Shatterproof Archery, Part Two, Bob Garner Recurve Rework

Hey guys, so we are back and we're filming again, and it has been a very long time since we filmed. The last video we did was the Bob Garner review, so today is part 2. We're filming part 2 of the Bob Garner bow, and behind me here is our house cat Ashes. Awesome cat. We took her in, she was a stray. She is a really good cat. She sleeps till about 4 o'clock, and then she'll be— 4 or 5, and then she'll be up and around all night, and then she'll go back in the house or in the shop and sleep until 4 or 5 every day. So, so what we're going to do with the Bob Garner— so the, the point of this, if you remember from the other video, is that it's an American-made economical bow, custom made but at a cheaper price. For a custom-made bow. What I'm going to do here is just take some of the things that I would do a little different just to make it more user-friendly, but yet still maintain the economical value of it. And we're going to start with the tips here. And these tips are functional. They're a little bit rough. They do have— they are reinforced with GTN underneath, so you could shoot a Fast Flight string with this bow. But we're just going to make them a little prettier, clean them up just a little bit, and something that isn't going to take a lot of work to do and will still maintain the, uh, the price. I don't know, um, how far or how extensive we'll go with it, but Shatterproof Archery is going to modify the Bob Garner and just make it, um, using some of the stuff I do here, make it just a little bit A little bit nicer. On the riser, it's, um, it's a little bit blocky. We're going to just smooth it out, clean it up, and we're going to radius the side plate. It's got a nice radius on the shelf, but we're going to go ahead and radius the side plate. And then on the grip, we're just going to move it up to where your hand is up underneath the arrow a little bit better, but also smooth it so that it's, it's not so square but it's a little bit more contoured. This, this grip has a really nice flat spot on it here. Some people— for people that shoot with that flat spot, like if you're shooting with fingers here and then your palm here, you really wouldn't need to do much with it. However, to accommodate everybody out there, we're going to change it a little bit so that anybody and everybody, it will fit, and not just the guys that shoot that particular way. Because if you shoot it like I, I hold a bow and I wrap around all the way I shoot it like this. Well, if I'm going to hold it like this, it kind of is high here, and then there's a little void here. So we're going to take care of a few of those things and make it awesome. It's a great platform to start with in the beginning, so it's a good shooting bow. So to begin with, we're just going to start with the tips. So for that, we're going to head over to the bearing sander and clean them up just a little. So here I just shaped that up there. We'll do the rest with the file. And I just took out a little bit of the, you know, just streamline it, make it look a little prettier. So let's head back over to the vise and we'll clean it up with the file. Okay, so now we have a tighter diameter so I can get in there because I just don't want to take off too much glass here. Ideally, I don't want to take any glass off. So, but this allows me to get in tight without taking— but we do have to take a little bit off because we're blending. Now I'm not going to make a full radius like I do on my bows because I don't need to. I just want to make this look Match the theme of this bow. We do want it to be symmetrical though, and pretty. So, okay, back it up a little bit, blend it on in. We don't want to be able to feel that when we're done. We don't want to be able to feel that transition. Okay, that's real good. Next, take this here. I could do this with. I don't want to deepen that because we're already pretty deep there. So I may think here. Yeah. No. I don't want to— I'm just going to use my sanding block here and go around that to make that— to clean that up. Just come around here. Here again, just making it smooth and symmetrical. Let's see, maybe a file actually. Maybe. A thinner file. Yeah, that was definitely the right choice. Allowed me to get in there without messing up any shape that was already there because I'm just making this all flow. All symmetrical. Okay, now looking down at it, I'm going to come in just a little bit here. Okay. Trying to decide here because if I, I could come in all the way and it would look really good. But I don't want to cause too much work for the guys doing this after me. There's really no need for it. It's still going to perform good. Okay, I think I'm going to leave it just like that for now. Yeah. And I will do the other side and then I'll catch you whenever I do the back side because the other side is going to be identical to this side. Okay, so here what I'm going to do is you can see these, uh, we just need it a little more symmetrical. They're not quite round. A little simple thing that, but it will make it look a lot better. So we'll just round those now. Yeah. Okay, so here we are. Now these are real nice. They're straight across from each other. That's really good. I'm just going to clean this up. You can see it just kind of jogs over just a hair. So we're just going to take— actually, what we're going to probably do is put just a little angle on this, and only because it looks better. But not only that, it makes it so much easier to string. If there's not— the smaller the tip is when you're stringing it, the easier it goes