Devastating Riser Failure on Vintage Bow!

Here's the problem. That crack is on an angle. It's not straight. It's like this up there. So it's because it's way further in here than it is here. That's not good. No. So I think I really think drilling coming in here drilling through that going all the way through and then running a dowel piece covered in glue and then overlaying it might be the best bet. I don't think a dowel is going to hold that. You don't think if we did an FR4 dowel? Because you're you're all the the shear is just going to be right around that dowel. What about? That's why I think it's going to have to be a headed bolt. Countersinking a couple screws and then overlaying those screws. That's what I think. Because normally it wouldn't come out. Well that's the deal. Normally you only have like this much and in that case you have to go all the way through and have a head on each side. But here you've got such a massive amount of hardwood that if you sunk some pre-drilled and sunk it in there I'll bet you that wouldn't just overlay this and it would be beautiful. Okay I kicked around so many ideas here but this bow is done. If it's not fit if it I mean as it is now it's a complete loss. So after a lot of different ideas without cutting this and sparring it I decided to go with deck screws. These are really heavy duty screws. They're really strong. They have a nice thread area and I'm concerned that if I put a big hole in here for a lag bolt yeah it'll hold down in here. But because there's this is compromised with a big old hole this will probably split out. So I'm so now I need to get the shaft size the drill bit size. So I'm going to go in here and measure just the size of that shaft. So we got 132 thousandths. 125 is an eighth inch. So a nine sixty fourths is going to be about right I think. Let's grab a nine sixty fourths. Looks like we only got one left and you always want to double check this. So we're going to chuck this up in a drill and put a hole. We're going to put a hole right here. Now we're going to drive this in and see how easy it drives. That's perfect. Okay so the first drill bit we're going to use is we're going to countersink this head because we don't want any resistance whatsoever. So for that I'm going to use a three eighths portioner bit. What I did is I centered this. I want as much surface area to not run the risk of this here failing and splitting out. So I got as much surface area as possible centering between here and the widest part here also. So we're going to drop it down in there. If this thing shows any signs of wiggling or not going in straight, we're going to have to do something else. We're going to run at high speed and try this. This is not smart but I don't want that thing to wander. It's going to work. Okay that's all I need for that bit. Now we'll throw in the countersink bit. There we go right in that hole. I'm going to make sure. Okay we're good. Okay good. Second bit is complete and now we drill out the 964s. So this one needs to be quite a bit in there but we're going to the first ways to get that hole in line because I don't want to run. In fact I'm going to go clear up here. I don't want it to wander. So we've got to stop here because that's not going to fit in there. All right here we go. Okay right there. Raise it up. Now we can extend that. Grab the that's going to be awful close. Let's try it. Okay so I am going about two inches. Okay I got to go a little deeper because this guy is going to sit clear in here. Just not a lot of good options when you can't, when you have to hide your repair. If I use the binding screws it'd be fixed and it would never come apart but you'd have a big hole down here. Okay just to double check it. Okay yeah we won't go through. Surgery. We're doing surgery here so we are yeah we should be perfect. Absolutely perfect. Okay I think I can take this off. All right let's go try it. The moment of truth. Okay so you can see if you look here you can see the angle of that screw and right here's the crack. You probably can't see that very good on camera. It's right here and over here it's way higher. On this side it's clear up here. So that crack is at an angle but where I put this screw it's going to hit the meat of that thing perfectly and still have a bunch of of the the cracks left to protect this hole. It still makes me really nervous to drill this in. I so I'm going to go real slow and if I feel any resistance whatsoever at any point in fact I'm going to go back out. Basically I'm going to thread that hole. I'm going to blow that out. I don't want any chips or anything building up stress and then splitting this bow. Oh that's beautiful. It's it's threaded in there lovely. It needs to basically be like a threaded like we threaded it and tapped it even though we're not. We're we're threading it with a screw instead of a tap. Still not much resistance but enough to know I got good threading. Okay blow that out and this will be the last time. When I put this in I'm going to cover this thing with glue and I'm going to stress this bow just a little bit and we're going to force high tensile epoxy into there. So it's going to be glued and screwed. The thing is I cannot cross thread. If I cross thread I've lost everything. I wish I used to have a little socket driver for this and that's what I really need. Okay that feels really nice. Oh that's that's absolutely lovely. That is perfect and that's deep. That sucker is all the threads are into that wood. So I didn't really tighten it up. What what I'm going to do to tighten it is use this as a wrench and feel how tight that is. So I don't want to over tighten. Okay that just feels amazing. Okay all right I think what we're ready for now and then after this here is all glued and screwed together I'm going to overlay this with something pretty. Probably the same color as this. Blend it all back in and hopefully if I did a good job you will have to look very hard to even find the crack. So let's pull this back out. Yeah that was in there good. So nice and tight. These threads on this here screw