Kanna plane and kiridashi knife is also used in pulling motion. Now it is clear why the saw, and other tools, work on pulling motion: from sitting position of would be very awkward to push and cut, but it is very easy to pull and cut. (It’s not me, pictured is Shibata Sensei, famous Japanese bow maker, courtesy of this website: ) I am following the methods used by the Japanese bow makers so I’m sitting on the floor with the fixture under my arm, like this: The thinning of the planks is done by hand using the kiridashi knife first to cut the excess material, and then finished flat using kanna plane. The thickness should be about 3 – 4 mm as I need to pack five of them + two strips of side hardwood into the core, and the overall width of the whole thing should fit in hand, so should not be more than 4.5 cm. Now, from these halves of planks I need to make a thin, nice, even strips. I attached a vacuum cleaner to it to collect all shavings, there was no yew dust at all. I had to draw a reference line on the yew plank, but then the cutting was very accurate, quiet, and a bit faster. I had to finish cutting the planks with a hand saw.īased on the above for cutting yew I got a hand rotary blade saw, king of like a pizza cutter but with a motor. This cuts better as I can control where the blade goes.
Overall experience is rather disappointing, this set up is not good for cutting long bamboo planks easy.
Side effects: the vibrations that the jig saw applies to the bamboo make it rattle like a machine gun against the table, to stop this I pressed it hard down, but then the vibrations go into the hand and bones and my left arm was numb for few days after the cutting. So – either cut veeeery slow (feed the bamboo mm by mm after the blade cuts through), or change the tool to something more suitable. But once the blade turns it is almost impossible to correct it applying side pressure only results in burning the blade / bamboo due to increased friction. Also the blades that I have are great for cutting in straight line as they leave no burrs (all teeth of the blade are of the same width as the blade itself, so they don’t stick out to the side, leaving a very clean, almost polished, cutting edge). While the deviation is not large (~5 mm) it is still visible on the narrow planks that I have, and on the whole length of the plank it is significant. Easy in theory, in practice the jig saw blade bends on any pressure and goes of of the center line. I added an alignment block and using this I cut these planks within 30 mins. Instead you can achieve the same cutting speed by making more lighter, quicker cuts.Īs I have learned the hard way the teeth are very sharp as well.Ĭutting several 2.5 m planks along their length with the hand saw is doable but would be a struggle and I would not get a straight cut line, so I have made a table with the jig saw attached from the bottom, so that the blade points up out of a small hole in the middle of the table.
Also the saw teeth are a bit like cat’s paws, so they bite into the wood when you pull, which means there is no need to press down hard on the saw to get a cut. Pushing down actually makes the cutting much harder as the teeth bit deep into bamboo. This allows for the saw itself to be very elastic and there is no need to constrain it and stretch the blade, as it will stretch naturally when you pull it. So instead of using your body weight to press on the wood you have to pull the saw. What is different to western saws is that the main cutting action of the Japanese saw is on the pulling move, not on the pushing. There are also other “attachments” – elements that are not part of the bow body (not glued permanently) and can be replaced, like the grip leather, grip insert, bamboo wrappings.īamboo saw cuts surprisingly easy and fast, and also leaves very clean edge without any burrs. They take some space from the inner face so the inner face is shorter than the outer face. So depending on the core setup the number of total components may vary.įinally, there are two wooden features that are glued to the ends of the bow. Then the core is a laminate of strips of bamboo and hardwood in different configurations. In general, the yumi bow consists of two faces made out of bamboo, the front face (that is on the external side of the bow, closer to the target) and the back face (the one closer to the archer).
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