I have noticed a few articles here on Trapping the limbs to reduce weight. I have an old Martin Ventura here that is a bit hefty for me to shoot . I would like to reduce the weight by 5# In your opinions what is the best way to do this ?. Filing from the back to the belly or vise versa. Thanks.
If this is a recurve, I don't know how effective trapping would be.
On longbows The ones I had trapped was towards the belly.
Discussing on TG lean more to trapping towards the back.
With a recurve with thinner limbs maybe reducing width would work.
Yeah I'm with Macbow. Trapping really only works if the limb has some decent thickness to it.
NArrowing the limbs can drop the weight alot on a recurve. As long as you don;t make them so narrow that you lose stability.
I probably wouldn;t go any more narrow than 1.5" at absolute minimum.
Regarding trapping, for wood, always trap the back if trapping, aside from very rare exceptions.
Regarding trapping for glass, as Canopyboy recently showed, glass is stronger in tension than compression like wood, so also trapping the back is the most appropriate method, although glass is very strong so probably either will work and not cause a bow failure.
Thanks for your input.The Ventura is quite wide at the fades and is so along to the tips. I might just try sanding evenly and weighing it frequently.
With recurves, folks typically sand the back side of the glass to reduce the limb thickness. You have to do it evenly between the upper and lower limbs, checking the tiller and weight as you go. I would avoid making the limbs thinner (i.e. narrower) because it could really mess up the stability of the bow.
I took about 5# off an old recurve recently using that method, mainly cause it had taken alot of limb twist over the years and I couldn't heat all of it out so I retillered which required substantial narrowing
Go slow and check frequently adn you'll be ok.