[sterling_archer]

When you have made all 4 grooves on the bow, you will see that grooves are pretty rough and their edges are very sharp. That poses danger to both tillering string and the bow string so this must be corrected. Use the rough sandpaper and gently sand grooves and all their edges.






3.2. Tillering

This is the most important step in the bow building and a skill that is learned for years. Until now stave was just a piece of wood but now it has choice of becoming either bow or firewood. For tillering you will need a device called tillering tree. Tillering tree is a device which on upper end has a holding place cradle and on the lower end has a pulley with a hook. In my case its a double pulley system. Between this is a scale where the drawing lengths are marked.
Here are the pictures of my tillering tree.







Double pulley system means that I pull the bow with two times lower force than it actually is. That ensures I can easily pull the bow even though its maybe a heavy beast like those English warbows.
Scale is measured from the top of the „cradle“, not from the bottom of it.
In my case this double pulley system is mounted on the wall. But if you don't have place on the wall you can buy a wooden rectangular pole and tie it to something so it doesn't move while you pull.
See the links below for ideas and dimensions that other bowyers have done.

http://www.primitivearcher.com/smf/index...opic=663.0

http://www.instructables.com/id/How-to-m...nal-arche/

http://tradgang.com/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.c...5;t=010285

You should give maximum effort and make the tillering tree the best and most rigid you can. When I started making bows I had at least three mediocre tillering trees that were made badly and gave me a lot of problems. Then I finally decided year and a half ago to make a state of the art super rigid tillering tree and this is the result you see on pictures.

Now, on to the tillering. Idea of tillering is simple. Remove the wood where the bow doesn't bend and leave the wood intact in places where it bends good. When the bow bends good at your drawing length of 28 inches, it is finished. Simple, right? Yeah, in theory.
What you will discover when you first start to tiller is that you will have difficulties in judging where the bow really bends good or bad. But don't despair, everybody goes through that stage. Maybe you will have to break a few bows, maybe none will break but you will learn in any case. I myself have broken three bows on the tillering stage before I made a first successful bow.

Unfortunately because of lack of space and inability for me to tiller at the same time and take the photos, I will put a link of video that in my opinion best describes tillering. Sorry, I would put the pictures myself of my bow but I can't.

So the bow now hopefully bends very good at 28 inches of draw length and your bow string is put on the bow. Here is result of my tillering.



Here I must mention that there are different draw lengths out there and different people prefer different draw lengths. This datasheet is aimed at bow that has draw lenght of 28. For an average height male, 28 inches of draw is pulling the string to the corner of the mouth. I have seen examples of people using even 24 inches. Later, when you got experience you can do whatever draw length you want. Famous Native American Ishi had a small bow that had a short draw length but he was master of it. Short bows (below 62“ tip to tip) can't have 28“ draw length without having recurves.


3.3. Final shaping

This is the last stage of wood removal. Here we will shape tips and handle and do the sanding. I take off bow string and I put the bow belly up and on the fades of handle I draw half of the ellipsis. I connect the middle of each fade with a straight line that goes through the center of the bow. So idea is that I will remove wood on the handle so it forms a semi circular or semi elliptical cross section, which is very comfortable for my hand. You can try different shapes. Google „bow handle shapes“ to get idea.