Modernizing a Vintage Bow | Stemmler Tartar

What we have here is Stemmler archery. Tar tar or tartar? I'm not sure how you say that. A friend of mine gave this to me, and we thought it'd be a cool project to soup this thing up. I imagine it was a production line bow. They were probably kicked out in mass production. The glass on it, what they would do is they would press rigid sheets and then they would just rip strips off of them. And I believe that's the construction of this. Structurally, it looks to be in pretty good shape. The grip on it is terrible. Your palm runs into this. There's a sharp point here. It's a 60 inch AMO. There's a serial number, 35 pounds. Let's go string it up and see how close to weight it is before we start on it. You can see right off there's a pretty significant twist in it. Let's go ahead and take a look at the weight on this thing. It's a little bit more, which is good because that way it gives me some room if I want to hit 35. Take the twist out. It looks like it's sitting about, oh, just under 37 pounds. The twist is pretty significant. Let me manually twist that, see if I can take a little bit of that out. That is a significant twist in that thing. Gonna have to work on that. Let's go shoot it once. This arrow is probably a little stiff spine for it. Not bad, not bad. No hand shock, little vibration, but actually shot pretty straight. Let's see what we can make this thing into. The limb profile looks pretty good. It's not. That's not too bad. I was going to put a string groove in it, but it doesn't even contact the limb. Let's unstring it and get to work. All right, let's go over to the vise. First thing we're going to do is take this elevated rest off. That came off nice and easy. The bow looks to be made of. It's got a maple core. This is black walnut riser. Dark, dark green glass on the limbs. We're going to reinforce this, but we don't want to take too much glass off of here. So what I'm going to do is put my hand on there like that because I want enough for my full grip in there. This is a symmetrical drawing bow. I have an asymmetrical one where it's tapered. Set it there. Let's give it just a little bit more arc. Yeah, that's going to be about right. And then I'm going to scribe this with my pen a little bit wider. That looks good. That's going to give me enough so I can build that handle back up. All right, let's take it over to the bandsaw. Would not recommend shooting this right now. Not, not, not a good idea. All right, that's perfect. We want to get that nice and smooth. So let's do the other side. Let's go get us some maple. That might do it. Perfect. This is a piece of curly maple. Got a little bit of bird's eye in it. Now for this I'm gonna get a sharp pencil because I want this line real tight. That'll work. Bandsaw time. Let's do like maple and walnut. Yeah, you want to get those ready. So this is gonna be the waist area. Make sure I don't cut. Put the blade on the wrong side. So we're going to find where this fits the best. Looks like right there. Then we're going to make our leg our indexing lines. Maybe film him doing some laminations. This part of the process is insanely Red Bull breakfast with camp. It's all right. Let's go to the glue table. Well, here we are waiting on the long haired guy. Got my stuff sanded, hand fitted it. Hi, Nick. What's he doing? You got my lamb? Oh, he's got him. Yeah, he already had them done. All right, we gotta cut these to size. Love the smell of walnut. Always do a mock glue up, cuz that's just smart. I want my maple against the dark wood and then my walnut where everything fits. So we're gonna, we're gonna do it with total boat epoxy. The total boat I have has a lower viscosity, gets stronger than smooth on, but it doesn't flex as much as smooth on so we can't use it in the limbs. Total boat has a tensile elongation of 7% where our smooth on is only 1%. The tensile elongation is the amount of adhesion that the epoxy actually has. And it dries. I did that when I was a little kid and I still love doing it. Put our roller on and it's a spin it too. And the bonus is is that little sticker will fly off at high speed so that you know that that does something for the guy.

Oh yeah.

This stuff is stiff when it's cold. That's two pumps. Six, we'll call that. Good one. All right, let's mix this up. You only have about 30 minutes open time with this stuff. All right, let's go. For it At Great Plains, we blew both surfaces of every piece.

All right, line our lines up. All right, now I'll wrap that.

