Vintage Bow Restoration | Ben Pearson BP-H52 | Very Twisted Limb, Bad Finish, Holes in Riser

Hey guys, Shane with Great Plains Traditional Bow Company, and today I've got a vintage Ben Pearson. This is a BP H52 7329. It doesn't have any other identifying factors on it, but what we're going to do today on this bow is we're going to radius the shelf and side plate. This customer likes the grip on here. We're going to leave the grip the same. They— it does have some Lineal stress cracks in the limbs. We're going to address those. There's not a whole lot a bowyer can do about those. We're going to address those. I'm going to go ahead and clean up the overlays, fill in these holes. He might want to put quiver inserts later, but when it leaves here, it's going to be perfect. So we're going to fill in those, those, uh, those, uh, old holes right there. And then it's got a slight twist in it, so we're going to take the twist out, clean it up, clean up the tips. And refinish the whole bow. So the first thing we're going to do just to get started here is what I always do. First thing I always do is I just take off— well, the first thing I do is I take photos, um, and this is for Chris when she puts the graphics back on. And then I It's also nice if you take photos before anything is done to it. And you guys, if you're gonna refinish bows, this is a very good idea. Take a lot of photos because you never know when you get into it and all of a sudden you're like, oh shoot, um, I don't remember what this looked like because you've modified it. Um, then you don't know what you're dealing with because you haven't taken photos. Now I don't have to take a lot because Chris and I, we know what we're doing and we know what to look for. Um, but I take a certain amount and then I add them to my bow rework album, and then that goes to her phone, and then boom, we've got it when she puts the graphics on. So that's enough photos. So, um, next what I do is I strip off this kind of stuff because obviously you can't sand through this. He's using Velcro on here. And then I grab my lacquer thinner out of my Just Right plunger can. If you don't have one of these, get you one of these off Amazon. They're about $70 or $80, but man, they're nice. They just have, uh, I just have mine full of lacquer thinner. You can put any kind of solvent in there and it just comes up right here. And this is a pretty big one. You can get, you can get little small ones like a pint. I like the bigger ones because I use quite a bit of it. And if I have just the little tiny ones, I just use them right away. I constantly have to refill them. So let's clean this up a little bit. This here, I'm probably just going to scrape this off because otherwise I don't need to spend a lot of time trying to get that sticky residue off when I can just scrape it because I know I'm going to reshape this anyway. But if you don't do this, when you go to, uh, grind on it or sand on it, it just gums your paper up. All that junk is on there. And once you have it scraped, now there's a little bit of glue residue left. Now is whenever I can take that off with the lacquer thinner. Now if you're not gonna go all the way down through the finish, you probably don't want to use lacquer thinner because lacquer thinner will eat the finish. Um, you probably want to use like, um, denatured alcohol. Paint thinner is softer on a finish than lacquer thinner. But where I'm going to refinish the whole bow, I'm going to use the most caustic thing. Well, this isn't the most caustic thing. Clean Strip. Um, I don't know if I've ever stripped a bow. On video. I need to do that sometime to show you the kind of stripper that is the best. But the Clean Strip orange can stripper is the most caustic. That stuff will eat your skin. But lacquer thinner is the next. Okay, so that's all cleaned up. I always stick with my same steps, and I always start with the tips. So what we're going to do now is we're just going to— you can see these tips, they're not symmetrical on the way they're faded into the limb. And so we can't have that. So we want to make that pretty and symmetrical there. So we'll start with the tips. Okay, so you can see here, you see how these are on an angle, um, just not symmetrical, doesn't look good. Also, you could feel right here, it just— there's a, there's a big hump there. We don't, we don't want to be able to feel anything when we run our hands here. It is— we want a smooth transition. So that's what I'm going to do, clean it up and make it look pretty and symmetrical. Hey, that's real nice. It's this, uh, This is so thin. They've got this on here so incredibly thin, but this is reinforced for Fast Flight, so it is good. We don't have to reinforce it. That's solid glass. There's 3 layers of glass on there. That's zebrawood they've got on the back there, but this one here has had some water damage, but that's okay. We can fill that. It'll still look good. I think I'm gonna Trying to decide if I should reshape that tip. It's got a nice shape. This one's not as good. Yeah, I'll probably reshape that on my bearing sander. Um, so if you look at this, it doesn't look like I did much. If