in. I'm also going to probably just You know, just clean these up and deepen them a little bit because that's kind of how I get my landmarks. So just come in here and then just deepen them just a hair because I did narrow that up a little bit. So we definitely want plenty of material for the string to grab when it's on the bow. So Then I also use this as my landmark when I'm running my file from the— my half-round file. Okay, I just want these straight across from each other. I want them pretty. Okay, that looks good. Now run my half-round file in there, and I'm just kind of designing as I go here. So I don't know how it's going to look. So first I'm going to clean it up straight, then I'm going to decide if I want to put a little bevel on this or not. When you put a bevel on the end, for sure here, it actually does protect the bow because if you have a sharp point here, for sure on the tip, if that were to catch on anything or hit the ground It can chip that glass back. And that's why I like to move mine back. So, I think what I'm going to do is just come in here and we're just going to round it, take it back a bit. It'll look, it'll look better. It'll make it look a little less bulky, but it'll still maintain its strength. So, You would not have to do this. This is purely, uh, well, this, this is functional to, to relieve that. You know, that moves that glass back away from the edge. It protects that glass on the end of that limb from getting bumped or actually blowing off. So that is functional. But as far as putting this bevel on for, on the sides for functionality, you would not really have to do that and it would still be fine. When you do this also, it gives you a better sight down and allows you to— like how this is round here, it lets you see that better so you can actually make it cleaner and crisper and more symmetrical. So just moving that back, not going to go too far. We just want a nice happy little tip when we're done. Okay, as I'm going, I see it's kind of in right there just a hair. That's not gonna matter though. Won't see that when we're done. Okay, okay, I like that. So now I will actually, when I'm looking at it, maybe just a hair more here. Okay, now we'll grab our 120 again and just clean up what we did. With the files, come in from this side. And when all these edges are relieved all the way around, you— there's, there's less of a chance that anything can catch it or that there is a burr that can potentially fray or cut your string. Okay, that's looking pretty good. Come in a little bit more there. Okay, so I'm, I'm going to finish this up with 220 now. So there's nothing more to see here because I'm just going to go over it just like what I did. So I'll catch you whenever I do the other side of the tips now. Alrighty, so I got the, the back of these shaped and, um, now I'm going to shape the— I guess this would actually be the back. I got the belly side shaped. But I need to kind of come in a little bit. And what I did, I came— I, I, I ground the edges of these in just a little bit, uh, to make it more in line. Oh, this clamp's not on. So I need to clean this up just a hair from this side. So these tips are going to be quite a bit smaller now, but remember, the less heavy your tips are, the faster your limbs are. The tip speed is directly related to the arrow speed. So it's going to perform good. Okay, so I'm going to do that. Now I'm going to come in here with a file and just clean this up. Now on the other tip, I did not deepen this. I left it exactly like it was. And on this tip also, we're just going to leave it exactly the same depth. We're not going to mess with that because I think it's It's thin enough anyway. What I'm doing here, I just want to make sure there's no burr that could cut a string right where that transition is. Now normally I would do this with my Dremel on high speed, but my tips are shaped just a little bit different, and if I did it, I think I would cut into this guy. Okay, keep going here. Okay, that's looking pretty good. All right. Now take this and we're just going to ease these just a little bit. Ease those a little bit. Grab my hand sandpaper, clean this up. And then from this side— Hardly do that with my left hand. The camera's in the way. That there line is just a little bit on an angle. Okay, that looks good. That'll work. So there's the tips done, belly side. That looks really nice. Okay, so I want to just take these off. It'll— it— that's not a lot of work, and it will make it look so much better and so much more streamlined. I don't know that I would even have to draw a mark on here because it's easy to get those symmetrical without, but we just want to nip those off. Okay, so I'm happy with that. Next, I want to just look at this shape here, and we just want to float this together. We don't have to do a lot here. We're just going to float it together. But on the grip, let's see here. Actually, I just, I just want the basic shape before I do any carving here. We're going to address the shelf. And so for the shelf, let's go ahead and just radius this. Okay. Okay, that looks good. That's sort of a rough shape, but that's what we want to see. Now, this bow, I measured it, and it is not a center shot bow. It is just barely cut to center, but it's not a center shot. This is hickory, and it's really strong, so we're going to move this over just a little bit and make it more closer to a center shot bow. We probably won't go all the way. Just to give it plenty of strength. So for the next step, we're going to head over and we want to also smooth this in instead of having an abrupt line here. We kind of want