See if we're still in line. C clamps are not all created equal. See the fine threads on here and the coarse threads here. Much better clamp. Looks like a pretty tight joint. Nick, my trusty right hand man, Nick these tips or any for me. We're going to go ahead and reinforce it with three laminations. Got it rough at first. You can see that was the finish. I went all the way through the finish. Come down to bare glass. Can't glue it on the finish.

Lay out our laminations.

This is our backer so we don't damage the bow. Kind of difficult when you got all these laminations. It's pretty slimy. These things are absolutely awesome. They're 2 inch fine thread pony clamps and they have a lot of power. So you can explode limb kits bent glass. They don't need to be super tight. Snug them up there pretty good because they have so much power. You think that you're not tightening them too tight. And then you over tighten them. They will actually crush the wood inside the core. If you're not careful on this bottom one. We want that clamp hanging over because that's has to be real tight where at least where it fades out into the limb. You don't want to add a lot of weight to these limb tips. This is a light bow. You'll slow your bow down and build in hand shock if you put too much. So this is going to be less than 3 16. I'll probably even grind it down to like an eighth of an inch or so. We're a little proud of that. Got our center pieces on with laminations in the middle. Perfectly fit. We've got our lens hips on in the oven. She goes. Should be ready in an hour. Oh, right behind the shoulder. That one was a little bit low, but I think it still would have killed it. It's high enough. It doesn't matter because when the arrows go where you want them to. But don't you know what the YouTube people say is that? Facebook warriors. Facebook warriors. Yeah. You can't hit anything the way you're shooting. Yep. All right, so this thing's cured up for us. We could pull it out of the oven. Glue is nice and hard. I got rubber on these jaws, so can't damage. You still have to be careful, though. All right, let's see how we did that. Looks real good. No damage on the glass. Good See, this one limb is really twisted. I see. Going to have to work that out of there. I can see why it's twisted. When they machined it, you can see that whoever machined this thing, they took off way too much along this side. This was shaved off. But then it dips in like that. Oh, that's bad. Yeah. But we're gonna make it work. Okay. Let's draw some lines on it, get it cleaned up. We need the same curve of what this bow is. It's now we'll nip out the chill. All right. Got it kind of roughed out. We're going to do the kick real quick. Pretty concerned about this limb twist on this thing. I gotta be really careful here because there's just not much glass on this bow. I'm gonna stop right there. That'll work. Let's see.

So we've.

We'll get the back of this tip shaped. They got these a little bit off originally. Try to correct it as much as we can. You know, you think you can buy these production line bows. You can get them off of Amazon or wherever, and you think, wow, this is an incredible bow for the money. But when you dig into them, you can find so many details that are wrong. Built wrong, overlooked, uneven. And yeah, it'll probably. You can probably get a deer with them. But also, a high quality bow can give you that edge that potentially could help you bag the big one. This one didn't even have no string relief coming back off the limb, which helps keep your limb in the same position every shot. You can see when they build it, they gouge it in right there. I'm not going to take that out. I would have to compromise the limb. The way this bow was built, initially, you would have wore strings out really quickly because there was a sharp edge that would have been biting into your string on every shot. We'll run 220 on it. See how far that string groove is in. See the difference between this one and this one? That is the reason it's twisted it because it was pulling so much more that way, and it devastated this limb. All right. Okay. Look at that tip. That's a gorgeous tip now. It's a beauty, beautiful, sleek tip that we rebuilt on this boat. Okay, we'll do that the other one really quickly. Right. That looks pretty good. Looks like a great plane's tip. Before I got too carried away with it, I wrote down the serial number, poundage, and length, because we're gonna send that off. I did work on the straightening just a little Bit. So I got it to where I'm plenty comfortable with shooting it and it'd be fine. Now we're just gonna give ourselves some landmarks to remove some of this material so it's a little faster. Wow, that old wood does not smell good. Wood is like a sponge, so it kind of absorbs its environment over time. A lot of people think that a finish will seal it completely, but unfortunately, that's not how wood works. By the way, this is my favorite hacksaw. If you want a hacksaw, it's only like 25 bucks. This Lenox is just an awesome hacksaw off. We're just gonna clean this up real pretty, and then we're going to go ahead and run this radius this just a little bit. Basically what we're doing here is we just want to relieve that. That opens up the sight window. But even more importantly, what it does is it removes the amount of contact that the arrow contacts have as it's going across the bow. See, that looks pretty good for roughing it. All right, we'll do the rest with file work so we can be more precise. Now we'll radius the shelf. You don't really necessarily want this radius perfectly centered. It doesn't hurt if you do. But if you have it a little bit back so that the high point is directly above the webbing of your hand, it actually makes for a more accurate bow. Grab this file here that my right hand man, Nick made me. A little handle for out of osage. Works really nice. Thanks for the handle on my file. Nick. You're a sugar bear.

