Tomahawk Reflex-Deflex Longbow Weight Reduction and Rework

Hey guys, Shane here, Great Plains Bow Company. So today I've got another rework and weight reduction, and because guys like seeing these, I'm going to do another one here. Um, now this is a tomahawk. Now Great Plains, uh, was highly instrumental in building and designing these for Three Rivers. Now to be completely transparent, the tomahawk was not designed by Great Plains Bow Company. Uh, I believe Dale Karch designed the bow. He designed the limb profile. However, it was not really sellable when, um, he approached Bill Foreman that owned Great Plains back then. Uh, probably I think that would have been in the early 2000s. Um, he approached him to build the bows, and Bill Foreman took a look at it and he said, Nuh-uh, this This isn't, this isn't going to sell because— and I don't even know what they look like. I would love to have seen what they looked like back then, but he said that it just wasn't appealing. It was, it was really poor look and craftsmanship and fit and finish. However, the limb design was fantastic and is fantastic. So Dale Karch did a fantastic job on designing this R&D-shaped limb profile, which Has stood the test of time and remains to this day as one of the best, highest-performing R&D longbow limb profiles out there. Uh, they're incredible. Anyway, Bill Foreman said, um, yeah, I'll be interested in building these for you, but, uh, we need to redesign this thing so that it'll sell, so people want to buy it, so it's appealing. So he did. Uh, he redesigned the look of it. Of course, the limb profile was already set. That was already designed by Del Karch. And if I get any of this stuff wrong, anybody can comment and say, hey, no, it was actually like this. That's fine. But this is, this is what I— how I understand it. So Bill Foreman redesigned it into the shape. And this, this one here is serial number 14339. This is actually one of the later ones before Great Plains discontinued building them. I'm not even sure how long that Great Plains built them for Three Rivers. I wonder. I think it was around 10 years or so. And then since then, many, many different bowyers have built the Tomahawk in all the different configurations, from the 3-piece, the 1-piece, the, the Kitska, the Tomahawk Kitska, the 2-piece. I actually built the 2-piece for about 3 years. Uh, the socket and tenon takedown system, but I ended up, um, backing out on that contract because it just simply wasn't, uh, lucrative for the business. But so the Tomahawk has a lot of history behind it. It's a fantastic bow, and today we've got one. And I kind of closed down my reworks for public. Uh, I will still take them on the right circumstances, but I'm very particular and picky on what reworks and reductions I'll take. Now, if it's built by Great Plains, any bow built by Great Plains, I will reduce it, rework it, whatever. I'll always do those. This one is built by Great Plains because it has a Great Plains serial number. So, um, this customer sent his note in and he says— excuse me— uh, reduce to 40 pounds, make center shot as close as you can. So make this center shot, which it's Yeah, it's not even cut to center currently. Refinish the bow shelf, dash, you know what to do. Okay, I think I do know what to do. Uh, new leather wrap and then make it pretty. So yep, we can do all those things. So let's go ahead and get started. And, um, it's currently— it's a 53-pound bow at 28 inches. This is a 64-inch AMO Tomahawk and serial number 14339. It's a Tomahawk SS Diamond Series. And so we're gonna just make it real pretty, do our magic to it, and see what we can do. Now before I start, we're just gonna get a slow, um, before and after because I haven't been doing that on my reworks, and we've got to start doing that because we want to really show the differences that I make. You can see this here shelf is not hardly radiused at all. It's got a slight radius to it, but very minor. Same with the side plate, and it's, uh, it's very thick. This bow is plenty strong enough to cut further in than that. Um, so, and then also you can see like here, this is, this is not very pretty. This is abrupt, kind of comes down and then straightens out. We're going to make that nice and beautiful right in there. Just clean it up. The overlays, see that? Yeah. That's not even at all. Um, we're gonna clean that up, make those even, make those pretty again, and just give it a facelift, but also reduce it, make it fully functional. So there you have it, let's get started. Okay, we're over here at my tuning alley, and first things first, we're going to string it up and see where we're at, because sometimes these bows come back in and they're a lot different than what the customer thinks or even what they're marked. Uh, so let's check this. Check it. Now that's too high of a brace height. So with the 64-inch, I generally like to have it, um, between 7 and 7.5 inches brace height. That might seem a little high for what people are used to. In my experience, you just get better performance out of a little higher brace height on longbows. Um, yeah, now you probably will lose a couple feet per second, but that really doesn't