Bow Making continued
The story of Robin Hood continues...
After I finished cutting the strips of wood needed for the bow, glueing the handle together and milling the curve out of it, I went to a local factory that fabricates fiberglass tanks for storage of fluids. Since it was the holiday season the people from http://www.lyngenplast.no kindly allowed us to use not only their space, but also some fiberglass strips, fiber strands and some epoxy. Really nice!
Here is the factory, situated at the edge of Lyngseidet:
To start, we cleaned a table big enough to place the bow parts, the milled shape and all the stuff needed to place the epoxy, and laid everything on there:
The white stuff you see on the table are strips of fiberglas. Which are sort of braided together strips of fiber strings. The normal unbraided strings we also used, to put between the other fiber and the wood.
this is the fiberglas from up close:
So the final setup was this:
Layer of wood
Layer of fiber strips
Layer of fiber strands
Epoxy
Handle
Layer of fiber strips
Layer of fiber strands
Epoxy
Layer of wood
Before you start, mix the epoxy. This consists of the epoxy itself and a hardener. The proportions differ for every kind of epoxy, so you will have to look at the specs of the stuff you will use for those.
Stirr well, and then put the different layers of stuff together. Work quick and secure, and to make sure you do so, mark the middle of all of the pieces (including the bow from) before you mix, and put everything on the table in the right order.
After that, clamp the materials together in the shape, and leave them to dry for the right amount of time. For us, this was about 1 hour.
When you take the clamps of, there will be a decent amount of epoxy and fiber hanging from the sides, but all of the materials will retain the shape you pressed them in.
Use a skill saw to cut off the sides and the top and bottom.
the whole process is not difficult, but make sure you have all the tools you need available, enough clamps to clamp the whole length of the bow and be sure to wear protective cloting...
Or at least gloves. You don't have to dress up as if you where walking around in NASA space station, as we did.
Here you can see the tanks Lyngen Plast normaly makes. They can make whole tank in about 4 hours, using the same technique as we did, but obviously without the wood and using metal molds. On the foreground you see the molds, which have dampeners inside, so they can be shrunk down after the epoxy has cured, to remove the tanks. The tops and bottoms are molded seperately, and then attached by hand.
Next up: cutting the bow to it's finall shape.
