you hi there I'm John McPherson and this is Jeffrey Schmidt and Jeff is becoming but three years you've been working under those at for three years now three years he has gotten to building asiatic composite bows and he's built one of well every major country that's built one in the Persian room Turkish and Chinese Koreans Egyptians and he's shooting well eight now you have bitter cutable suitable and five that are bingo so what we're going to do is first up and explain what composite bow is and why we will make a composite bow and that's what this little segment of talk is about and from there we're going to go step by step through the process of building a bow you're going to see this in less than two hours to subtract minuses gab we got going here but you have to realize it to build one of the finish really good products that we're going to show you is like five or six months worth of work and to the old Turks they spent years on the for five years they spent they could spend as much as a decade but they would build the bows and batches of five hundred and during one particular season they would just perform one operation such as sin Ewing on the entire batch and then the bows would be seasoned out sometimes two or three periods and it might take ten years for about to five hundred those to be completed from raw materials to stage when they're being sold well we're going to show you here is going to be like five months just average time is five to six months that we're going to compress it down we have those and Jeff is prepared various stages of everything so run through urine like three days we'll be shooting this you'll see it in an hour and a half but also you can build one within a month we'll show you a quick way to build a composite bowl let's talk Louis first some of you don't have much for background possibly in the physics of archery lawyers and a bowl is basically what most people think of it as a piece of wood the string tied at both ends that you Bend and you pull this string and throw an arrow which is this another stick well you got some wooden pieces here to illustrate this so this is a piece of hickory that's been worked down to the stage where it needs its final tillering to become a bowl and right now you'll notice that it is basically straight one end to another but when you bend this piece of wood any piece of wood when this has been too far right now but when she's been what happens is the outside of this wood is trying to tear apart the inside is really this compressing pushing together on itself compression these are the two major factors that control bowls a third which is not really worth much you're worried about much in wooden bows a third dog principle is the center of the bowl which has nothing happening it's called a neutral plane in the bows we're building here it has a lot to do but on wooden bows it you don't worry much about that but a piece of wood when you bend this eventually is going to go apart if you bend it too far regardless of the piece of wood and most woods will fail under the compression the inside of the bent before they will tear apart at the back but either way you have what 1% about a 1% strain in the wood and what that means is that if you have a piece of wood say 100 inches long you can either stretch it or compress it by one inch which is one percent of its total length before it fails under the particular strain that you're giving it if you are stretching it 100 inch piece of wood will break after it's going to stretch to 101 inches and so that's the limiting factor in BO design often is making a boat that will bend to the proper draw length for your arrows and still be within some sort of safety margin for the materials so we refinish this boat and then I shoot it I bend it compressive forces are going to take over it is going to end up with what we call a set it won't be straight anymore it will be bent slightly towards the belly of the bowler towards the shooter this is the back side this is the belly side down here and the string would be running down along here so the bottom ball was straight when I began that compressed there's ways to counteract that somewhat but for what we're talking you don't need to note it you can build your boat with what we call a reflex then backwards so that when you string this bow you have it strong you have more energy stored with the bone that is bent backwards in one it's bent forwards one who has string follow or reflex so ideally if these were all the same bow basically the same size and configuration and woods and same poundage bows let's say 50 pounds the one that would shoot hardest and furthest would be the one before spinning they had the most free folks and the one that had the most D flex or string file would not be easy is these other two now as Jeff mentioned you would has now this top boat here the tree flex you see this fuzzy stuff that is sinuous been seen you bet we're going to talk about this in our composite post let's go back to our basic plane boat 1% you can stress this whether we could stretch it or compress it 1% that doesn't give us much it makes good goals they've shot for years and years the English long bows and vision Americans and all around the world most cultures used wooden bows they still are today and they work really really efficiently but you can only stress this to a certain extent you can only bend it so far so if I wanted to really reflex this bow to get the most out of it a piece of wood what if I reflect it way back like 8 or 9 inches backwards it would probably break before you get to string up because just in getting it to the point where it's straightened out you would be straining the wood on the belly side on the backside by your 1% and the bow will probably not taking more than that so it will break before I even get it to this point I'm going to string up so you can get a really fantastic go up just a piece of wood this boat here is a hundred pound boat I can't drop completely that's for the 23 inch arrow and it has thrown well 260 very narrow that when you set me it's thrown a flight girl that just sent me over 300 yards we lost it as it went into treetops at about 15 or 20 feet in the air and it was 320 yards so this thing can throw an arrow the considerable distance and that would be a tremendous shot for an English longbow by the way this is 48 inches long not let's improve on this boat first thing we're going to do is we're going to take some heart this is part of a ginsbot comes from Africa in sawn into this is horn of a buffalo in a Native American by son and this would work for making the goal and this is horn from Asian water buffalo mr. provision water buffalo horn the inside curve this is what Geoff builds most of his bones from this we use on the underside of the bow the belt besides it faces the archer when you draw that is under compression because this has four times five times the compressor for buh-buh-buh this can take an overall string of 4% which means that the bow can be reflux before being strong and to be drawn farther after being strung roughly four times the curvature of the little wooden bow and still fall safely within the limits of the material but if you bend this it's going to break before it goes any great distance because it doesn't have tension it won't stretch even if they would be really really well not the trick is to make sure that the horn which can withstand compression is placed on the bow and such a place that it will have to withstand only compression and Chandra so this by itself isn't going to make much of a bow because you are back to this if you had a piece of wood with except you would be able to bend it further at the back didn't I so what we're going to do is we're going to take senior tendon from animals and this is off the back strap for a beer and we're going to shred this out two threads now we're going to glue this on the back of the bowl let me grab a strip of corn this is just exactly the one I put down it has been shaped and we'll show you this later by heat moist heat and it's been flattened so this is one limb of a bow this is another limb of a ball and all we need to do is place in you on the back side or the reflect and get it reflect this is simple composite bow Jeff's got one here again in Korea this is the type of reflex that you end up with this is an extreme case the bow looks a little bit out of balance right now but when it's strung up the limbs are balanced extremely well this bow is merely straight before it was sinuan and reflex and the shrinkage of the singular loan has pulled it into this shape now as you can see you're going to have to exert an enormous amount of force and put a lot of energy into the bowl just to straighten out the limbs and that's energy that will be stored in this bow above and beyond what could have been storing a straight limbo then in addition to that this bow being nonetheless quite short along the curve can be bent tremendously far and shoot a very long arrow because the materials are so extremely flexible compared to wood it can take it over all four times or five times as great a curvature as a normal wooden boat now this boat would probably not be efficient if it were not reflex because the horn and the sin you are both denser than wood so this boat as it stands is heavier and weighs more physically than a boat made out of wood of exactly the same shape that slows a bow down when you make a bow until you make it on automatically slows down its operation so you want the lightest material you can on you use what physics you can to make it as efficient as possible so by placing in that bow the Jeff just held up two weeks three weeks this one was soon you two weeks and he's had it strung and we're going to string it again later he'll see it later in the video hopefully we'll get to that point we all right on your time but this will be pen if you took a piece of wood like this you'd never even get it straight it would explode that would make it all right on the belly send you in the back the sinew stretches five times maybe the amount of wood the horn compresses that much and so you can do fantastic stuff you will show you here this is what Turkish this one has the Indian Indian subcontinent ah a bow this is reflexed this is backwards and what it will be when it's strong yeah you couldn't take a piece of wood is in this shape and do anything without it exploding it would just blow up on you I'm going to put this down just a moment you grab this because there's one concept on the other go which we'll cover in a second this is just the tip with a string will be placed this is the other tip but it's going to be bent backwards if we did that