matter. You just need that proper tension on the limbs when that— when the bow is at brace at the end of the string stroke. If you have improper tension or if you don't have enough tension on the limbs, you get more horizontal flop and vibration and wiggle. But if it's under good proper tension at the end of the string stroke, everything is better. Less hand shock, it's quieter, it doesn't hit your arm as easy. Um, a little higher brace height is usually better. So there we're sitting about 7 1/8. I think that's good for now. So let's go ahead and check the weight on it. Okay. All right, so we're looking at 49 pounds and So there again, yes, it's marked extremely wrong, or it's possible that it lost weight. Bows don't lose as much weight as people think they do. Um, I would say 70 to 80% of the time the bow is marked off, it's marked wrong because people were trying to hit a weight and they wanted to get by with it so they could sell that bow. That's kind of dishonest, but unfortunately that's what happened a lot of times. Um, I try never to do that, but it is a temptation for bowyers to do that. They might lose a pound or 2, but a lot of people think that they lose a lot of weight. They don't. Most bows that are well built don't lose a lot of weight. They might lose, like I said, a pound or 2. This one here is 4 pounds under what it's marked, so it's 49 pounds. It's marked at 53. So let's go ahead and quickly check the tiller. 7, 8. Okay, it's really close. Um, so it's nearly a perfect tiller. Um, we're not too concerned about that right now. Let's check the straightness. Bottom limb perfectly straight. Top limb perfectly straight. Okay, so what we have is a 49-pound bow that needs to be 40 pounds, so we only need to take 9 pounds off. Um, it's got a mild trap on it, moderate. We're gonna go ahead and, uh, give it more trap. I've got a nice amount of glass to work with on the belly and the back, so this will be a piece of cake to get it down to where we need it to. Um, but before we reduce it Uh, we're gonna do the shelf and side plate. That's the first thing we'll start with. We gotta stay in our steps. We can't deviate from our steps, and that's the first thing we're gonna attack here. Okay, over here at the disc sander, we're gonna just clean this up so that we can work with it. Now I want to move my high point back as far as I can, but I obviously— I can't go too far back because we don't have a cut-in underneath there. So we'll just do what we can, what we got to work with. Now when I'm doing these, I kind of have a measurement. Well, I don't want to go on this here. I really don't want to— when I'm rough carving it, I don't like to go below 9/16 because I'll end up going a little bit lower with my file work, but that's where I like to stop. Okay. So I don't get too thin it up too far. And here what we're trying to do, we need to come in here. Overall, this bow is sitting about an inch and a quarter. Half of that is 5/8. So if we want to cut it to center, ideally we need to take off a whole nother 1/8 of an inch, and that would just be to center. We don't want to cut it past center because there's just not enough material there. Okay, so you can see there, if you look, Up to the edge of that beveled shelf, I'm just almost perfectly dead on 5/8 of an inch. Now when I file it, it's going to take it lower, um, so we got to keep that in mind. That's going to come out to about a perfect cut-to-center bow. I just got to clean this up and fade it in. Whoops. Okay, now I'm trying to look at where my high point is here. I think I'm going to move that high point just a little. Ah, maybe a little more. All right, perfect. Now I'll go ahead and radius the shelf. I can't do a whole lot with this shelf because there's just not much there. It's such a tiny shelf to begin with. What I'm gonna do— I don't want to mess this up either. I want to kind of stay within this little artistic fade out here, or how this kind of grew out, because if I get down here, it's going to look really weird. So what I'm going to make the height— I decided I'm going to make the high point back here, not quite in the middle, a little bit toward your hand, because I don't have enough material to come all the way back. So you can see the high point is there now. So I'll just bring this up to here and we'll call that good because we just don't have a lot of shelf to work with there. Okay, so I'm really happy with this now. Um, you can see this little, uh, dark spot there. Um, it was kind of some poor craftsmanship, whoever shaped the shelf to begin with. It had like file marks and stuff in it, but that tells me that I didn't go any lower. I just cleaned it up. I went lower, of course, here, but that's original from where it was. So that tells me I didn't drop this shelf and all of a sudden lose control of it. That's an original mark. And I do that, I leave those marks there a lot of times so I know that I'm not losing control of it. My parameters are still going to be okay as far as tiller because I haven't suddenly dropped this shelf a quarter inch or something. Okay, I got this bow clamped onto my little board vise table here that I love to use and looks real good. First