are nice and deep. You can see how deep they are. They're big white threads. Some of the deck screws don't have those those good threads like that. You got to be careful. I'm going to blow this out. Okay next thing is I have to rig up something to carefully stress this to open this crack up so I can force glue in. I don't want to just I could just string it but I run the risk of extending that crack way up into the riser. That's not going to happen. So what I'm going to do is put what I'm going to try to do is put a long string on here. Okay wipe the excess off here. I'm going to vacuum it again. So I can see it coming through that crack. So I've got it I know I've got up to here completely saturated with glue. So now I'm going to just push some more through. I was going to put it in the hole but there's too big a risk of creating hydraulic pressure with that glue which potentially could split while I'm screwing that together. So I decided not to do that. All right so let's go ahead and wipe this off. Now I'm going to flip it over. I've got a nice amount there and I'm going to force it in on the other side. I'm getting glue everywhere but this whole bow gets refinished so there's not much crack on this side just right there that's it. I don't see how this could come back apart but you know I've had failures in other repairs. Okay so I've pushed it all through and I wiped the excess off. So we're first going to release the string slowly. So that made it squeeze out some. Okay now I have to unstring this before I screw it on otherwise I'm not going to be able to I don't want that string putting pressure on it. So let's take it over here quickly unstring it very carefully ease this string up and over. Okay wow just just releasing that string look at the squeeze out we got. Beautiful squeeze out. Okay we're going to go clean that off and then we're going to screw it down. Loki bear are you playing fetch with Rio? Go get it! Oh went behind. I got this little ratchet this is going to work very nicely so I can tighten it up I got so much saturation it's coming out all the way up to the very top of the crack the glue is so that in itself makes me feel a lot better about this repair. Okay here's here we go I'll tell you what we're going to wipe that off one more time. Okay one more time just so we can see what the screw is doing. All right here we go. Oh yeah oh yeah it's looking so good. Oh that's beautiful. Okay I'm going to stop right there that's nice and tight let me feel it one more time. Lots of squeeze out all the way up all the way clear to where that crack starts clear to where this crack starts. Come over see this little wet line right here that squeeze out from when I tighten the screw so absolutely complete saturation of glue. So I'm gonna just okay I'm good with that I keep double second guessing myself it feels tight but yeah I'm good with that. Okay crossing our fingers that may be repaired now I'm going to leave I'm not going to wipe that off just in case I could embed some cloth fibers into that crack. I want every chance of that thing being absolutely perfect. So I'm going to put it in the oven for about 30-45 minutes not too long and when I catch you again we're going to make this look perfect. We're going to overlay this so that hole will never be seen and hopefully we're going to make it look like no incident ever happened to this bow because there's no hole here we succeeded in that if the repair holds it's going to be a perfect repair job. All right so I got it out of the oven and it looks like it's a perfect repair I got good squeeze out all the way around here the glue's real hard. I think well I know the repair worked but the question is will it hold up will it last for years and years and years. So let's go ahead and string it first because there's no reason to go ahead and overlay this until we know for sure if it's going to last. So we're going to string it and we're going to go ahead and shoot it too and see if this is going to hold. Now if it holds without overlaying this then we know we got a good repair and overlaying it is just going to strengthen it even more. If it doesn't hold there's no reason to overlay it so let's go string it up and see what happens. All right we're gonna listen for any cracks or pops or anything string it up. I twisted this string up some. When I got this bow it was very very twisted you wouldn't have been able to shoot it at all the way it was. So I took most of that twist out and I did that about six weeks ago. So let's see where we're at as far as the twist. Just a teeny tiny twist on the bottom limb. Plenty shootable. Look at the top limb. Top limb has a teeny tiny twist also but I could just correct that for now. Whenever I go ahead and tune this thing I'll take it completely out for good but just so that I can shoot it now. Okay that's perfectly straight. This one here I know which way it's twisted. I'm just going to give it a little bit look at it. Okay that's straight. Okay now I have not drawn this bow or anything since I repaired it. So we're going to slowly draw it. I don't feel anything at all. It feels good. Let's look at this. No crack opening up or anything. All right here goes. I'm a little worried about this but we shall see. Wow this this is really an incredible shooting bow. I mean completely dead in the hand. Fast and quiet with no silencers on it. Wow I like that a lot. So I'm not seeing any movement or I'm not feeling anything. I think we did a successful repair. Not really used to shooting split finger but I have to because there's no knock. That was even a bad release and that went about an inch to the right of where I was aiming. Perfect. This bow is super easy to hit with. Wow quite an incredible shooter. So I don't see any movement. It's nice and tight. Dead in the hand. I think we repaired it successfully. Very very well. Okay let's go ahead and overlay this and clean up the glue and see how good we can make it look now. This is really interesting. So you can see where that failure is but we glued that so tight with so much pressure that you