Self bows, recurves and longbows...performance

[Bill Carlsen]

I hope this is the right forum to bring this. I found some interesting reading in a study done at Berkely regarding what makes a bow perform well. It is primarily centered around Olympic bows but the physics and ideas presented in the study, I thought, would be a topic of interest here since I see lots of questions asked in this forum that this whole study deals with. Some of the reading is tedious and scientific but when you get the gist of what they describe it all seems to me to make sense and explains why longbows are different than recurves and what makes good bows vs. bad bows when performance is the goal.

http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~archery/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/Fundamentals-of-the-Design-of-Olympic-Recurve-Bows.pdf

[LittleBen]

Interesting. Although a bit of a broad and superficial look at things I thought it was informative.

I think what I took from that mainly, is that ideally I should be molding everything I need out of multiple layers of unidirectional carbon.

[dfrois]

A very good read. It also explains why Border HEX5 and 6 limbs have such good performance, according to many in the target world.

I think I need to make a new form for my limbs...with more recurve!

DF

[Black Mockingbird]

His assumptions of what a primitive bow is....is stereotypical naive ignorant hogwash...natural materials have been more than proven to shoot as fast as man made materials...and some are faster than the average glass bow....its all about design. He obviously knows nothing of "real" materials.