thing we're going to do is take our half-round file, and the reason I do that is just so that When I use my rat tail quarter round file, my quarter-inch rat tail file, it doesn't skate off to the side. So I just kind of clean off these little ridges here. I'll show you what I mean. Okay, now grab this guy, quarter-inch rat tail file, and see if I, if I file those off. If I have all these ridges, it kind of wants to skate off. But this is what I make the interior radius of my shelf with. So this is linen phenolic, what this riser is made of. And then this here wood right here is, um, diamondwood. Um, it goes by many names. Um, it was originally diamondwood, then we started using Kuznetsov's Wood Products. They call it Diamond Luxe. Um, now I get most of mine from Rosewood Archery, and it's back to being called Diamondwood from them, wherever they get it from. But essentially what it is, is Baltic birch that's been dyed, pressure dyed, glued up in panels with resin, and, um, into almost like a thermo composite. It's not a thermo composite, but the thermo plastics companies are the ones that make it a lot of times. Actually, no, Well, it's kind of the same process, but, uh, it's used in a lot of gunstocks all over the world, and bowyers use it quite a bit. But that's what this here is. I believe this is the cocobolo color, and then this is the black linen phenolic. And then there's a layer in this bow, this little thin black layer running through here, that's not carbon. That is Uniweft, which is a horizontal stabilizing lamination. It helps with twist, also helps with horizontal torque, keeps the limb more steady. It's kind of an inert product, so it really doesn't add to the performance of the limb, but it does stabilize the bow. So I'm just making this. I already kind of made my landmarks with my disc sander, and now I'm just kind of following those landmarks I make. I'm always profiling at all times. I'm designing and profile when I rework or when I build a new bow. Every step successfully done makes the next step so much easier. So even now I'm looking at my high spot, I'm building it back in. Okay, so now I've got a beautiful landmark made. I don't want to dig into my shelf. I should be sitting at about around a half inch here, and it is on the dot. Perfect. Okay, now I'll use my half-round file and work into my landmark. What I do now, if you're doing this on your own bow, you never want to file out from glass. So I never would run and run my file like this or like this. You file into glass, otherwise you'll blow your glass off the limb, splinter it, do all kinds of gnarly stuff. So when you have an overlay on a bow, you can get away with some of that because that overlay protects that glass. You still want to— it's still a good rule not to ever file out and away from the bow. Always file into the bow. So what I do is I stop right here at my high point. Now I'm going to switch places and I'm going to come in this way. So now I'm filing in, back into the bow, and I don't want to dig the edge of my half-round file into this shelf. Because anytime I do that, it makes pretty deep gouges. Well, those have to be taken out with hand sandpaper, and that's not very fun. So these files also act sort of like a hand planer. You can bring everything together. When I'm doing this, I'll look down here and, uh, there. Make sure that this is, uh, all floating in pretty and smooth. And when I come from this side, you know, I stop at where my high point is, and then I come in from this side. Well, that naturally will peak that, um, and will make it a lot easier to establish. I've decided I want my high point right on this here, um, decorative diamond wood. Coming into there. So, and it will be. Okay, filing's done. Okay, now what I've got here is my 120, and this is my, uh, little thicker— that's my little thicker rubber sanding block that I've made. I've ground this a little bit thicker, and that's to match this here inside radius here. Um, And we'll use 120 paper and we'll clean up all the file marks and the disc sander marks. All the while we're doing this, same thing, we're profiling, we're thinking about it, we're saying, how can I make it better? Making the hands do the magic. Also want this to be at a 90, so I'll get down here and look at it, and it is beautiful. As soon as My scratches are gone. This step is done. And there we have it. So you could actually— the tiny little ripple there, I don't like that. I see a tiny Ripple here. It would never matter, but I don't like it. Is it gone? It is not gone. Okay, it's gone now. We cannot have that. Okay, so there you have it. And it, it might not look like a lot on camera, but it is quite a bit actually. Um, you can see here, see if I can see. So you can see I'm actually past 5/8 by the time I was done, and this is an inch and a quarter wide. So I'm actually— right now it's cut a little bit past center. Um, oh, by the time we shape this, this shelf will get a little smaller, but there it is. It's cut to center. By the time you put your, your, your side plate material on there, it's going to be cut to center bow. But yeah, that's beautiful. All right, over here at the bearing sander, I'm