He acts like that. That really, you know, he don't like that. But you know, I think deep down he. He like, he likes, he likes the little nicknames. So now I'm just radius in the inside corner where the shelf meets the side of the bow.

Anytime you leave an inside sharp edge on any woodworking project, I don't care if you're building a table birdhouse. You create a weak spot unless it's a joint that is glued together to be sharp. But if it's a static piece of wood and you leave an inside sharp angle, you create a place where the wood naturally will release moisture faster. It will crack there a lot sooner or fail there a lot sooner. And that's the reason that we radius this area on all of our bows. And of course, it looks so much better to radius this. I like the half round files. What that does is that relieves that top edge. So if I'm filing up in close, I Don't have to worry about that square edge grinding or nicking into the other piece that I don't want to cut into. Another important thing with a file is you've got to always file into glass. If I were to run that file like this, it would blow that glass right off. Relieve this radius just a bit more. Also, anytime you have grain structure or like Dymalux or Spectra ply, you can use that grain pattern, the layers of grain to be more precise and understand how deep you're going or what angle you're cutting on. And now I can come in from the other side because I'm not blowing glass off. I tried a little 1 inch Makita high speed sander for this and it does work. Man, I just can't get it as perfect as I can with a file. And there's just something about using a file that is just really satisfying. Even if you had a CNC machine after it came out of the cnc, you'd still have to use some hand tools of some sort to get it perfect. I've seen bows that were built with CNC machines where the craftsman didn't quite get the CNC lines out. Not a great look. Let's send her up real quick now. I always start with this little guy. Another really, really valuable tool. I got about five of these and on each one I have different radiuses. Grab some 120. Always use fresh paper because that's what we do. So we just want to get that inside radius real crisp and purdy. Main thing is I'm just getting the scratches out because on all of our shaping tools, our rough shaping, we use 40 grit paper. And as you can imagine, that leaves some incredibly deep scratches. Some 120 paper on a pneumatic drum. When you're building bows, you're constantly shaping. Not only are you descending it, but as you're building, you're shaping while you're sanding scratches out. This bow is going to be so happy with itself once it's done. We got to keep that backside of it off there because we already shaped that. So we're going to just. Just gonna sand right here Now I'm happy. Are you happy? He's happy. We're gonna have a little bit of a challenge because when they ground this, they put this so low, it really should be higher up. I guess we'll just see what happens. We'll see how it pans out when we're shaping it. Just start by radiusing the outside, the shell. When you're Doing a project like this and you're just winging it, it's a really good idea to step back and look at it every now and then so you don't really, really screw it up. First. I'm going to get me a center line on there for reference.

What's half of inch and five, eight.

Joss, Josh, whatever you're marking right now.

Okay, good.

You're right.

It is 13.

