Don Assenheimer Bow | Tribute Video | Weight Reduction and Refinish

Hey, guys. Welcome to The Great Plains YouTube channel. Again. Today is the first day of November, and today I am going to rework a Don Assenheimer three piece recurve. So Don Assenheimer was a fairly well known bowyer. He started building bows in the 1970s, and his work became. It got a very good reputation and he did a very good job with his bows. And he passed away May 2, 2019. But this is an Assenheimer bow. Now, I've done a number of Assenheimer bows, but I've never videoed one. So today we're gonna do a full rework on this bow and weight reduction. So currently this bow is. I think it says it's 50 pounds at 27 inches. Let's see what the instructions are here. Loki is wanting to get the cat. Okay, so here are my instructions for this bow. Lower limb weight to 40 pounds at 28. That's currently 50 at 27. Check tiller. I shoot three under. Check limb straightness. Rework if required. Refinish as necessary. Check limb tips. I want to shoot fast flight strings. Reinforce if necessary. Change graphics on riser to 40 at 28 inches. 1999. I'm not sure what the 1999 is for, but. And then he wants Donny Assenheimer 10, 20, 34 to 5, 2, 19. Oh, and check quiver inserts. Change if necessary. I will change those simply because if I pull those out, I can do a higher quality rework. And it's real simple. And I can put nicer ones in a little. He's got the inch and 5, 16 spread. Quick Equiver inserts here. So here we go. We're just going to start with the basics here and get it prepped for the rework. And I think the first thing I'll do is pop these quiver inserts out. So I'll show you how I do that. I've kind of developed a method here that works really, really well for me. Take your soldering iron, you heat those quiver inserts up, and then you take it easy out and they come right out. So get that ready. And then you grab the size of easy out. That works the best. In this case, that one's too big. So now when you do this, you can't save the insert. So if you do this method, you need to have inserts prepped or new inserts that you're going to put back in there. So with these here easy outs, I've modified these. And all you got to do is just cut that end off so that it doesn't bottom out in there. And you can get these from harbor freight for like 10 bucks a whole pack of them. And they're cheap enough that you can cut them and do whatever you want with it. So what I do is I heat this up here. Just stick your soldering iron down in there because you really don't want to heat up the surrounding area. But just wait until that gets hot. I've been absolutely slammed with work here. And this is one guy here trying to keep up with huge amount of work. All the reworks, new bows. And unfortunately, what happens is you can't make everyone happy. So there's people that just get upset with you no matter how hard you try. Because when there's that big a workload on one guy, you just can't get the work done as quick as you'd like. But anyway, okay. So when you see. I like to wait till I see just the first wisp of smoke coming up. You don't want to go too hot. Pop this in here like this. And I just tap it in just to seat it. And then grab a pliers or usually I use a crescent, but this will work. And there she comes out. She's loose. I can even do it by. Actually, what I might do is just hook this up to my drill so that one doesn't have threads. And that's okay. There it is. So my inserts have a little bit. They're threaded, so this will work perfectly. The ones I put. Now the thing is, I just realized I don't. I do not have any inserts, which is totally fine. We'll go ahead and do the work and we'll put them in. We'll polish them, put them in after the bow is completely finished. But I do want to pop these out because if you, if you, if you do rework a bow, it's just so, so much easier to not have anything like this that you have to go around, sand around. You can do such a high quality job, much, much higher quality job if you don't have to work around inserts like this. So on my. Like I was talking about with my reworks, my bread and butter here at the bow shop is my new bows. The reworks that I do, I really don't make that much on them. It's more of a service to the archery community, which, as you can imagine, kind of creates havoc because those are the bows the guys want back. But it's hard for me to get to them all. I usually have around 60 or 70 sitting, waiting on me at all times. Okay. This time we're just going to go straight to the drill and it'll probably. They don't want to, but I've got it. Okay. Yeah. And there's number two. Piece of cake. I kind of skipped a step, which I don't normally do. I'm a little bit rusty. Haven't made a video for quite some time. The very first thing I normally do is just simply string it up and shoot it. So I need to get back. I need to do that now. I guess that would be. Looks kind of like a 64 inch. It might be a 62. Let's try a 64 first. The tips are reinforced already for fast flight so we don't have to worry about that. It is a 62. These can kind of be deceptive. I believe that's. That looks to be about between, I'd say a 17 and 19 inch riser. Just looking at it, I wonder. 19 and a half. So that can be pretty deceptive. Sometimes you look at that and the riser so long and you think, oh, that's got to be a 64 inch. But it's an optical illusion. It's actually only a 62. But the riser is so long. Looks like a 64. That's an 8 inch brace. With that limb profile I probably would run that higher. I am not a lefty. This is a left handed bow. So let's go ahead and check it. See how straight she is. I've not strung this bow up yet even one time before this very moment. So bottom limb is perfectly straight. Top limb is not straight. But I could tell this bow is very well built. It's not a new bow by any means and it still looks very good. Okay, so we're a little off. Not. Not bad. What guys don't realize is a lot of times a recurve lives its whole life a little bit off. Probably 80% of them do. Just a tiny bit that you can't even hardly see and it never affects anything. Okay. So I recalibrated my chateaune scale. Let's see what she measures at 28. And it's okay. At 28 inches it's 53 pounds. And it's marked. Oh yeah, 50 at 27. So it's almost dead on. It's 49 and a half pounds at 27. Very, very close. So he did good there. Let's go ahead and check the tiller. And before we do that, most important thing is you need to check where the fulcrum is. The pivot point of your bow and then where the shelf is in relation to that, because that has everything to do with tiller. So we'll go ahead and make a mark here at 29 and then come up from the other side. And also when you're checking tiller, if you want to be precise, never go off the limb tip. Sometimes the limb tips, these look pretty, pretty similar, but sometimes the limb tips can be different sizes beyond the string, and that can throw you off. What you want to do is from the pull point of the string because that's the true area of the tiller measurement. Okay, 29.