not going to do just a whole lot. This is already fairly thin handle. However, we are going to put leather on here that's going to build it up, and it's probably going to feel a little thicker to him, uh, to the customer. So that gives us a little tiny bit of room to profile it a little bit so that he gets the same feel. Of course, we're going to fix this, and then I'm just going to ease into here just a little bit. That's about all over here at the bearing sander. Alrighty, so I just crisped up this line here, and then I deepened this just a hair, and then of course I made this all pretty again. It was kind of like that. I made this here nice. It kind of follows that medallion. Looks real good. It's actually got a little deeper cutout now, so it's going to be a bit of a more forward handle, which will be really nice. He'll be able to feel that. And then I went in about basically the thickness of the leather so that when the leather builds it back out, it's going to feel identical to what he felt when he was shooting it before. So let's clean that up and then we'll move on. All right, I cleaned it up, got it nice and clean. I also put the tag on it, and now it's time to reduce. I already did string it, so, um, we're sitting at 49 pounds. We need to take it to 40. I've got some choices here. Do I trap it more? It is nice and straight. Do I trap it or do I just take it off of the, uh, the belly? 9 pounds is quite a lot to take off just the glass alone, so I think I'm going to go ahead and put a trap on it. That's what we'll do. Okay, so over here, this is where I trap it. It's kind of a piece of junk, but it works. Uh, very important to count your strokes when you're trapping this. Really, I've done it a thousand times. I've done it on video a lot. So we're just gonna— I think I'm gonna go with, uh, let's see, 9 pounds. Probably go, uh, 25 strokes and then 5 to round it to blend it into the limb. 25 per side. So for this entire bow, be like 130 passes. Alrighty, when I do this, I always check to make sure they're even and symmetrical, and they are. They look pretty. So, um, I've got those. So now I'll blend these back in to the tip and to the riser on the bearing sander, and then we'll clean them up. Okay, let's go ahead and see how much came off with that trap. Sometimes I do this for sure when I have to hit a specific weight. If I'm doing a stock bow, I'll just go ahead and clean this up. It doesn't matter. But I have to hit a specific weight here, so I need to see how much came off. Okay, so, uh, that did not take off as much as it normally does, but every bow is different. So that only took off, man, a little under 4 pounds. Wow. So that tells me I can be quite aggressive when I clean. That, that also tells me I'll put a new piece of paper on and I'll be pretty aggressive in cleaning this up, and I'll, I'll lose, uh, I'll probably get another 3, 4 pounds off just doing that. Okay, let's see what I took off there. Then the rest we can take off of the glass. We've got plenty of glass on this bow, and we do want to take some off the belly anyway because that will make it perform better. That will make the draw smoother and, uh, reduce that compression on the belly. So this bow, once again, it's a bit stubborn. It's not moving nearly as fast as they generally do. So we need to go a solid 3 pounds yet, maybe 3.5. Uh, but that's, that's okay. We're being careful. We're coming, we're taking it off evenly and smoothly. We're down to about 44 pounds now. So we'll take the rest off the belly and we'll finish up the tiller on the back. Okay, so here we just got to be real even when we take this off. And once again, we'll count our strokes. I'll probably start with— I need, I need 3.5 pounds. So the way this bow is moving so slowly, probably do 5 strokes on the 120 because it can sometimes come off real quick. Now we'll clean that up with the 180. Okay. That 120 leaves really deep scratches in the bow. Alrighty, yeah, that's feeling good. Really, really good. Oh, that's perfect. Just a little bit strong, which gives me room for my, uh, edge sanding. But let's go ahead and check the tiller. Okay. Wow, it's nearly perfect. I'm just going to take just a hair off that top limb, but it's almost perfect. 7 and 9. 7 and 7. Perfect 1/8-inch tiller. Let's go ahead and put it back on here. Dead on 40. Dead on. All right, let's go ahead and shoot it real quick just to make sure, because if anything, um, is gonna be messed up or happen Your shooting is going to tell you the story. Got her strung up, tiller's perfect, brace height's perfect. Now we're going to shoot it. Wow, that's beautiful. Well, let's try for a little— I don't even have silencers on it and it's not loud. Nice. 40 pounds, really fast, very smooth. Very nice. All right, one more. Now what I do is I check it, see if it's straight, because that's the real story. Bottom limb perfectly straight. Top limb is perfectly straight. All right, she's reduced. Let's go ahead and, uh, get her edge sanded up and ready for the finish room. Okay, so over here, the first thing I do always is my overlays. And you can see, um, we got a real big problem going on here. Those are not even, so we've got to