you look at that tip, it really— you're like, oh, he didn't do anything there. But it's really deceptive because on the backside, you can see it looks like I did a lot. Now that looks real pointed and stuff. What this allows me to do is it allows me to crisp the layers up. It allows me to crisp the layers of the tip up where they got it real thin and they're not very crispy. And you want to clean that off and make them crispy by changing the profile of that. And even though it doesn't look like I did much here, by the time I file that around there, it'll remove enough material where everything will get crisped up again and it'll look really good when I'm done. Here again, it looks kind of pointed. It won't be pointed like that when we're done. And on this one here, you can see it. You can't really tell what I did, but you'll see when I'm finished why I did that. So here on the backside here, I've got the same residue and this would— this is just from putting like a Moleskin or something on to dampen the noise of the, the string hitting the recurve. Um, same thing again, you want to scrape that off because if you just go to it with lacquer thinner or paint thinner, it could take forever to get that residue off. So initially you want to scrape it, and then it's in that— it's kind of down in that string groove, and for that you just take this And run it out of there with the file. Get that junk out of there. Okay, now we can take our lacquer thinner and clean that up. Get that glue residue off there. And now here again, we've got this here lip. We don't like that. So we're going to take that down. Just kind of float that in. Okay, so there again, we've got a smooth transition. Now we'll clean that up real quick with our random orbit here. There again, I've got a smooth transition there. Now I've got to clean these dudes up because they don't look good. But before I do that, take our Dremel And we're going to deepen our string grooves. We got plenty of width here, and they're too narrow right now. We're not going to deepen them a lot though, just a little bit. And when you're doing this, you got to be pretty careful. You want to stay on that same angle. You can really mush the tip up in a hurry if you don't. So looking down there, looks to be close to the same. Good. Now. I'm going to relieve these edges so the string comes in easier, but also so I can get my tools in there and make it look right. So now I've got a nice symmetrical shape coming into here, but these here are not pretty, so we want to clean those up with our file, our rat tail file. So come in here. When these bows are made, I always marvel at a lot of these tips because they really make it difficult for themselves the way that they're shaped. And if when you don't relieve these shoulders like this You just make it really hard to get in there with hand tools. And that's why so many of these bows on the belly side of the tip, they're so rough and uneven and they look real bad, because these guys were really struggling to get their tools in there. No, it's just, it's very simple. You just remove this. You can leave it full width on the back side, which this is the belly, it's the back, and it looks great. But when you, when you ease this, your tools slip right in versus trying to fight this edge. And that's why these are always such They're such a mess on so many of these vintage bows. These guys didn't do that, and they, they just created a massive problem for themselves. Every single tip. So we're going to make this come in here, make it nice and pretty. And then as we do this, we're watching the layers and making sure that they all come down equally. So that they're the equal depth. Okay, that looks really, really nice. It's probably hard to see on camera. Now we're going to come in with our 120 paper and just follow the lines that we did. We're just going to take out the file marks. Over to 220 and do the very same thing. And then this is the one that had water damage on it. Um, a lot of times whenever you take the top layer off, it kind of clears up, and it— that's exactly what it did on this one. I might put a tiny bit of CA in there, but basically those cracks were in the very top surface of the wood. So I'm just going to follow everything, chase it down with With 220 now. All right, now I'm gonna just fill a tiny little bit there, and this is thin CA. Alrighty, the back side of that tip is done. I'll just show you, put a little bit of lacquer thinner on it just to show you what it looks like now. If you can see it, really pretty. Now this is all blended in. You can't even feel that transition now. It's real smooth and it's got nice symmetrical— the flow of the, the string grooves coming in is real pretty. So All right, that's the back side done. Okay, so the belly side of the tips is done now. Now what I did, I didn't show it on camera, but a lot of these old vintage bows, they're real clunky and thick. The tips are really wide. If you streamline those tips up and narrow them up, you're going to increase the speed of your bow and the performance because there's just less resistance and everything is more slim. So what I did over on my