29.

Mark there a little bit better. And from that we'll find the center one and three. Let's see, that's one and three eighths. That'd be eleven. Sixteen would be the center of that. So that would be right here. And then up from that. Yeah. So it's one inch above center. So that needs to be an eighth inch tiller. So find the end of the fade out. Come in here. Six and a 16th and 14. That sunlight is messing with me. 14. There's five and seven eighths. So we have a 316 tiller, which they're actually. What is some bowyers that do 3:16 little on the high side. It probably shoots great at 3:16. So I wouldn't say it's out of tiller. Yeah, Chris was reminding me he wants to shoot three under. Which for three under shooter. Yeah, you could probably say it's out of tiller for three under shooter. Three under shooter should be about out of 16. If you want to really micromanage it. About a sixteenth of an inch. I'll probably set it at an eighth because you will never notice any. Any difference between three under and split at an eighth of an inch. Let's go ahead and quick shoot this bow. Okay. Alrighty. I raised the brace height a little bit. Oh, okay. Yeah, that's. That's not gonna work. I was shooting the Houdini. I was tuning a Houdini last night and I heard something. That's too bad. That's one of my favorites. So 50 at 27. My draw is 29. I'm gonna guess you're probably looking at about a 55, 56 pounds for my draw. Okay. I'm. One thing I noticed already that I'm not particularly fond of is there's no protection for your hand right here. Guys that don't have a lot of thumb muscle or something would be fine. But your hand can go up into that arrow flight Fairly easily. Unfortunately, there's not much I can do for that if there's just no material left there to work with. It feels good. You know what, it's 55, 60 pounds and honestly it's pretty smooth. It doesn't feel. It really doesn't feel that heavy. So that tells me he's got a good limb profile, design. That's a good bow. It's a very good shooting bow. There's no silencers on the string, but it's not really that loud. Okay, there I missed. I wasn't focusing. Okay, let's shoot it. Let's get a full draw. Yeah, it's. It's impressive. There's no question it's impressive performance. So good. Good job, Don Assenheimer. Let's shoot a heavy arrow and see what the cast is on this bow. That's really where the rubber meets the road. Pretty good. You can see it noticeably slowed down, but still pretty good cast. Alright, one more shot now because I did notice the top limb was a little off when you shoot it. We'll see how much it self corrected and it didn't. So we do need to straighten that. Not a big issue. It all be piece of cake. Actually. The bottom limb now shows a little twist too. So both of them, that's the. That's what tells the real truth. After you shoot it, if there's any twist, not, not a lot of twists, we'll correct that.

Okay, so back over here at the.

Vise I'm going to.

It's important to follow the steps and it's super important for me to follow my steps. That's how I get accurate. The first thing we'll do is we'll.

Strip off.

The rug rest and side.

Plate.

Get off the junk behind it. This is the fastest way to do that. My knife's pretty sharp. Get most of it off and then we'll take lacquer thinner and get the last bit off. Because when we sand this, if you don't do that, you'll gum up your paper real quick with the adhesive backing that's on this side plate and rug rest.

Next thing I want to check, you can see that these here benzels are different than what I have. They're kind of unique to their cells. I don't see a lot like this. So we need to preserve that. So what we need to do now is see if my bolts will fit that and if so, we'll use my bolts for the build so I don't damage those. If not, then I will show you How I protect those. So it looks like we've got a little poly washer and then the brass Benzel, we're gonna polish that up so it's real pretty. And that's a shorty. Short bolt. That might be only an inch. That would be an inch and a quarter bolt. Okay. So for the takedown configuration, I can see he's got a collared receiver or that kind of comes. I don't know if that's the right word for it, but. So that's different from what I use. But I think it will fit my hardware, which is what we're after. So what we want to check now is if I can use my bolts and then we don't have to worry about damaging his. So. So we'll grab one of these and one of these, and it does. So we are golden. Good. So we'll go ahead, put these bolts in a package, label them with his name. You can see here the tips are nice. He did a good job on uniformity, evenness. The only thing that we're gonna make better, I don't care for especially is if you look here where it fades out, there's a ledge right there, and we're gonna feather that to where you can't feel that, make that real pretty, give it a nice little profile there. That's all I need. So I'll grab my inch and a quarter pneumatic sleeve sander. And I want just a little bit of play in there like that. I've got a perfectly smooth transition. I can't even feel where it starts. And that's going to be very practical for debris dust for finish flaking off. That's really what you want to do and how you want it done. So on the back side here or the belly side, I guess it would be all we want to do. It looks pretty good. We would just want to even up the string grooves and the way that we. And then we want to finish this so that we don't have to touch this again while we have it singled out here on this jig. So what I'm going to do first is just quickly lightly sand over this and that'll do two things that'll get any of the debris or any junk off of it, but it'll also show me because it'll highlight what's uneven and what I need to correct.