this just to flow in. So we will head over here to the knife grinders. Okay, so over here, I was thinking about this. Now ideally, the best place for the high point on your shelf is directly above your webbing. On this bow, our radius is over here. We can actually move it over. I think we have enough materials. We can move it back. So we'll probably do that. But on this step here, we're just going to do the side plate here for now. Actually, you know what? Before I do this, I'm going to have to drag the camera back over to the bearing center because I want to clean this out with the bearing center before I do this. Okay. Now I didn't need a lot. You can see I didn't hardly do much, but it immediately made it look very much better because it now flows into there. So now that we have that, now we can go ahead and radius. So what we'll do here is we know we want our high point to be about right here. Over the webbing, kind of. We're going to move the high point on this shelf because we have enough material to do it, so we'll do it. But for now, we're going to bring this up to here and then up to here. We don't want to take a lot of material off, just, just enough to get us a radius there. Okay, so I can I got— I'm coming up to my line there, and I'll go just a little bit more and then stop. So that's looking good, but I'm gonna go ahead and transfer this onto the shelf because I do need to take that down a little bit. The better job I do here, the less file work I have to do. So this rough carving, you can say, oh, I'll just clean it up on the file, and you end up with a huge amount of work. Okay, I'm happy with that. So And we'll clean it up with our files. That's the rough shape. You can see the high point is back here where we want it. Okay, here we are over at the disc sander. This thing is coming along very nicely. We're changing it. So what we're going to do here is we're going to radius this to where the high point is moved back, which will make the bow much more accurate. So I know I have my mark there, but I'm gonna obviously take that off, so I'm gonna go ahead and transfer it back onto the side plate. Okay, so you can see there I'm moving that back. It's actually a really good spot there. Let me get an arrow. So if I put on here and I kind of estimate where my arrow will be as far as square to the riser, you can see it's really nice. That's about— we gotta go, we're gonna move it back just a little further because I'm a little forward of that. But you don't have to have it perfectly above the webbing because you want some meat over it, underneath it to reinforce it. So it's really close to where I want it, so we'll just do a little bit more to it. And also, I want this here to be at a 90. If I, if I angle that shelf this way or this way, it's really hard to correct with my hand tools and paper, for sure with hickory. So I want that about perfect before I Stop over here. So I think I'm pretty happy with that. We're gonna leave it about right there. That's straight across from my high point there. So yeah, I'm happy. Um, see how square I am. Let's see here. Yep, we're good. All right, so I got a little line here. We gotta radius the inside of that with a rat tail file, but before that, I gotta take this off of here because if you don't When you put your file on there, it'll just keep wanting to wander off. So we just take off that little line that I made. Now I'm looking here, that almost looks like a crack in the riser. Um, I'm gonna have to investigate that. Hickory is super strong, so I'm not too worried about it, but we don't want it to spread. One of the hardest things as a custom bowyer in the world is having to warranty defective wood. It literally is. You can do the best job you possibly can and chip pick and pick and be super picky and choosy and cut around knots and cracks and what have you. Do the best job, and there's a crack that you can't see that opens up later, and guess what? You gotta pay for it. You gotta warranty it. So it can be really frustrating at times with the checks and cracks because we're working with natural wood, and it can really bite a guy. Zebrawood is one of the worst. It can lose a lot of money on zebrawood, but it's also a fantastic bow wood. Okay, I'm kind of getting ahead of myself. Normally I don't file up onto there until I have that radius carved in there. So I just cleaned that up and now we'll go ahead and grab us a rat tail file. And put our inside radius. Now, this inside radius is super critical and important on any bow made out of wood. You do not want a sharp corner in there. You don't want a sharp corner anywhere if you can help it, on any woodworking for that matter, but for sure not a bow, because moisture leaves those areas faster. And you can have an uncontrolled acclimation, which can result in checks and cracks and failure. What I was saying before is there's a crack there that I think— I forgot about that a little bit. I believe that is a tiny crack, but when I look at it, it's very minimal. In fact, I can see it there, but it looks like it's just on the surface. We'll put a little glue in it and just see if it wicks down, how far it wicks. Because that can tell you if it's a deep crack or what's going on by how far it wicks down. Yeah, so that's— that isn't going anywhere. It's just the surface. So we don't— that's not a— that's not a problem. Okay, so this rat tail file also is a landmark and guide. So as I go down with it, I'm setting the shape Of my shelf and side plate. I'm setting the radius, how deep I want to go, because then all you have to do— you can set it with something small and it's