flat sander is I took these shoulders down a little bit. Before I did the, the back side of the tip, which is this side. And now what I'll do is I'll just come in here and just deepen these side nocks just a little bit. We want these the same. Yeah, I like that deep. That's perfect. Okay, now I use a little finer file for this because it can blow off the chunks. You can see this thing's not symmetrical now, but now is where I'll make it symmetrical with my file. Um, just kind of pull everything together here. And make it line up, make it all nice and pretty. Okay, that looks pretty good. I'll flip out this Just ease these here edges. Okay. And that's a very beautiful tip now on that Ben Pearson. All right, now it's time to, uh, go ahead and get a radius on our side plate here. We'll do that with our 2x72 knife grinder. Put me a little bit of a mark here where I want it. The high spot about right there or so. Above the webbing of the hand. Okay, so I rounded this off just a little bit, um, just because I know that's my finished shelf shape that I want. So now I'm going to radius this. Almost there. Always throws me off on these massive risers because this thing is so huge that whenever you do it, it seems like this should be radius more. But if you were to radius a nice radius, you'd have to come clear down to here. So you're going to have to have kind of a pretty long flat spot here before it swells up onto the webbing of your hand. And that always throws me off a little bit when I'm doing it. But I almost have it now. Let's get an arrow from over here and let's see here. Yeah, that's, that's about perfect where you want the high spot right there. So we'll call that good. Maybe actually, maybe A little bit more. That'll work. Wow, that's a short bow. Whoa, that is, uh, I do not like this at all. Okay, I got it strung up here, but, um, the way that these, these, uh, string grooves are shaped You got to have a really big string loop for them to fit. My strings aren't even built that way, but I can still do this. I'm just going to have to— He said it had a slight twist, but I think it's worse than that. It's, it's way, way worse than that. It's an aggressive twist. It's a very bad twist. I don't know if you can see it. In that limb or not, but it is a nasty twist off to that side on the bottom limb. Um, and the top limb is also twisted. Now there's a slight twist, somewhat of a slight twist in the top limb. The bottom limb is nasty. Um, Tiller don't look to be too far off. It's reverse tiller, I can tell you that right now. It's got reverse tiller, which is not good. Let me grab my arrow. This thing is marked 45 pounds at 28 inches. Um, it's 42 pounds at 28 inches. So, question is, do we take this out by taking material off, or do we take it out with heat? Let's see how much it moves by taking material off. We got a super wide limb, but that's such a bad twist. That I really don't know, man. Man, oh man! Ah, what should I do? What should I do? I think I'm gonna heat it first. I'm gonna reverse this string so the bigger loop is on the other side. Because if I take that much material off it, I don't even know if I can get that all out. Oh, I know I can get it out. I just, I don't know what's going to happen if I, you know, how much weight is going to come off by the time I get it off if I try to take material off that much. There you can see how bad that is. It's just a horrific twist. So let's go back over to the vise and then we'll We'll heat it and see if we can get at least a good amount of it out with heat first. So when I take this out, when I take the twist out here, the number I like to be at is 130 degrees. You're safe at that. I've never had a bow— I had a bow fail in a rework class I was teaching. I wasn't the one heating it, but they were. They overheated it. I was busy with some other students and it I didn't catch them in time. They overheated it and it failed. But that bow had a lot of other issues, so I didn't think we'd be able to save that bow anyway. It was really bad off. So whenever I take this string and move it clear over to the side, even doing that, it takes it— it takes having that string all the way over on this edge for it to go even straighter. Great. So what we're going to do now is we're going to clamp it right here, and when I have it there, I'm just a little bit past going the other direction. Okay, next grab the infrared and we're gonna heat this. And you just want to run on this thing with this gun here. It's a This thing gets to 1,200 degrees. It's a really hot gun. It doesn't— you don't have to do it a lot of strokes to get up there. You want to heat as even as possible down onto the fade-out, and usually, uh, 2 times, 2 sessions on belly and back will get us up to 130. And you want to take your temperature, um, you don't want to measure it right after you pull the heat gun off that side. So I ran 2 times on both sides, so now I'll hit the thermometer on this side. So I'm at 107 degrees, so I'm not hot enough. Different bows heat up at different speeds, it seems like. I know I'm not going to get it all out. I could get it all out doing this, but it might take me quite a