Now I'm getting the random orbit twirl marks out before I check it.

So now because I have that highlighted, the string groove and the two side string grooves, it can really show you how uneven it is. So it's not too bad. But we'll go ahead and correct. The string groove is a little uneven. These are just slightly uneven. So to do a professional job, we'll go ahead and correct that. Also. This is a little bit too short. It's at the perfect spot. Supposed to be two and a quarter down, but it's not quite long enough. It should be about another quarter inch or even a bit longer to fully catch that string. So while we lengthen it, we'll also straighten it because it was not straight. And we want to keep that exactly in the middle and it's not quite where it is because when we tune the bow, we want to tune the limb to the exact center of that string groove and that will keep our limb straight. So the whole thing actually needs to come over this way. We're not going to go all the way. It needs to because it will be a massive string groove. We're basically just not make sure we don't carve on that side and make the problem worse. Now I'm going to even up.

The side grooves here. And for that I'm going to get.

A rat tail file, but a thin rat tail file and I'll come in here. Also, these here are not really pointed correctly. They are not doing a very good job of guiding the string because they're basically pointed like that when they need to be opened up a little bit. Because the natural fall of the string loop is going to be a little bit wider than the way that these were pointed. So we'll correct that.

Here. Again, I can't go as much as I would on my bows because there's already a profile established. Okay, so about got it. And you know, it was a little bit hindered by the shape that was already there, but I opened it up a lot more than it was. Okay, so we'll finish it off with 220 and then you'll be able to see hopefully the evenness that we added to the whole belly side of the tip.

Originally they were like pointed like that way. So you can see I opened them up a little but extended the string groove and I did not deepen it because you can see it's already through the glass there. I just extended it, opened it a little bit and centered it. So I moved it this way. So that's perfectly done. Belly string groove tip. Alright, so here's the other tip. I didn't show it on that one, but I can show it on this one. And you can see these string Grooves, they're like pointing. Like if you would put a. Let me grab a file here. Like if you lay a string that. That is pointing that way clear over there. Well, no string loop drapes off of a limb on that angle. You're more like, you know, coming off of there like this. But we can't even open them up that far because if we did, we would have a huge groove here. So what I, what I, what I do and what I did on the other one is just open it a little bit and sort of manipulate it to more of a natural angle for the string. Because once again, you can see where it's pointing. It's pointing clear off of here. Ok. So we've done both belly sides of the tips. I went ahead and did the top side. Didn't film that. I'll show the last one here. And now we're ready to do. Sometimes I call it the top of the tip. So essentially it's the back of the bow. But we're going to go ahead and clean this up. There's not much to do here, so for that we just check and make sure everything's in line, make sure these are the same. They are. I want to clean this up just a little bit. It's not perfectly symmetrical. So we'll grab some 220. And like I always say, the better job you do on the step you're currently working on, of course, the easier the next step is and just keep on making work flow like that. So first thing you want to do is come around here and crisp up this string groove and make sure that's real pretty, no burrs. You don't want your string to be cut, so you want to make no burrs, but also you want it to look pretty. Okay.

And that is done. Now we can just see what it.

Looks like real quick. Put a little lacquer thinner in here. Whoosh.

That's a pretty tipping you can see once again here. It's just seamless, the transition. You can't even feel it. And there's no debris. Nothing can get caught on there. The finish can't flake away from there.

That's how you want to do your tips. Okay, tips are done. Okay, so over here, the first step we're going to do is we're going to go ahead and mate this down right here. And we could go ahead and keep this same look. We don't want to take away from the look of the original bow, but we'll just make this a smooth transition. And here again, that's important because, you know, you could hook this on anything in the woods or something. Or if you're stocking, you know, potentially you could hook it on and maybe chip the bow back or something. But if you, if you're flush with that limb pad, don't matter what, you could drag this through brush or branches and nothing can hook on that ledge. So. So for this it's too tight of a radius for the big side. I can do it on this side, but we'll have to use the little side for the other over here. Now we're going to go ahead and flush these up and then we want to taper it into the limb. We don't want to dig a hole here. Have that look bad. So we'll start here. For this I'm going to use the flat spot of the limb here. Down here. That's going to be my guide. You can see it's taking it off more on the riser than the lamp. Okay, that looks really good. I'm happy with that. Got a nice. We're going to retain that same shape that was on there. So the limbs are mated to the riser now. So we are done with this step. I'm done with the file work. I got my 120 grit. We're going to take out this radius here, clean this up. And while we're taking all the scratches, you know, we're constantly shaping, constantly profiling, watching every everywhere to make sure it all comes together. And also, you know, I want to sand back here because I don't want to dig a hole here. That's very noticeable if you end up digging a hole there. So I have to send. Just fade it back in. I also want to keep this here in line basically with the imaginary straight line of the bow. 90 degrees off that. That's just the style this one is on not every bow. Would you do that? But this one needs that. Now I want to take my sandpaper, get a little wider of a radius on this rubber sanding block. And we're going to sand the inside corner of that shelf and side plate there.