easy. And once you have it set, then you just bring everything together with your bigger files, your bigger wood remover tools and files. And that's a really good way to do woodworking, not just on bows, but anything for that matter. So I know I want my high point right here. I still got a faint line there, and I'm also going to gauge this, how I want this to look. Now when you're doing this, main thing is, is do not cut into that shelf. Um, that's just really hard to get back out if you do that. And I don't want to go too far. This bow does not have to be a center shot bow to be a high performing bow. And, uh, I also don't want to weaken it because if you go too far and create too thin of here, then you could potentially cause a lot of warranty problems for the bow you're producing. These bows, we don't want to do that. So I feel comfortable with where it is now. Let's just see how much I've left here. Yeah, I don't like to go any further than a half inch right here. Of course, it swells up to quite a bit thicker right here. Okay, now we'll just do what I say, um, and connect the dots. We've got our landmark established, so now we just file back and make it look correct. And we took, we took away that abrupt transition here. Really simple to do, doesn't take much, but it just completely changes the way it looks. It looks so good now. This riser is going to look super cool when we're done. It's, it's gonna— Screamer has a nice Platform here, nice starting platform here to make it make something really look good. That is loud. I usually have earbuds in when I do this. Okay. Here again, I just, I want this all to be pleasing to the eye, these lines coming in here. And this nice flat area that he had on here to begin with, that's good. That opens up that sight window and It also keeps the side plate from overcrowding the arrow and pushing it more out of center shot. Okay, so what I do is I go up to my high point, then I come in from the other side. That way I don't accidentally shave off the high point. And I'm looking here too because I want this to be a nice line coming into there. Hickory definitely doesn't file too fast. Okay, that's good. I've got that shaped. Now I'm going to grab my, my thicker sanding block here, and we're going to go for 120. This, this 120 from Klingspor is nice and aggressive. It's an open coat sandpaper, but all woodworking paper is open coat, but it's a really open coat. Okay, that looks really good. And I'm just going to check and see if I'm squared up 90 degrees, and I am. That's all cleaned up, so now we don't have to use this any longer, and we're going to switch over to the drum. And for that— We will clean this area up here. It would just take forever to do that by hand. So while I'm doing that, I'm also profiling. I'm not just sanding scratches out, I'm shaping also. Making it look all come together. But hickory is a hard, dense wood, so it hides its scratches very well. It retains them, I should say. Okay, so that's as far as I can get in there, but then we'll finish this here with the random orbit. Okay, looks really good. I'm just gonna kind of shape this in here because I'm not gonna— I don't think I was thinking about this. I don't think I'm gonna mate the limb so much to the riser because it really doesn't need it so much on this bow. It's already a pretty good fit. All right, let's take a look at what we did. Now, whenever I was, um, whenever— I don't know if you noticed when I was kind of radiusing this on the bearing sander— when I did that, suddenly that shelf looked half the size almost. Um, and it does that, it does, it looks that way. But whenever you go ahead and open this up, then all of a sudden your shelf is back to the same size it was and magically appears again. So I have this arrow here And so, um, I don't know if you can see that. I'll show it from several different angles, but you can see that that's exactly where we want the high point. And then from this side, I don't know if you'll be able to see that, but yeah, so that's perfect. So, okay, we've got the rough shape on these edges. the shelf and side plate done. So we're going to head over to the bearing sander, and now we're going to carve in a little bit of pretty into it and just give it a pleasing shape here. Okay, so we're going to go ahead and carve this now. Now one thing is, like I was talking before about several of the problem points here, this is a kind of a problem issue, and then right around here You can't really get up close to your arrow. We want to leave enough on there to protect your hand, but, and, but we want to kind of take away some of this blockiness and make your hand go right on up into that shelf and feel great. So we're going to start there. Okay, so that is so nice already. It feels so good. So, um, when I'm recarving something like this, you know, when I carve my own bows, I kind of have a Standard way of doing it where I cut in my landmarks. I don't do that on something like this because I'm constantly thinking and I'm designing as I go. So I think the point— what we need to do now is fix our angle of attack on our grip. And once we have that, then we can decide what to do with the rest of it. So for that, uh, let's see here. I could do it on this side. Yeah, I think I can do it right here. Okay, so that fixed that. Now we're going to— I think I'm going to Kind of just float these in here. I'm really happy with that. And there's a couple areas here just to make it look streamlined. That's looking really, really crispy and beautiful. Um, I want to address— just doesn't take much, but I'm going to just kind of float this one