while. I've straightened many, many a bow doing this and gotten every bit of it out. Oh, okay. So now. Now it's wanting to— it's wanting to go the other way on me. That's not good. But so now I'm gonna— okay, good, good. You got to watch that because it'll— it'll— you can overheat it. That's 130 on the dot. And that, that isn't from overheating it. What happens is, is I, I, um, uh, heated up the wax on this string and it slid. Slipped, but I don't want that to happen. But me heating it now pulled that limb straight into alignment without the clamp. So I'm going to go ahead and move it over just a little bit now because I want to be a little bit past, and then put another clamp on it. Okay. All right, now we'll quick cool it, kind of quick set the limb. So loud. Back down to 84 degrees. Now it only has a slight twist in it. Yeah, it's just very slight now. I can easily take that out on my flat sander. So I'm gonna just let this cool. If you do this, you want to let that limb cool all the way down before you, um, do any, uh, any other work on it, just in case. So 10-15 minutes and it'll be cooled down. Um, okay, I'm over here at the flat sander. What I'm going to do here, I'm just going to take off material. Hopefully, since I straightened it with heat, I should be able to just take a little bit off the sides and just bring it right into Perfect alignment. So that's what we're gonna do here. It shouldn't take much. This thing is really loud, so I'm gonna put my earmuffs on. Okay, now this thing is perfectly straight now. Will it stay is the question. It should stay. But we don't know the history of this bow. We don't know what happened or how it was stored or where it was kept, or, you know, if this thing was in a hot car and had an incident that caused the twist. Um, some of those you can get them out and they revert back over time. Um, I believe this is zebrawood. Zebrawood is, uh, horrible for twisting. Uh, and now, now the, the limb core is not zebrawood. That looks to be maple to me. Maple's not— it doesn't twist easily, but you've got your fade-outs of zebrawood, and your fade-outs have— they play a lot into the twist of the bow. A lot of people don't realize that for sure. Like, if they— let's say that they were gluing this bow up and their fade-outs were like that when they glued them up. Well, that can really affect it. We don't know that. We can't— we don't have x-ray vision. Okay, um, let's go ahead and check it, see where we're at now. So we lost about a pound and a half doing that. That is not bad. If you can straighten a horribly twisted limb and you only lose a pound and a half, that's really, really good work. Now if I would have went at it mechanically and just took— physically took material off the strong side, I probably would have lost up to 5 pounds. But when you use heat with— you put heat with taking material off, we salvaged. We only lost a pound and a half. Okay, let's check the tiller quick. 6.78. Okay, like I thought, it's got reverse tiller, but it's only an 1/8-inch reverse tiller. So that's, that's a piece of cake. So I'll quickly remedy that by taking a little bit of material off the top limb. I got a nice amount of glass, so I'm okay. Oh, that old finish is in rough shape. It's just peeling off there. Actually, it's overheating. I don't like that. Dead on 7. Still need to take a little bit more off. This stuff is heating up and melting, so I have to go to a new spot on the belt, and I don't want to also build twist back into it. Still good. Some of these older bows, they are super stubborn, um, to change tiller and to move. I don't— it doesn't always make sense. Okay. That has got to be close. All right, that's perfect tiller. Now we probably, we probably lost a half pound doing that, I would say. Oh yeah, we lost about a full pound actually, but can't be helped. We've got to You can't shoot an untiltered bow. We're, we're actually, we're sitting at— we've corrected the tiller, we've corrected the horrible nasty twist, and we've lost 3 pounds. That's, that's still incredible. That's, um, that's very, very, very good, um, considering this bow wasn't even close to what its marked weight was. It's marked at 45 and it was only 42. Hopefully We're all getting older, so a little lighter bow, always fun to shoot. Check the twist. Oh, I'm really happy. It's perfectly straight. It's tillered. We only lost 3 pounds, and as you saw in the video, just a horrific twist in there. So before we go any further, let's just— let's shoot it a couple times, and because that's the real test. If, uh, if, if it's going to stay straight, if everything's going to work and it stays straight, then we know we've got it. Alrighty, here we are. I'm gonna shoot it. I didn't even check the brace height, but I like this. That's a good— it's an 8-inch brace. That's fine for a super short bow. It probably would even shoot well with a little higher brace, but Okay, that's a really heavy arrow with a lot of drop. I didn't anticipate that. Let's aim a little higher. Now when I do that, you probably notice I didn't fully draw it back, and that's— I do that on purpose. Whenever I've worked extensively on bow limbs, you