Just right in here. But I've almost got this. I'm trying to be mindful. I don't want to take too much shelf material off because we don't have a lot to begin with. And the more we take off, the more we just go right down into that throat of the grip and we lose more and more material to protect the archers hand, which I'm basically taking nothing off here. You see some dust coming up but.

It'S okay in my square. I am square. That step is done. Last step, very last step. Random orbit. Bring the two sanded areas together. This sanded area and this. And the shelf and side plate is done. Now, this would usually be the part if the bow is not carved after the shelf and side plate is done, that I would carve the riser, the grip. But since it's all carved, I don't think we're gonna change that. That's just the style of the Assenheimer. And it's nice. It feels good. You know, if I had specific instructions to change the grip, I would, but I don't, so I'm gonna leave it just as is. Feels good. Feels nice. And we've already mated the limb, so the next step is to clean off the 40 grit scratches with the pneumatic sleeve over here. Okay. So I went ahead and cleaned up these here on my pneumatic sleeve sender here. Just cleaned off the 40 grit marks, cleaned up this, and we're ready to tune it. So I've went ahead and strung it up. He wants it 40 at 28. It's currently 50 at 28. So we're going to drop it 13 pounds. Now it looks like there's probably. There's not a huge amount of glass. We may not be able to get it that low. It looks like there might be between 35 and 40,000ths of glass left. We do have some width to work with, and the bow is a little bit twisted, so we can go ahead and manipulate that to our advantage. We may not be able to reduce this thing £13. So it's pulling off this way. So we're going to remove from here. When I look down here also, I can see there's a little bit of ripple in the edge. Not bad at all. But we'll. We'll be able to go ahead and straighten that also while we take this weight off. So the other thing that does for us is as we clean that up, it can tell us, give us a more accurate measurement of how much flash we actually have, because that edge is rolled a little bit until it looks like you have less flash than you do. Okay, that almost straightened it perfectly. I'm going to take a little bit more because I want to straighten this side a little bit. Actually, let's do this side first. Okay, good. Now that's going to have caused it to twist the other way again, which it did. Now we'll go ahead and take some more off it. Really, really close this boat really hard. To see. Can't hardly see this, folks, for some reason. Okay, go ahead and take some off of this side. Good. That really moved it over for us. And that gives us more room to come off this side. Now that's perfectly straight. Now when it's so straight, now you're struggling seeing how straight it is. You know, you got it. So now what we did, when you do it, when you do a full rework on these bows, there is so much stuff that gets corrected that most. Most guys don't even realize. Just a lot of small stuff that comes out so much better than it was. For instance, like the edges of a recurve limb. I wish I could. I should have accurately filmed that. But, you know, the edges of both. All four sides of these were really ripply. But by. By running them on my flat center like that, you know, it acts like a gigantic planer. And it just makes them straight, straightens them up really beautifully. And then you have a nice straight limb again. Okay, so now this is what I wanted to see. So now since we did that, you can see how much glass we have. We have a lot of glass, actually. When I took that rolled edge off, it shows you how much filled glass there is. And so that is good news for us. So now I'm pretty confident we can get the weight off. We just don't want to go too far. That's why it's important to do that step first, because that tells us how much material we have to work with. Okay, so it didn't take much off. It never really does on that step. We got £2 off, down from. From 53 down to 51, which I'll take it. And so I just want to look at the tiller real quick. So the tiller is close to even. So I'm not even going to worry about the tiller right now. I'm going to. You want to take glass off the belly if at all possible. When you're reducing the bow, that should be primarily where you take it, because the belly glass is under compression when you draw it. So when you remove that glass, you essentially, you smooth the bow up. But not only that, weight comes off faster when you remove glass from the belly. And the faster we can do that, the better. The more you dink around on a weight reduction, the more you mess around trying to get the weight off, the more chance for mistake to happen. And also the more stuff does just naturally happen and make. Make the limb not turn out as high quality as if you. If you concisely and Pointedly take that weight off in several good, important steps. The whole limb, the whole bow, everything turns out better than if you just muddle around and work it and work it and work it. Sometimes you have to do that. If you want to take. If a huge amount of weight comes off and you want to be careful, well, then you. You've got to just mess around with it for an hour and carefully take it from every possible place to get it down to your desired draw weight. I recently took 27 pounds off of a hybrid longbow. I didn't think I could do it, but I just took my time and I just carefully. Just kept manipulating it. And when I was all said and done, I said I was surprised they actually could have even taken more off. But that's a rare occurrence. We want this one real tight and this one not as much. And we're set. So now we still have to take off £11. So we're going to go ahead and probably take. Let's see how much glass we've got. Got a nice amount of glass. I would say between 45 and 50,000ths. So we're going to try to go with 10 strokes on the 120. So we're going to square it up carefully. And as we take strokes off, we'll continue to extend it further and further, further and further. And that way we don't dig a hole in the limb. 1, 3, 4, 5. I do 5, and then I check it and see if I need to put more pressure, if I need to put more pressure on which whichever side. And it looks like it's even. So I need to just keep doing what I'm doing. Six, seven, eight, nine, and ten. Okay, that's maximum. I don't want to go any further than that. Now we'll clean off the scratches. 1, 2, 3, 5. None. What I'm doing here is I don't want to have to come back. The remaining. I know that I've maximized how much I'm taking off here. I don't. Because I can tell just by the way the glass looks that I don't want to take any more off here. So now I'm just cleaning off the scratches with 180, because I'm not going to touch this again. As far as removing weight, bang on 45 pounds. So that's what I was hoping for. So I managed to get £6 off that. So we're down in our wheelhouse now. There's no question we're going to be able to reduce it to 40 because we have that back glass that's completely untouched, yet also we have the edges of the limb that we have to round over. Yet that in itself, if done correctly, will. We can get £2 off of that. We want to stay about with bacote. It's different for every limb wood. How much you got to leave on to do the final edge sanding? Over at the vise with bacoti, we want about a half pound. If it was bamboo, I would leave a full pound on because the edge sanding would take a pound off. With bacoti, it just doesn't come off as good like I was talking about earlier on edge setting. So I want it at this stage. I want to be 40 and a half pounds when I go to Edge. Send. Seven and an eight. Oh, my stars.