out a little bit. And then this one here has just a slight Little ripple in it. We're gonna take that out quick. Okay, this is looking really nice. I don't think I'll come in here and do this because it, you know, it's just purely design and it doesn't need it. And, you know, we gotta— we want to keep this bow as economical as we can, um, and still make it high quality. So we're going to leave those square. We'll just ease them. Um, but this little line here, um, we either need to radius it or we need to make it Straight. I think I'll just make it straight there again so it's not extra work, but I need to, you know, make it straight instead of like that. All right, so the rough carve for the Bob Garner bow is done. I'm really happy with it. I want to, um, you know, Kramer left a nice wide area, and I want to be sure to leave that because I'm sure he had that design there for a reason. So I left that nice wide area there. I just kind of opened it up, so your hand is now underneath here. And then we took the hotspot off here. So if you shoot closed hand like I do, it's going to work. But also if you shoot open hand, it's going to work because you still have that nice flat spot on the back of the bow. So it should— it feels really, really good. So we're going to go ahead and clean it up on the pneumatic sanders. Okay, I got it clamped in here. Now I'm just gonna take these off. Now we're not, we're not gonna grind these down to make the limbs because if we did that Then the limb interchange system— his limb interchange system would be a mess. He would have to hand fit every one, and for an economic bow, you don't want that nightmare. So we're just going to clean these up. All I did is take the finish off. Well, I didn't even touch this one. I just gently took the finish off over there, but we're going to just clean the scratches off here. Okay. Now flip it over, do the same thing on this side. Okay. Now, right after I was done grinding, I went ahead and I beveled the outside edge of this shelf, and then I cleaned this up with my drums, my pneumatic drums here. A lot of boring work. So that's what I did to get that all crispy and clean. And, um, yeah, I just cleaned up some of the scratches. So now what we're ready to do is, uh, go ahead and put the limbs back on. This here area, we'll just scuff that up for the new finish. We don't have to, um— well, we'll do just a little bit on here with some new 220. Just to blend that in, blend those new edges in. Yep, that's looking good. Okay, and then same right here, just to blend that in. Okay, now we're ready to put the limbs on, so Lims are right here. This is the bottom limb, and the top limb. Now I did go ahead also when I was off camera. The bow is perfectly straight. The limbs are perfectly straight. It was just a little out of tiller, which could come from it acclimating. So the fulcrum The pivot point of this bow is 1 inch below the shelf, which I like to tiller all my bows at 1/8 of an inch, and it was at 3/8. So I changed it by standing on this limb a little bit. I changed it to 1/8 real quickly. So now what we need to do is go ahead and with the limbs on— let's see here. Yeah, like I was saying, I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna grind these flush with this and this because if I do that— it doesn't need to be, first of all. But second of all, if he wants to interchange limbs and then each one is specifically fit, then you get into the expensive custom-made bow and you don't need that on this type of bow. It's plenty good like it is. It doesn't matter, and it's a good fit. So this thing is looking really sweet now. It really feels great in your hand. It's got the radius shelf side plate, a nice flat area here. So what we're going to do now is go and string it up, make sure that it is— it stayed within tune after we sanded on it a bit. We're going to shoot it and do our final— Adjustments. Finish sanding all over, and then we're going to be done. Here we are, got it strung up. I went ahead and checked the tune and tiller on it again, and it is perfect. I got it tillered, it stayed at 1/8 of an inch. So we're going to shoot a few arrows with it here. That's a good shooting bow. It's That new grip on there, I really love that. That's a very good shooting bow. I have a lot of scar tissue right in here, and if the grip isn't— doesn't fit my hand, I always feel that. But this one feels really, really good now. That's a loose nock. Let's get Oh, nice, nice. Very fast bow. It's surprisingly fast. So what I always do when I shoot a bow again for the first time is I just check the twist and make sure that it's okay. The lower limb is straight. Yep, she's straight. So it's tillered, it's straight, but you don't really— you can check it right after you string it, but the true story is found after you shoot it a couple times on how straight it stays or it is. Lovely. Okay, I'm very happy with it. Yeah, that's— let's shoot a bamboo arrow. Nice. They're coming out of there like laser beams. Very nice. Okay, I'm happy. So now what I'm going to do is— it's perfect. So there's some sharp edges here. Um, just along here, some places. I'm going to ease those edges, and then it's done. I got to scuff up this finish to accept the new finish, and we're going to go ahead and put it in the spray booth and spray it, and I'll show it to you after it's sprayed, and we'll go from there. That is a cool looking riser now. I like it a lot. There are the limbs with the gloss coat on, and, ah, looking good. Like that radius shelf now, the beveled edge, and that grip is super comfy now. Alrighty, thanks so much for watching.