You got it. First try. If you look at where that center line is, you can see that on the new shelf area, I cut that past center. I don't want to go any further than that. On my bows, a lot of them are cut like on a center shot bow, they are cut a little further than that. But with this one, it's a little bit unknown how actually strong it is. I think it's strong enough, but I'm not going to go any more than that. I'm just giving myself some pretty landmarks. But this might get a little interesting because we got this mess right in here. But we're just working with what we got, so. Yeah. So for the kind of grip this is it really. It's. It's too wide here. So I didn't want to really cut through my laminations, but I'm gonna have to because it just doesn't feel right. Oh yeah, that feels really good. Now this is pretty redneck how I do this. This. It's extremely effective. It's just that it trashes that that area of the shop over there. Cuz instead of dust collector, I hate breathing that dust. And I don't like big shrouds around this because you can't get in there. So I blow the dust away. I've got 80 grit on here. That's nice and symmetrical. I really like it. We're not going to try to hit a weight at all. We're just going to set the tiller correctly. Actually feels pretty good already. Let's check the tiller. So it's got reverse tiller, which is no good. That means that the top limb is stiffer than the bottom limb. So we have to fix that. Now I could see there's still a little bit of twist in here. So I'm gonna use one of my straightening methods and take it off this side. That will change the tiller and the twist at the same time. That's about as much as I feel comfortable taking off that side. So we're still at a tiller. Actually we're even tiller now. I think I'm going to go ahead and Take it off. The face on the top limb actually would be the back of the bow, but the face of the glass. Okay. That's perfectly tillered, and it's straightened. It's still not perfectly straight, but. But it's plenty straight enough where I'd shoot this all day long. Never worry about it. I could get it straight, but in doing so, I would probably compromise the bow. And it's plenty good. So basically, it's tuned. Let's check the weight. It was marked £35, but it was a little heavier than that. So we're sitting about 34 pounds, which is perfectly fine. We weren't trying to hit a specific weight with this. We were just trying to retrofit it, make it look cool and shoot great. It's tuned and tillered. Let's go fling a couple arrows with it. I shoot every single bow that I build. I shoot six or eight arrows out of every single bow, because if something's gonna fail, the real test is shooting it. It's a good spine for it. Knock point. Looks. That shoots great. You know, I shot it before, and I didn't think it was too bad, but, man, once it's properly tuned and straightened, you can tell such a huge difference in the way it shoots. I'm gonna shoot some heavier arrows. It won't hurt it, but really, we're just making sure that it performs okay. Oh, yeah. That bow shoots nice now, and it feels great. Okay, we're ready for finish sanding, and then we're gonna spray it. I always check if my string is staying centered up on the tip, and you can see it is perfectly. That's a good indication if you got something wrong, that string will sit over there, you know, but if it. After the shot, if it stays centered up, you know, you got it. So generally on this step, I use 80 grit paper for what I'm fixing to do, but because we don't want to really go any lower on weight. And also, this has already had most of the big scratches taken out of it. We're going to use 180, but we have to. We have to go ahead and reduce the tension on the pneumatic sleeve. We want it real soft because we want it just to kind of float around that profile. That'll work. So I'm going to start with the side that I ground on, because that one does have deeper scratches. And we'll start on new paper with that one. I'm just gonna do four passes. One, two, three, four. Actually, it's six passes. You can see it cleans that up just pretty. And then it also radiuses the edge of that glass really nice. On to edge sanding beings. I don't have any overlays. I have these, which are similar. So. So we're going to shape those first. Got to stay within the same steps because that keeps you accurate and consistent. I'm just going to gently file them now. Here I am actually working into the glass. But because I don't have a glass edge, I'm not going to blow that glass away. Okay. I can't even feel it. So that's perfect. All right, last step is the random orbit. Leaves little swirl marks. So we always take those out on our bows with 220 paper. All right, we'll do the belly ones. Other than absolutely, totally rearranging the handle, we're trying to leave everything else as vintage as possible.

And we'll run the random orbit on.

