Turkish core, 7 piece construction

Hello, I’m trying to make my first turkish composite bow but I really have problem to find long enough piece of maple. Can I use V splice joint in the kassan eye section ? I know that there is a little bend at full draw. Do you think that glue joint in that area would work ?

Hi. I would recommend trying to find long enough piece to have sal+ kasan eye from one piece. You would need only 35cm piece for this.
I don’t have experience splicing the core at kasan eye. It might work too.

You want the sal and the kasan eye as all one piece. Splice above or below that; but not at the eye.

I think it’s better to avoid any splice on kassan-eye, because that part have some flex toward full-draw, maybe you can splice at half-section of the kassan or base of the siyah which is static…

but I believe the traditional method for Ottoman is 3pieces construction, so it’s might better done that way whenever possible… cmiiw

Finally after one month of searching I found maple for at least 5 piece core. And I live almost in the forest :smiley:

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Looks like a good start! Good luck.

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Steam bending was successfull. But next time, I should use longer piece for kasan/tip bend, at least 30cm, for easier bending. Of course my hands totally forget how to use clamps, when I was in hurry :smiley:

What are measurements to build the forms?wjere do you get patterns?

Welcome to the forum! I believe all forms are pretty much custom made by the bowyer.

I recommend to draw out the bow you want to build, then start tracing the inner circle to which use as the surface for forms. Forms need to be a little bit smaller than what you think. Bending some pieces over the form and then measuring would do for a quick test. There is a lot of fine tuning that goes into finding perfect form…!! Good luck.

I just traced the shape from a photo on my PC screen. Zoomed in until one limb was 22 inches, then traced it to paper right off the monitor.

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Ok thank you,I been trying to find measurements for Turkish and tar tar forms .

I recommend to look at some old bows from museums (online) and copy the form on paper. Then try to get the traced shape to 50-55cm like Marek mentions.

Here is a beautiful bow from Met museum.

What i can say is… you can overdo the bend and always open the curve by hand later. This bow here has quite excessive reflex. But core form is always going to be reflexed more than the shape of the bow in everyday use.