I. It's almost perfectly tillered, but it is.

Positive on the top limb, which what I expected. I only need like a sixteenth of an inch, and it's tillered perfectly. So I'm not even gonna worry about the tiller right now. I'm gonna go ahead and take more material off, but this time I'm not gonna take 10 strokes off. I'm gonna probably go. Actually, I'm just gonna go five. Okay, now, I got to be really careful here because I do not want to run these pneumatics into this decorative overlay. I would toast this thing in an instant, square it up and go. I gotta stop before that tip tube. Two, three. This is pretty touchy. So three, four, and five. And I bumped it. I bumped that tip just tiny bit. Not a big deal. I just got to remember I did it so I can clean it up later. Looks really good. Let's go ahead and give it a flex. Check the straightness real quick. Perfectly straight on the bottom limb. Perfectly straight on the top limb. All right, let's go ahead and see what. How much we took off, so. Oh, no, no, no, no, no. I gotta clean the scratches. Actually. Yes. I'm not going to clean the scratches off yet because I might need to take more off that surface. So I was at 45, so I'm kind of hoping I'm gonna just venture a guess. I hope I took between two and three pounds.

Up.

42 and a half pounds. Took two and a half pounds off. That is absolutely perfect. Now I'm not going to take any more off that surface because I don't need to. I don't. I say that I don't need to. I don't think I will. But now I'm going to go Ahead. I might have to actually yet think about this. Yes, I'm going to take more off because I don't want to have to remove it all on the edge because now we're at 6 and 15, so we're out of tiller a little bit. I'm going to move the tiller back in and that'll take some weight off. Sometimes you can take the remaining wet weight off to just by setting the tiller, which is really nice. So there's the three things that you. When you're tuning the bow, there's the three things, Tiller, straightness and weight. And once you get good at that, you can manipulate all three things at the same time. Sometimes with one step or for sure, usually two. But once you get the bow straight after that, if you're really careful, careful, you don't. You basically hardly have to worry about that one again. Oh, man, this is. This is just going gorgeously, stunningly. What do the Brits say? I don't know what they say. Swimmingly or. I don't know, 41 and a half. Man, we're so close. So what we're going to do is we're going to aggressively clean the scratches off, which should drop us close to a one more pound. We gotta leave enough room for our edge sanding 3, 4 and 5. Okay, let's. Everything has to come together at this last little bit. It has to, or you have failed the tune so little over 7 and 16, maybe. So now we're just under 7 and 3. So we need a little bit more positive tiller. So we'll go ahead and get that. But we might say our limb got out of. Straighten us just a little bit. It's important now just to. Just to quickly glance at that because if it did, we can change that tiller by taking off a. Whichever side it needs to be taken off of, which will help us. For some reason, this top limb on this bow is so hard to see. I don't know why. Okay, so. So it actually could use a little bit off that side. So that's why you look at it. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to come in here like this. Now, if you're doing something like this, I would not recommend this for a beginner because you have to. You have to have one steady, concise movement for sure on it. When the bow is strung, if you stop, you're digging a hole. It's over. It's game over. So, okay, it's perfectly tillered. Absolutely perfect. At an Eighth inch. Let's go ahead and check the weight. All right, so we're up 41 pounds. That is perfect because like I said with Makoto, you want about a half pound off, but we have to do one more step here. So with that step plus the final edge sanding, it's gonna. It should. Everything should fall into alignment and it should drop in dead on 40 at 28. Okay. This is pneumatic edge sanding. It's quite an important step. I've tried skipping it, I've tried a lot of variations. I've tried to replace it, but I just can't. What it does is it takes out the deeper scratches that come from tuning it. And it takes them out to where when you run your. Your concise, counted strokes of sandpaper over the edges for the final edge sand, it takes it down low enough that that final step takes all the scratches out and you're done. You don't have to worry about spraying finish coat on it. And then, oh, whoops, I got a deep scratch in there. That doesn't happen because if you implement this step, but if you leave it out, invariably you'll find a scratch. So here again, we're going to cut, count the strokes. It's gonna be six per side. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. You got two flat, two slowly rot. Slowly angling, two slowly angling to get all sides. 1, 2. And now I'm not putting much pressure on here because I don't want to drop the weight button. If I needed to take more weight off, I'd really bear down and you could take three pounds off. Okay, so let's see what we did here. Oh, yeah. So it's just a hair over 40 and a half. Absolutely perfect. And the bow is tuned straight. Okay, so that's showing not straight. But I think it's that crazy string groove. All right, we'll shoot it. That's what we'll do. Let's shoot it right now. Alright. Whoo.

