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Design Stats for My Traditional String Follow Form

(Bamboozle)

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I have had numerous inquiries about the degree of string follow on my Traditional pattern form, the one I used for Bamboozle and Chocolate Moose.

Bamboozle and Chocolate Moose

(for more detail go to Gallery: Bamboozle or Chocolate Moose

These bows were layed up on a double sided form. One side makes the string follow bow and the other makes a reflexed bow. Both are basic Hill styles, using a 1 1/2" wide form. The information below is based on the string follow pattern. Here's a pic of the double form:

This pattern has more string follow than most modern "string follow" bows. The original design was taken from a 1950's Ben Pearson lemonwood longbow, which had a good degree of string follow to begin with and had undoubtedly acquired more during its long shooting life. I learned to shoot on this style of bow, really liked it and so wanted to be able to duplicate the style, but with increased performance from the use of fiberglass lamination. The result is a bow that I think handles beautifully and is the most forgiving design I have ever shot.

The string follow produced off of this design is 1.5". I'm usually asked how that effects speed. It clearly costs you some fps. I don't care, the pleasure of shooting the design outweighs this consideration for me. I won't take a live shot at more than 20 yards with any bow, so it's hardly relevant. If you're looking for speed, shoot a modern RD or recurve bow with a shelf and carbon limbs and stop calling yourself a traditional archer.

Speaking of tradition, when I build this bow, it does not have a shelf. My original lemonwood longbow didn't have one and I still don't find one necessary, so I try to keep the design true to the original. The shelf is, to me, a modern development and the first step down that long slippery slope to the compound bow. You, of course, may disagree and put a shelf on if you prefer, dammit.

OK, enough background, in response to requests, here is what should be enough data for you to build the form for this pattern. My wife, the marine design and pattern specialist, says it's sloppy work. Tough. If you can't build a form from this data, you probably couldn't build the bow anyway. What you'll be looking at is a half form template. The form is symetrical. If you make this template, you just draw one end of the form and flip it for the other. The squares shown are nominal 2" station references. I say nominal because all I did was lay my big 72" steel rule on the paper and draw lines with a Sharpie pen. The rule is 2" wide. In drawing 18 station lines, some inaccuracy due to the accumulating thickesses of the Sharpie lines was introduced. Hence, the final square isn't a perfect 2" square. Trust me, it won't matter.

Here is the overall pattern as taken from the form and a separate list of the drop at each station:

Because of metal reinforcment used in making my form, I was not possible to lay it flat on the table and simply draw the line. I used a needle punch and made dots on each station line, then connected the dots freehand. Needless to say, the line is intended to be a very smooth curve. Working that into the plywood after bandsawing out the rough form line is up to you. The needle punches measured up as 1.50 and 1.50 at stations 0 and 1. Actually, the curve is smooth right through the riser area. It was just so slight as to not show up with the holes I punched in the paper... hardly critical.

I build the bow center/center, i.e. the center of the riser is layed up at the center of the bow, not offset. In making the first bow, I made a matching curve riser. Later, I took to using flat bottomed risers. I use a 16" riser and found that the gap from the center of the riser to the center of the bow form was .130. I filled this gap by adding a power lam the tapers from .130 at its center out to paper thin beyond the end of the riser fades. In the layup process, this fills the slight curve below the flat bottom riser perfectly and makes making the riser much easier.

Here is a set of closeups of the stations and drop measurements:

That's it. A lot of text and pictures to just say, essentially, start with a straight form, drop the center 1.5" and draw a smooth curve up to the ends. Hopefully, though, this stuff will help you understand the bow and give you some confidence to go ahead and try it. If you do, I'd like to hear from you: rwightman@mindspring.com

Dick Wightman

Addendum: I've been asked about the reflex pattern. The reflexed form side has 1/4" less drop at the center and has the tips curve a bit more sharply than the overall to give a little extra reflex on the end 1/4 of the limbs. You can use the string follow form to make a reflexed bow simply by making it a forward riser... or vice versa. Incidentlly, while I've gotten many bows off of this setup, I don't particularly recommend the double form. It's quite heavy and awkward compared to a single.