Today, I finished off my tiller string and finally got to start tillering. Using the tillering stick/tree (I'll write a tutorial about this soon.) I made earlier today, I started off with a low brace, per the suggestions of a few friends on the PaleoPlanet forum. My low brace is about 1 1/2" and the tiller seems OK. It looks like there's a bit of twist where the jigsaw took a notch out of it, I'll try to remove wood where appropriate, but it looks pretty bad on that front.
I don't have enough pictures to really do a buildalong writeup for the tiller, so here's how tillering is done. My way. I string the bow and put it up on the tiller tree. I look at it, for bad spots in the arc. After I've looked at it, I take it down, unstring it, scrape it with the Surform, restring and repeat. Really, it's not the greatest way to tiller, but that's how I wound up doing it. I'll work out a better method soon.
In the end, I guess this bow was doomed from the moment that notch got taken out. It exploded just shy of full draw at 26". Lucky for me, it exploded up and away. I've got more sticks of wood and more bows to build, so it's no problem. All part of the learning experience. Next time, maybe I'll be luckier. Maybe I'll do better. Until then...
-Chan OUt
This stick of red oak is going to be the basis of my next, hopefully more successful bow. It's a piece of 1"x2" quartersawn red oak, 5' long exactly. The grain runs nearly straight all the way end to end. I'll be making this bow 59" nock to nock and hopefully around 40#@26".