fix that. So with these overlays, there's just a— they're very, very poorly done. This shouldn't be this big a gap. We can't do a whole lot with that, otherwise we'd end up with real stubby overlays, but we can make them symmetrical. This wood under here is Pacific yew. It's really hard to— it's a beautiful wood, but it's really hard to file for overlays because it moves so unpredictable and so fast. But essentially, we just want to clean up these radiuses, make them symmetrical, make them appealing, aesthetically pleasing to the eye. And we got to be real gentle and careful with this U, how we hold our file. Also, if you'll notice this here dark spot right there, that's, that's a glue cloud. So that also tells us that when this bow was built, they didn't do a great job of clamping their overlays on. That's okay, it won't hurt anything. It's just not as pretty as if you would do a crisp, clean, tight job of clamping your overlays. Here again, These overlays are just sanded way too thin. This is— I mean, there's nothing there hardly that I can work with, so I gotta be real careful. So that's a— that's— we can't go any further because it's just— it's, uh, shearing back or fading back. But that's at least symmetrical, so go ahead and I'll do this side. And whenever you do this, I mean, you have to come back all the way to your lowest point. When they're asymmetrical like that, sometimes that can mean coming back a long ways, and you don't really want to make that low point any lower. I mean, I'm barely touching it and it's, it's cutting it back. So you got to be really gentle on these here. Okay, that looks good. So now I just got to clean these up, and here again, I got to be super gentle and careful. Beautiful. Can't feel it. That's done right. Next, I'll take my 220 here. Pieces used up. And we just want to take out those random orbit scratches that we just put in there so that once it's— and with them being this delicate, even this here sandpaper can move them. You can see I didn't put much pressure. There's some itty-bitty Scratches that I got to get out of there. So now I'm going to run this, uh, this little wheel sanding drum, and I'll put a little tiny bevel on there. I don't want to put a very big bevel on there because I want as much shelf as I can get so I have an overhang to To protect your hand but keep that arrow on there. That's it. And then take our thick sanding, uh, profile rubber sanding What are these called? Sanding block. Sanding block. And then we just clean that up. And as we're doing this, trying to make that— the outside edge of that shelf very round and symmetrical. And I'm making it a little bit wider at this stage because I'll show you the next step is going to narrow it back up again. And then I'll come in here and relieve this inside corner because you don't want that arrow to catch on there and blow your laminations, your overlays off. So you want that to be relieved back away from the shelf. Okay, next grab this guy. We're going to put new paper on it so that it cuts real sharp. This is 120 grit on an inch and a quarter sleeve, and I want it soft like that. So it can go around there. And here's where we can narrow this outside edges up while also shaping it. Next, I still have a ton of these medallions from when I built the tomahawks, so to save ourselves a lot of work, we're just going to put a new one in there. And get this old one out, maybe. Boom. Flip it over. Now we kind of want this to be strategically placed because we're going to edge sand. Hit this first. And I just blend these in. I know I've already done this when I did the side plate, but Whenever we trap it, we just want to blend any lines that we may have put in here. Just blend them in pretty. All right, we are ready to edge sand the limbs. We start with 120, a fresh paper every time, and we count the strokes. That's how you keep your tune and tiller correct. Okay. Clean up the limb tip. So I was thinking while I was working here, I would tell, tell a little story while I'm X-netting this. And, uh, We just barely went to— we just, we take an annual vacation. We basically, and we go to South Padre Island or Corpus Christi or Port Aransas with my wife's family, Chris's family. And so we took that usually the first weekend in August. So We did that this year, and we go down there, get set up, and I think it was the first day— was it the first day or second day when we had that episode with Rio? Second. So the second day we were down there, and we have a Um, a 6-year-old boy. He's a first grader now, but he loves the ocean. He's pretty independent. He's— and he was playing out there, and I had left the beach and I was driving around, and, uh, all of a sudden Chris calls me and says, we can't find Rio. I was sitting at the camp watching him. Yeah, yeah, she was, she was, she was there at the camp watching him, but he was so fast He was so fast and he was doing his, uh, his little swimming thing. Well, actually, didn't you say you were in the water with him or something? I was just sitting up by the tent watching him. Okay, yeah, she was sitting up by the tent watching him and, uh, all of a sudden, what, he was just gone? Yeah. All of a