All the surfaces that we can speed up our time. We can see a tiny little glue joint. I don't know if you can see that. That's probably been there since the creation of that bow. But we're going to fix that real quick. So what we're going to do first is build up some dust and pack that crack. We'll hit it with ca. The problem, it comes when you have a crack. Moisture can get in there. Now we'll mix that. Push that slurry down in there. And then what you do is you take the air nozzle, put compressed air on it, and if it stays closed, which it did. I can't even see it. You fixed it. If it opens back up, do it again. We'll go ahead and flip it so I can see right here. I've got the same problem. Now if you look real close here, see those little dots in the fade? Those are voids. Oh, there's another one. Wow. This bow has them. Every step in bow building affects the next step. So gonna make sure that every step you do, you do it well enough that it don't have to be done twice. Reason I do this is because if you leave this sharp, that will break. We start with 120. Very important to count the strokes. Otherwise you'll change the tune on it.

Okay, that's all the 120 on that. Now we'll clean up the edge of this tip.

We'll use this little sanding device as a sanding planer on this shelf bevel. What that's going to do is take out any dips or gouges that my imperfect human Hands would have put in it. We'll go right around that. You can see that's real sharp. So we're going to go ahead and relieve that. Like I said before, you leave it sharp. You're creating a place where moisture escapes faster than the other areas. Now we switch to 220. It's going to make it pretty soft, so it'll follow those contours. Come in here, Clean up those little scratches that I seen. Make it nice and pretty and happy. Flip it over. Switch over to 220. So we got that limb done. We're gonna do these other two limbs real quick. Edge sanding. Done. The problem with this particular model of bow, that sticker is literally on top of top of the finish. I can't really sand that or I'll ruin that sticker. I'm going to go ahead and sand the limbs like I Normally do with 340 grit paper on the parts that don't have stickers. Okay. Now after we get done sanding the limbs and everything, we're going to string it up and see if it stayed. We don't need to shoot it. We already test shot it. But sometimes when you edge send it, you can change the tune on it just a little bit. So let's check the tiller real quick. Okay. The tiller is still perfect. We'll get a final weight on it. This will. This weight will be the one. We mark it with 33 pounds, grab some 180, and we'll just clean up around the shelf area that we couldn't get to with the other tools. This is also where we'll shape that final shape on that bevel or that chamfer. I always feel if I've left any sharp areas right where the webbing of your hand goes. Okay, that step is done. Final step is we just take a piece of hand sandpaper, go around the whole thing. Anything that we may have missed, I do this on all my bows. Make sure this isn't sharp right here. Okay. Now this is something extra I have to do on this bow. We've got these stickers here.

That finish has to be scuffed or the new finish will not take.

It's not going to look like a brand new bow, but it's going to look pretty stinking close. Actually, it's going to look better than what it looked like when it came out of the factory.

It actually has tip reinforcements.

Now, the tip reinforcement is important because these bows were made for string. Material called dacron had more give and more stretch to it we use fast flight, and we make our bows Fast flight compatible just so that you can use either type of string. Fast flight is more harsh, but it gives a higher performing bow. But it's a little harder on limb tips because there's not as much give in it as there is with Dacron. And so because of that, you have to reinforce tips. The reason I'm not doing it with pneumatic sanders, which is what I normally would do, because this is. This glass is so soft. I don't even know what the. How old this bow is. I would guess it's probably 50, 60 years old. Now, somebody that knows these bows probably gonna say, that's wrong. I don't know. She's done. I'm always finding stuff that I gotta correct or that I think I gotta correct. It just little tiny details. Here we are in the spray booth. I use lacquer thinner, but I do it really fast. Lacquer thinner is such an extremely good cleaner that it gets that off real quick. We don't let it sit on there. That'd be devastating. If you let lacquer thinner sit on a bow, you can start to see the colors coming out. Okay. My wife normally does the inking on here. I don't have as good a writing as she does. Okay. Okay, that'll work. We just use a real thin string so that it doesn't take up too much space on the tip. Then after it's done, we sand that little spot and hit it with the special kind of can finish. I always check that this is the exciting part of Bose. See what she looks like. Perfect. And that's it. A retrofitted Stimler archery tartar. Got some of that curly maple that even has some figure in it on the. On the palm swell there. But it's definitely a totally different looking bow. Now, that was fun. Well, that's it. That's all. Thanks for watching.