learned about the scallops and the cut-in decorations on the side -- elements that I would have thought could have caused the failure of the bow, but didn't. I'll save that for another post.

Meanwhile, here are some photos, and a video of the bow being drawn eventually back to the full 28 inches. The first shows the bow at brace (6" from belly). The second at full draw (28"). Don't be alarmed by how off-center it looks -- it's because it rocks in the handle cradle. Following both of those is a brief video showing it being drawn eventually to 28" (you'll see it rock at the start and end of the video).

More images show tips and the scallop where I managed to incorporate the knot that runs from the back through the side. Hickory is some tough stuff! Also a shot of the bow unbraced. Notice the string follow?

Lastly, the FD curve. Currently #52.5 @ 28". I only managed to get 138 fps with a 500 grain arrow using a 110 grain string; I'd like it to be about 15 fps higher, but I think the nature of the design (wide tips, shorter bow, flat untrapped back, and hickory in a damp environment) essentially limits what one can get.   One can note on the chart the string stack happening toward the end of the draw, especially out past 24 inches. This is because the working part of the limb only amount to 46-47 inches or so. Frankly, I'm surprised I can get a 28" draw on this bow, given how little working limb there is! But the stacking at the end is not that bad at only around #3 per inch. It's also not a bad sort of stacking, per se -- it just reminds you you're getting to the end of the draw!



I still plan to do some more work on this one: heat treat the limbs to a) see if I can heat out some of the deflex and b) to try and make the limbs a little less prone to absorbing moisture from the air. (I've read that heat treating white woods can help in this regard, probably because it changes the physical structure of the wood. Maybe "cooking" the cells prevents them from reabsorbing moisture?) The bow may go up in weight a little bit, but we'll see. Once all of that is done, I plan to darken the limbs before I put the final seal coat on it.

Seneca style scalloped hickory bow.

I'm behind on updating other projects, but I wanted to get this posted before it breaks or blows up, per my wife's suggestion!

This is a little project I've been goofing around with: A Seneca Native American style bow with scalloped sides. I saw this in Traditional Bowyer's Bible, volume 2, p.61. I had a hickory board lying around, and this seemed just the thing. Truth be told, this is a complete lark, and I have no idea what I'm doing messing around with those scallops. Given the nature of the board (described below), this may also be destined for failure. BUT, the fun is in the journey, right? ;-)

At 5" brace height from handle. Top limb on right.

The stave is lumber yard hickory or pecan, biased ringed, and mostly sapwood. The bow is 53" nock to nock. Limbs are 1" wide (1 1/4" at the peaks of the scallops), and started 5/8" thick at the center. It was quickly tapered 1/4" on the bandsaw just outside the handle section to the tips. I marked it out for the lower limb to be 1" shorter than the top limb, so the arrow pass is closer to geographic center.

Scallops were laid out simply on two criteria:
1) There was a very small knot or occlusion in the back. I wanted one scallop laid out so that the peak would line up with this area for maximum strength.
2) I wanted 4 scallops per limb.
Not very scientific!

Knot(?) in back, through side!

Ends were recurved initially with dry heat by bending over a thick dowel, which resulted in more of a "hinge" rather than a smooth curve, as well as an indentation on the back where the dowel had been. They were later steam bent over a 12" diameter form, giving them their better appearance but resulting in lifted fibers on the belly of one of the curves. (This has subsequently been filled with super glue and sanded. I'll keep an eye on this -- if it looks like it might lift, I may have to do a sinew wrap.)

The biggest tricks so far have been 1) getting the limbs aligned and 2) getting the limbs to bend where I want.:
1) The original board had a small amount of heartwood running down the edge of one side, which is now part of the belly. As a result, it seems slightly stronger on that side, causing the limbs to bend toward the scalloped side.
2) The 1/4" taper created a pretty even bend straight away, though with way too much bending through the handle. I've been weakening the mid limbs to try and move the bending away from the handle, which was starting to take a set. I made a small heat correction to the handle to try and undo a little of the set (seems to have worked), and now it's getting a more even bend, though still more at the center than I'd like. Interestingly, based on the set it has taken so far, it is starting to look very similar to the sketch in TBB2.

So far I've pulled it to 12 1/2", where it read #35. Extracting this using a straight line slope for the force/draw curve would put this around #70 @ 26", give or take. Looks like there's still a little wiggle-room for fixing the tiller and still getting a hunting-weight bow. We'll see...