know, I'll probably shoot it a couple times at, you know, 2/3 draw, 3/4 draw, full draw. Just to see, you know, make sure everything is okay. So that was about 3/4 draw. And then, you know, just look when you're doing this. Look, everything is staying perfectly in line. So let's go ahead and do a full draw. Nice. Is it staying in line? Oh, it's perfect. Absolutely perfect. Perfect. So you can see the method of straightening that limb with using heat and removing material, it's pretty much invaluable. You really, um, being, being able to have both of those skills in your tool bag if you're doing this for yourself Is, is really, really good. I could have done it. I could have straightened it without using heat just by taking material off. What would have ended up happening is I would have had a super, super skinny limb and I probably would have lost 6 or 7 pounds. I could have done that. But I would have lost that weight. On the other— on the flip side, I could have probably straightened it completely with heat, just use completely heat and gotten by with it. But you're not as guaranteed that it will— it will— it will not revert back if you only use heat. It's better to use a mix of both. Now, if you don't have— if you don't have availability of both, you can do it with just one of those methods. But this thing is spitting them out. It's really fast. And right now it's only a 39-pound bow, but it's screaming fast. Of course, that's because it's so short. And with a 52-inch recurve, you know, if you didn't want any stacking at all— so it starts stacking right there. Well, look how much arrow sticking, you know, it's probably stacking at 25 inches. Um, so that's why it's so fast, because at my draw— well, still at my draw, it's only about 42, 43 pounds, but it's stacking up. So you're getting a lot of speed just from putting a lot of stress on those limbs. But a lot of guys on these old vintage bows, they just shoot, they shoot them. They, even though they stack, they don't mind. They're used to it. Okay, I like it. I'm happy. We are done with the tuning part and we are ready for the final finishing of it. Okay, I'm back over here at my vise. Now I'm not going to go— I'm not going to show you guys. You've seen me do it on so many bows, I'm not going to bore you to death on the refinishing. Basically all it entails is I'm going to bevel this outside edge of this shelf. I'm going to go around here with my pneumatic sanders, clean this all up, make it pretty. He likes the grip. He loves this grip. So we're not going to mess with the grip. We're not going to change it at all. We're just going to clean it up, take the deep scratches out. I did kind of undercut it a bit, and that is really good. It really gets your hand up there and it feels so much better. That's the only thing I did. But I don't want to change this because he likes it. So I'll do that. I'll clean that up. I'll, like I said, I'll bevel the outside edge of the shelf. I'll go ahead and I'll make these overlays symmetrical and pretty. And so that you can't feel them right now. I can feel a bump there and a bump there. So I'll do that and then I'll edge sand the edges and then we'll get it to the spray booth. But what I am going to show you just real briefly, because I haven't done a lot of these, is just how to fill these holes. He probably is going to put quiver inserts in at some point, but this is for the Quickie Quiver and so he won't be using these anyway. So we'll just show you how to cover— how to fill these real quick and you can do it on your own bows. I don't want any finish down in the hole. So the first thing I want to do is take it down to where it's— the finish is gone and it's just wood. So we'll just use the CA and we'll get us some dust and just fill these up. Now you kind of want to fill as much as you can, like the whole, the entire hole, because when you go over top of it and sand it, if you don't and you just have just the top of it filled, it can create a cave in there that you can then knock in when you sand it, and then of course you have a hole again. Okay, once I know I've got it packed in pretty good, I still have an indentation in there, but I'm going to put glue in now. Because I want to get me a base down in there of sawdust and glue. Okay. And it bubbled up. That's fine. So now we'll go back over it. That could get the excess off just a little bit. Okay. And you just keep doing this until you've got the same color, the uniform color of the— because it'll be lighter if it's not all saturated with glue. It'll be just a little bit lighter than the surrounding wood. Now, once I have that— now, you don't want to use your accelerator when you're first filling the hole because it'll fizz and foam up. And you'll create voids in there made out of accelerator and glue and empty spaces and not actually glue and wood dust. But now, because that's all filled up, I'm going to seal it to make sure that it's cured. Okay. And now I'll run my random orbit over it. Blow it off. You can't feel those holes. I'll show you what it looks like. And they're perfectly filled, and you can't feel them, and you'll never feel them again. And