This link is from the Otzi the Iceman post by Duckdiver.

http://www.primitiveways.com/bow_tillering.html

I used to use this trick years ago. I don’t remember for sure if I read it somewhere or it just sort of happened.

Basically the idea is to hang a weight off the nock of one bow limb at a time to help in the tillering process. It goes into much more detail but suffice it to say it’s a really interesting idea.

The other thing that is fun about hanging a weight from the limb (or the strung bow itself) is you can sort of slowly and carefully bounce the weight up and down to stress the bow inbetween taking material off during the tillering process. I’ve never liked having bows that drastically change in shooting characteristics after making them so everytime I would take off any wood the bow got 30-50 full draws to the point I had reached on the tillering tree/stick.

Just place a stopper to keep the weight from dropping too far and over stressing the bow. But with this you can very easily nudge the weight down and let momentum and gravity do the work for you. The weight will bounce up and down and work in the limbs very well with minimal effort on your part. It’s a fun and easy way to work in the limbs. So much easier than drawing it hundreds of times throughout the building process.

the (almost) self bending idea sounds great. I bend a bow 30x after any wood removal. A little help wood be good :)

walter wrote on May 6^th, 2020 at 7:58pm:

the (almost) self bending idea sounds great. I bend a bow 30x after any wood removal. A little help wood be good :)

They say it builds character, I’m still waiting lol.

But for years I’ve wanted to set up some type of pneumatic ram to automatically draw, hold at full draw and then let back down bows.. I’ve heard that at least theoretically a wooden spring will never suffer fatigue if balanced correctly. I have no idea if that is true but I would love to have one bow that stays on the ram all day for years. Get tens if not hundreds of thousands of draws and then compare the speed and tiller as the months and years go on.

It would also allow the ability to throw a newly tillered bow on the ram and let it go through several thousand draws before sealing and finishing.

Thinking wood is organic. it is not spring steel and will (should?) eventually break down. I often feel that like slings, we are supposed to make and use our bows. Imagine how busy we would be as bowyers in a clan of twenty or so!
Know what you mean about the finishing and sealing lol