That shoots.

Good man. Why is this top limb so hard to see? Oh, that's perfectly straight. So that's where the rubber meets the road. After you've retillered, retuned it, you must shoot a reworked bow or any bow, but it's. You can think, oh, it's straight. But until that, you know where the string lies. After the string stroke, you don't know if it's truly straight or not. So also you can see here, that's where the high point was when I started on it and I had to leave it there. Because as you can see, if I would have taken this down, we would have lost more. And there's already nothing there, hardly to protect your hand. So I left the high point where it is, but I just highlighted it and made it more pronounced. So that arrow for sure finds the high point instead of being shooting from different locations. And that will make a difference. He'll be able to notice that actually the customer has not even. He's never even put his hands on this bow yet. He bought it from another individual and that guy Drop shipped it to me. Oh, wow. I'm not left handed, but Donald Assenheimer can build a bow, I'll tell you that. This thing shoots now. He knew what he was doing.

That was a terrible shot, but that was me.

Let's put a super heavy arrow on here and see what happens. Oh, that's nice. Also, you can look at the, where the arrow is rubbing and you can see those little scuff marks. That's the high point on this one. So ideally in a bow, you really don't want it there. You kind of want it back here above the webbing of your hand. But like I said, we didn't have.

We just have to work with what we're given here. So this arrow here now would be about the right weight, grains per pound.

What this bow needs. So let's see the speed on this one. Yeah, it's a good bow. Let's see here. He's got his core. That's a bamboo core. And that's a, that's a. That's a parallel. There's no taper on that. He's got his tapers on the bacode. It looks like. You know what? This may be an untapered limb. I think this limb is untapered. If I measure it here, it's about an eighth of an inch. If it's tapered, it's very slight. I'm kind of thinking it's an untapered limb, which I always say. Anyway, the performance of the bow is totally in the profile shape over, you know, the species of wood or the tapers. You can manipulate it, sure, you can manipulate the performance. But if you have a bad, poorly designed limb profile, there's nothing you can do with species or tapers or anything to make it perform good. It just never will. This is a good profile. He did well for this bow. That was a flu.

Flu arrow. Last arrow. I got to keep moving.

Okay. That's not the last arrow because I missed the target. So we can't Quit on that. That's not how things work. That's the good last arrow center of the target. Okay. So I just wanted to catch you up here. I've got this all. Send it up. It's beautiful. This is currently ready for the finish room almost. And then on the limbs, these are also ready for the finish room. This one is. I wanted to show how I do these kind of overlays. These are a lot harder to do than the kind that are faded in. So I've already done this limb. So you can see it's all been sanded. It's all pretty. And there's a little. If you look right here, you can kind of see a little line of dust. But I'll show you what it'll look like when finish hits that boom, gone perfect. So I really hate this type of overlay. Trying to work around it. This type of overlay is really pretty on a bow, though, so it's a necessary evil, because leaving it like this on some bows really adds to it. And so you just got to learn to go around them if you're. You're reworking them. So I'm going to show you how to do that on one of these. It's really quite simple. I left one undone so I could show that process. So we're going to random orbit this. There's a heavy, thick finish on here, plus wax. I think he waxed that limp pad. If you were to do this on your own, you just have to have really steady hands to be real careful, because the last thing you want to do is dig anything out here where it mounts to the bow. But that being said, it's really quite easy. It's not that big of a danger, so. And the thing is, when you're running a random orbit, never run it past on an edge like this. So, for instance, if you would run it like that, big trouble, you're instantly going to take that edge off. So you just want to come up to it, up to it. Never run past same thing on this side if you don't want to change that. And also, same thing with the edges. So wherever the. The hot, the pressure point is that I have my random orbit on. I would not want to come over here like this. I'm going to gouge that out. So I just do the center. I'm being conscious of doing the center, and I just let the little bit of pressure on the outside of the pressure point. Finish the sanding up. And that way I'll show you with a. We'll put A square on it and see how square we did it after we're done here. And I don't know if you can see that on the camera, but that is perfect. It's completely flat. And so if you. If I take it and I tilt it. So right here. Okay. If I do this, I've got just a little high spot right here. And I can see that. I can see there's just a little bit of wax or something left there because I was real careful. So I can take that down real quick. And that's how you can. If you're doing your own and you do the limb pads on the limbs, you can just keep working at it. Now if you're not that good with a random orbit, I'll show you a little trick here. Take you a good straight block of hardwood or phenolic and wrap it with your paper and use it. Get it real tight on there and then just use it as a sort of like a. Well, we'll just do it on this one so I can show you how good it works. And I'll use 120 paper. And essentially you're just sort of using it like a. What's the word I'm looking for? Like a joiner. A joiner or a planer. And it will just automatically create that nice straight surface you're looking for. So you don't interrupt. Okay. So you could see I'll pull that real tight and then it's straight. It's hard. So any high spots, it's naturally going to take those off, but it's not going to dip down into the low spots. So. And it's super easy. And I could do this, you know, even if a guy didn't have a random orbit, you could have started this way. I just. I know my tools and I know the random orbit is faster than this. But let's check the straightness now. So that's really, really good now. I mean, it's absolutely perfect. And then I'm just gonna come up to here and I'm gonna stay off of that edge. I'm gonna get as close as I can really carefully. And being mindful, because if I put too much pressure here, it's instantly gonna dig a hole when I do this. I am. It's a feather. Feather light and see how it's starting to sand. So right off you can see that was a high spot, that was a low spot. You can see the differences. And that's all I'm going to do. So I've brought that back really, really gently. And that's all perfectly straight now. And unfortunately there's nothing you can do but just to use hand tools to get in there. But I will show you one little trick. What I've taken here is you can pick these up from Harbor Freight. And all they are is the woodturner set of tools. And they're pure, basically pure junk. If you're, if you work with a lathe, however, it's plenty good. I can take these little tools and I got a whole set of them, all different shapes, and I can put an edge on them how I want them. And you can see if you can see that on camera, but you can see how I've got that edge on that one just slightly tapered up. That gives me options. I can use this because this is a little proud. It's a little proud of this whole thing. It's not a completely flat square 90 chisel. I did it on purpose. So now I can use this and get right in here and just get that little edge. And you can see it peeling back. That is finish, that is wax. And I'm just straightening that and I can straighten that perfect and make that real crispy right where that overlay meets that limb. A sharp piece of 220. And I'll just run that in there and take out any marks I may have put in with that little tool. But I've went now I've crisped up that edge. Now you can carefully, careful when I say this super carefully. You can run this way, but only a little bit because you can dig a hole so fast it'll make your head spin. We're going to put lacquer thinner on it after I'm done and you'll see how perfect it's going to look. These are the things that are absolutely. This is the reason that I charge, you know, $350 even for just the weight reduction. Because whenever I do a rework in my shop, I want that thing leaving my shop looking better than it was when the customer bought it new. So I put a lot of love into these bows. So you can see they're nothing special. And some of these, some of these you can't hardly use. But, but you can get a lot of different shapes out of these little guys. And like this one here, it's got a concave in it. I mean, you can do some cool stuff and they're so cheap that it's a no brainer. You just buy them and then you just grind whatever shape you're needing into the ends of these things. I mean, look at that. You can really get some different tools that'll really get in there. Nice. And I could think. I think it's 10 or 15 bucks from harbor freight for the whole set. That. But really, really good to use for reworking bows.