that's how you fill them. So, okay, I wanted to show you one more thing on this bow. So this bow, as I mentioned at the start of the video, it has these lineal cracks running in it. This is extremely common on vintage bows. Um, by and large, most generally, they never will cause you any trouble at all. I've seen them on hundreds and hundreds of bows that I've reworked, and they never caused the first issue. I get this question a lot. What do I do with them? Well, generally you can't do anything with them. They're too tight to fill with glue. You can hide them. On this bow, what I could do if I really wanted to hide them and spend the money and time, I could paint the entire thing black, all the black limbs, and hide them. But even then, they would probably come through that paint eventually. Because it's just going to crack through the paint. So it would only work for a brief time. So really, they're not, they're not that big a deal. You can put glue on them. You can get windshield glue and fill them, but that windshield glue is not strong like super glue. It's not going to do much. So basically, you just kind of do your best and refinish and leave them. We're going to look at them here, but I wanted to show you a method That you can use on your own bows. You're not— most guys aren't going to have the pneumatic sanders like I have, and you don't need them. This is a very effective, easy method to get the finish off your glass and refinish glass. And all it is is just the random orbit, and you just do it evenly, and that's how you can refinish it. And what I do is I just, I just run this along and I'll take the finish off. And let's say you're going to reduce your bow. You can reduce your bow with this method if you don't have pneumatic senders. And what you do is you just, you do a session, a cycle. And a cycle is running your random orbit over there and then taking your 220— get a fresh piece here— and taking out the little swirly marks that the random orbit puts in. Now you don't have to do that, the 220 part. You don't have to do a cycle that way. If you're just— if your goal is to reduce the bow and you want to do it with a random orbit, you just keep doing passes. And the way that you get it even is either take a marker or something, scribble on it and sand your marker off, or time yourself and spend the exact same amount of time on the limb. And because the key is evenness, if you want to do it successfully, reduce your own bow with these kind of tools. The key is to be even. Just have the tool on the limb the same amount of time on each surface— bottom limb, top limb, both sides, all 4 sides. So I'm going to just show you how to take this finish off on this because this bow got refinished at one point and it's kind of a rough job. So we're going to see what it looks like underneath. So you can see that cloud right there. So you can see this here. Now this is all the way down to the glass. Say you're just going to refinish this bow, that's all you're going to do, you're not going to reduce it. Okay, you can see this cloud here, that's the old finish, and this is all the way down to glass. See that little cloud right there? That's a little bit of old finish. But if I was going to just refinish this and I didn't want to reduce anything and I wanted to stay even, I would only have my random orbit down on the limb as long as it took to take the cloud off. And then once I had the cloud off on the, on the whole, all the limb surface area, I take my 220 paper, come in here and take those little swirlies out that the random orbit puts in there. And you can, then you're ready for finish spray. Or if you want an even finer finish, uh, 220 is basically going to be Good enough. But say you want a really fine finish, then you can switch over and use like 320 and go even further and really get it nice and ready for the new finish. So I'll go ahead and take the finish off all the way on here so you can just see about how much time and effort it takes. Okay, all that finish is completely off now. We'll blow it off here. And you can just see those little lineal cracks in that glass now, and I can't even feel them. Now that I cleaned it off, I can't even feel them. But what you can see, you can see all those little swirly marks that the random orbit put in there. And that, of course, is not acceptable. So then you come over here. Whoops, that's not in there very good. Let me fix that real quick. So you probably— let's see what this looks like with a little bit of lacquer thinner. You might not even be able to— So you can't even hardly see those swirlies when you get the Lacquer thinner on there, but you will see them in your finish if you don't take them out. So one cycle is to run your random orbit till the cloud is gone, and then take your 220 and take out the swirly marks. Now don't go straight to 320 after your random orbit because it'll just take so much work to get those, uh, those swirls out, and you'll just— You'll work and work and work. If you want to go to 320, then do that after the 220. So that's what I wanted to show you on that, and it's easy to do. You guys could do it on your own bows. Thanks, Mike.