sudden he was just gone. And you know how those kids are, they're so fast. He was just gone and they couldn't find him anywhere. She called me and I was going— we were going to buy some shoes or something in the town. And I got that phone call and I've never had a phone call like that. And I was freaking out so bad. My heart just sank. And I whipped that, my truck around. I have a long bed truck and I think I broke about every traffic rule or law out there. Hauled back there. We could not find him. Well, they had been looking the entire time while I was driving back there, and, uh, when I got there, I was only there— I ran out into the ocean right away. I thought we were going to be looking for him. I thought he'd be drowned. I thought we were going to be looking for a body. And you know, all those things go through your head, just terrifying scenarios. No dad or mom wants to ever have that happen to them. And we, uh, I was only there at what, I was, I was probably back what, within a minute when we found him? Yeah. And all of a sudden my brother-in-law, well, there are some people yelled at him and they, they, they were, uh, they found him. He was, he was, uh, he had wandered down the beach and he had lost his orientation. He couldn't find where he Was. But the beautiful part of this story is there was some people that were just right close to our tent, and they were watching, and they noticed he was— they noticed that he, he was kind of wandering around. And they said they didn't know that he was from a tent right close to theirs. They didn't know where he was from, but they thought he looked lost. And so they started— These were the young couple. And they started watching him. And the, the girl, she told her boyfriend, said, something's not right with this little boy. Something is not right. I think he's lost or something. And he wandered off, and they were watching. And finally they got up and they started following him because they knew that something wasn't right. And they followed him for about a quarter mile, and they went up to him and asked him, Where are you going? Hey, are you lost? Well, he said, I think my people are just over there. They're just over there. Well, the first time he turned them away because he, I guess he might have, must have been scared of them. And he kept going and they didn't give up. They just kept following him because they said something's not right here. And finally, when they were about a quarter of a mile away from our location where we were picnicked there, He admitted to him finally that, yes, he was lost. And so they started— they turned around and he thought it was back the other way and they started walking back and they kept walking and walking. And then what happened is they got close enough to where my brother-in-law seen him and them. And was able to run over there. It was a terrifying experience. But what was impressive to me about the whole deal is that there's really good people out there. Those 2 young people, they said to themselves, something's wrong here, something is not right. And they had the foresight, the knowledge to, to say, this little dude's in trouble. We don't know what's going on. But we're gonna follow him and see what's going on. And I don't know how far he would have gone. You know, if he would have, if he would have wandered off a mile away and they couldn't have found us, and the, the Coast Guard or the lifeguards wouldn't have known where to find us or anything. I mean, we could have, we could have been looking all afternoon. Really, really scary deal, but Also a very good learning situation, teaching situation, educational for mom and dad and for Rio, and also an opportunity to see good people out there. But anyway, I thought I was thinking about that. I was like, you know, this is real boring while I edge sand these. I thought maybe I'll just see if people want to hear a story of one of the recent events in our lives. But anyway, I'm gonna, I'm gonna go ahead and edge sand the other limb, and it's boring, it's the same thing, and I'll catch you when I'm done with that. All right, here we are in the spray booth. Um, it's all finish sanded, ready to go. Got the graphics written back on it, Tomahawk SS, the specs. She finished out beautifully. And it's dead on 40 pounds, so, uh, go ahead and spray it for y'all so you can see the finished product. Okay. Here the Tomahawk is completely finished. I'm very happy with it. It's a beautiful bow. So I— the grip feels amazing now. I went ahead and profiled this just a little bit deeper and just cleaned everything up, made it feel more ergonomical, made it feel better. It looks better. Brand new buckskin on it that Chris put on. And then the shelf, of course, I radiused that, moved the high point back, raised the side plate really nice. It was basically flat and square before. And then I always crisp up the lines when I do these. So the Great Plains bows have a little line that runs right here. It's just part of the design, and it looks really good and crispy. So I crisped that up, and it's a gorgeous bow. Dead on 40 pounds. Just a beautiful bow. Pacific yew on the belly, bamboo on the back. So here she is, all finished.