Yeah. See, I mean, it looks absolutely perfect. You can't see. It just.

It looks. It looks perfect. So this is my baby. This is Ashes. She is my house cat. She sleeps by my bed every night, all night long. I got a little bed made for her on my nightstand, and a lot of times she sleeps there. But a lot of times, like last night, she was on my pillow all night by my head. Crazy thing is, I've hated house cats my whole life. I never thought I would have one. And I haven't had her for quite a year. I absolutely love her. I mean, I love her as much as the dogs. I really do. She's very independent. She's a queen. We think she's a. What did we say? Russian forest cat. Norwegian forest cat. But now she's a southwestern Kansas cornfield cat. So I got a little diamond chamfer bit here. Beveling bit. You can get stones. I actually sell the stone ones. The stones work really good. Just depends on what your. What you're cutting into. But the diamond one works really good, too. And then you just want to. When you. Of course, when you sand on these limbs, you'll sharpen the edge of this. Well, you don't want to leave that sharp, because that could catch on stuff and shear back. So this one here, I already beveled it. I'll show you what it looks like up close. You just bevel that after you're completely done sanding. Because any feather sanding you do, of course, will sharpen that edge back up. You just bevel that out. And then the pins and the bolt can't catch on that and blow pieces back off. Your overlay or your lint glass, it's especially important if you don't have overlays. And it's just glass has to be beveled because that can blow that glass off if it catches on the bolt or the pins. So you just set it in here, and you want to make that even. And you can just look at it. So I can tell this side, it's a little bit more. So I'll put a little pressure on the other side. Every little detail matters if you want to turn out professional work. Okay, so I've been communicating with the customer here. And these are quick Equiver holes, they're inch and 516 apart. You can use them for some other stuff, but mainly there's a few guys out there that use the Quick Equiver, but it's kind of went obsolete. Very few guys use it anymore because there's so many amazing quivers to choose from. So a lot of times I end up plugging these holes. I didn't know if the customer wanted that on this one, but I contacted him this today and he said after I had taken him out, he said he would, he wanted me to put the quarter 20 quiver inserts on the offside here and to just go ahead and plug these with bacoti dowels. So what I'm going to do now, I'm going to plug these, but I'm going to show you real quickly how to make hardwood or exotic wood dowels. And I'm going to show you how to do it with a. Let me grab it here. Multiple ways to do it. I'm going to show you how to do it with this little guy here that I got off Amazon for $25. And this thing is not well designed at all. And I'm going to show you why. But I'm just going to show you how it does do. It does do the job. And if you need a dowel, you can make it work. And we need a quarter inch dowel. Those holes are quarter inches, but we got to start bigger, of course. And so what we're going to start with is we're going to kind of work our way down because that's the best way to do it on here. This one here, it only goes to 5:16. That's not a problem at all. I'll show you how we can get perfect quarter inch dowels, but we're going to start with cutting us some blocks of, let's see, probably 38 inch bacoti. So here I've got 338-38-inch square little blocks here, come from this side. Hold it as steady as you can. Not bad, not bad. That's really pretty good. Now we will drop down to our 5:16. So the question is, is it worth it to buy one of these? I would say yes, even though it's severely flawed. If you need to make a dowel for these kind of projects, you can get yourself a nice dowel. Actually, with enough effort put into it and knowing the quirks of this little contraption, you can actually get yourself a Dell. But say you wanted to build a bunch of dowels, don't even think about it. Almost there. But while you're doing this, you do have to be pretty careful because you don't want to go undersized. Okay, that's going to feed. Now I've got to reverse this drill though, because I have to come into the blade. So here we go. Hold it straight. Okay. Let's see if we got any usable 5 16. I could do a better job than that. Look at that. That's really close. 