The Best Tools for Tillering a Bow
Amateur, recreational and professional archers all require a bow that shoots hard, shoots fast and most importantly shoots accurately. The advent of modern materials and design elements incorporated into the bows of today allow for some tweaking -- none more evident than on the recurve bow, where tillering – making changes to the bow limbs to improve accuracy -- is common practice. The right tools are necessary for doing the job correctly. Does this Spark an idea?
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Fine-Grit
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Sandpaper is available in variety of grits that gauge how rough or smooth the paper is. The type of grit you need is determined by what kind of job is at hand: in this case, making minute changes to the structure of the bow. For this purpose, fine-grit sandpapers such as those graded between 200 to 240 grit are one option for your bow when it comes to tillering. Using heavier grits ranked 100 or below may remove too much of the fiberglass or wood composite from the limbs, thus potentially ruining the bow by make all your arrows shoot high or low. A fine grit allows you to slowly remove wood until you’ve reached a satisfying medium.
Files
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Like sandpaper, wood files are abrasive enough to allow you to slowly move incremental amounts of material from the bow’s limbs without taking away too much, provided you make small passes with the file. Files are available in different “grits,” meaning the larger the teeth on the file the more material it’ll remove. Choose a finer-toothed file and, as with the sandpaper, make incremental passes to ensure you’re removing small bits of material at a time.
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How to Perform Tillering
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Once you’ve selected a tillering tool, now comes the time to put it in action. You need to lay your pre-strung bow down flat on a stable surface and use either a bow square or a ruler to measure perpendicularly to the bowstring to gauge and accurately measure how thick the upper and lower limbs are. Once you’ve determined which is thicker, use a file or sandpaper to thin the limb down to match the opposing limb. Unevenly matched limbs cause an arrow to "weigh," which causes arrows to favor the thinner limb and shoot high or low, depending on which limb is too thick.
What Not to Do
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Removing too much material can potentially ruin your bow, since you can always remove more material but you can’t replace it. For this reason, you want to go slow to avoid oversanding or overfiling the limb. Don't use a crafting knife or any type of blade; while those tools are effective at whittling, fiberglass and composite react differently than wood, making it much easier to remove too much material.
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References
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