literally cannot see. I think this is part of it but over here you can't see it at all. It's so tight. All right so what I'm going to do we've got to have a real nice flat area for our overlay. So I'm going to take this flat block here and I'm just going to scuff this up as flat as we can get it and then we're going to take the finish off up to our mark here. What I'm going to do just for extra strength we're going to fill this so there's not a void there and we're going to fill it with CA. It's probably going to smoke a bit here. There's a lot of surface area for that glue to grab. Okay and then we're going to fill it again. Okay that'll work. Okay now we've got kind of a complicated situation here as far as gluing an overlay on. We can't just clamp here so we're going to have to take some two by four material and make ourselves a clamping block. All right so what I'm going to do here I made this this little form to glue and that gives me square clamping and then cut this for my overlay and now it's nearly a perfect fit but just to make sure it's perfect put a piece of hard rubber on here. I glued it on here with contact adhesive that will catch any voids make sure that that overlay is super tight not going anywhere. Then I'm going to put a piece of black glass. I thought about not using this but it's going to add so much strength over that injury and it's going to cross it's going to go right over where that's cracked and then down here and it's going to make it even stronger plus I've got black um reinforcement up here so it'll match and then a piece of this which is nearly identical to the wood that they used. So we're gonna epoxy that on clamp that together we should have a perfect repair. Some lines here this has to be lined up about perfect whenever I push it down so that was gonna go there I can move it a little bit now I'm gonna get a squeeze clamp hold it in place we're gonna clamp it with more powerful clamps than a squeeze clamp we're just gonna line it up here there oh that is gonna work just beautifully and this is gonna go just a little bit up so I've got this aligned you can already see it's perfect squeeze out there okay now these here will be strong enough what I'm gonna do center that whoop that moved so that means that I'll have to start over here so move this back into position right there down okay now I'm gonna go clear over here that looks good we'll just stagger this sort of like you're tightening the lug nuts on a car wheel rim go back and forth to get it perfect and it will move it a little bit every time all right so you can see I've got absolute perfect squeeze out all the way around there and I do on the other side I just checked it so we'll go ahead and put it in the oven like this for about an hour on these older bows you've got to be really careful that they're not in the oven that long so okay all right I got it out of the oven here took the clamps off looks like we got a very nice job of overlay I pinched that down real tight cracked right here but that's fine because that's where the shelf is so that just tells me I had it on there really tight so go ahead and trim the excess off with the bandsaw and we'll clean it up and feather it and see how she looks all right that's roughed out let's uh let's see maybe I'll just clean that up with a file really quick such a giant riser really hard to clamp it safely might work okay gotta go into the riser so I don't blow that overlay off so that's where that crack was and you can't even see that where it filed of course it's kind of rough but I feel really good about this repair time will tell it holds so there you can see I filed that that was fun so now I will do the other side okay that looks really nice so there you've got the shape looks really good I'm going to feather these on the bearing sander and then we'll clean it up okay so let's uh let's quickly clean this up we'll take it to the pneumatic you cannot see where the crack is that crack is just gone that's cool the rest with the drill pneumatic all right let's go do the final cleanup and shape then we'll we'll just spray it uh just so you can see the finish we're gonna feather these real quick this old glass on these vintage bows in my experience is pretty soft so you got to be real careful when you're doing something like this that's looking pretty good it doesn't take a lot and then I'm just gonna I don't want to create a hole there so I'm just gonna come back okay that's perfect I can't feel that now I'm just going to give this a little bit more radius a little more pleasing to the eye that looks pretty good okay I like that that'll be good for the rough shape of it and then we'll do the same thing here it doesn't look like much on there but that's all it needs okay nope I'm not using that I'm gonna use this for this one then here we've got some satin rust-oleum which will work perfectly so if you can imagine we had a big crack here we had a big crack here there is no sign of either of those cracks we've got a screw that that that is that long all-weather decking screw that we put in with the ratchet carefully drilled it then we glued it we vacuumed the glue all the way through for complete saturation we had glue all the way up to the end of the crack on both sides in fact that's the end of the crack so take a look at that so the that crack extends down here but you cannot see it it's gone but that right there is actually the crack so that's pretty cool can't see it but we repaired this and hopefully the owner won't even be able to find it but I did show him pictures of it but anybody that picks it up will never ever know that it had a major catastrophic failure running right through the riser okay take a look at this now put it on pretty heavy just so you can see it but there it is and that is a beauty and I think it adds to the bow it's not original but it's got glass underneath there protecting it that little black overlay on there I think that's great I think it's beautiful so the Herder's Perfection Simbar catastrophic failure to complete repair and cosmetic aesthetic appeal again