5 16, remember, is 3125. That's really close. So. But it started wobbling at the end and it blew that out. Let's try one more time. I think we can do better. Now. I got me some 120 paper here. Now I'm gonna carefully taper this down and I can look in here. When I'm doing this, I can kind of see kind of like a lathe. Take your time with it. Taper it down. Check it. Too big. You know, I could really bear down on this and have it down to size quickly, but I wouldn't have an even smooth taper and then I would have to build another one. Okay, Just getting into there now. Alright. Able to slip in about a sixteenth of an inch. Perfect. When you hammer that in there, that's gonna go right in. So now what I'll do, I'm gonna show you what to do on your bed saw. Okay. So this is just a real simple dumb thing. Just take you a piece of cardboard and that way you can. Your dowel is not gonna go down the hole. That's just simple, but makes a difference. So now I'm just gonna nip this off about right here. Now I had a hold of it so it wouldn't have went down, but you know, it helps. Nice and sturdy. Okay, now we'll go ahead and put this in with thick ca. You could use medium ca. You don't want to use thin ca. It would dry too quick and you would not get a good bond. For that matter, you could also use wood glue. Wood glue would work fantastic. Something like this. I want this to dry pretty fast because I want to finish this bow. So I'm gonna go ahead and use thick ca or basically thick super glue. You could use the gel super glue from a hardware store. And for this here, you want to look in that hole, make sure there's no debris in there. Yeah. Okay. So this is the best grain that I could come up with. The other thing that by using the. The thick ca gives me a little more time to twist those dowels. So the grain Lines up. Now this is. This one's going to go. Now this is really important. Don't put your glue on the dowel because you want the glue in the hole. Put it on the inside edge there. That. And then run that around in there. Coat that nice and good. Put your dowel in. Line it up to where the grain is as perfect as you can get it. That looks close. Pop it down. That is. That dowel will never come out. In fact, I regularly use this method if I want to say. I would like to put quiver inserts here, but I want a bigger or smaller one. You can use this method to glue in a collar and then re drill that hole to the size of hole you need. If this hole was the wrong size and it would be in there tight enough that it would hold threads. I do it all the time and I've never had one fail. Okay, real good. Exactly where I want them. Now I'll go ahead and accelerate that glue so I can keep working. Now, I don't have a $500 sort of these Japanese woodworker pole saw or whatever, but I do have a $15 Dewalt that the dogs chewed on. It works good. You just don't want to get on that limb pad there. I could come at. Nope, I can't. So I just nip these off. Watching where the edge of that saw is going. This is fun and relaxing. I love this part of the Dells. That's probably my favorite part right there of building Dells. And just do this one here. Oh, yeah, that's. That hits the spot right there. So there you have those. Now before I will send those smooth, blow them off. See, there's a little bit of glue squeezed out there. We'll go ahead and hit that with accelerator. So we'll just. We'll just shear this off. So I could just sand these down with a random orbit. But if you have any protrusion like this and you do that, you run the risk of making a little bubble because the random orbit will sand more around here and around here, and it'll take longer to sand here, and you won't get a completely flat finish. So if I just flush it up with a chisel, really, really close. This isn't a very sharp chisel, but it's working. If I get that really close, then when I hit that with sandpaper, it'll just be done in an instant. Thin ca will seal and coat the exterior of that Dell. Not only will it seal it from moisture, but it will also glue it in even further. And for this, you know, I just put it on and let her soak down in. Make sure a nice big puddle and just let it just eat it. Just drink it up. Drink that glue in. Okay. I mean, you absolutely cannot feel those. You can see them, but you can't even feel them.

I'm just removing the little swirls that random orbit tenders put in. And then because this was all done.

I'll just touch this up. Just the edges that I sharpened a bit. There you have it. As you can see, the grain is not an exact match, but man, it's actually. It's got its own character. Actually. It's actually pretty just by itself. Even though you can tell there was holes there at one time, you cannot even fill them. So that's how you do it. It's done, it's finished. We'll show it. I'm going to show it to you here after I get done spraying it and I'll show spraying it here. And then that's going to be it for this Dawn Assenheimer bow. Beautiful, beautiful three piece recurve. 40 pounds at 28 inches. 62 inch AMO. Thanks for watching. Look really nice when they're crazed. You can't see that.