The fear involved...

I hate bow making. I love it too, but sometimes I hate it. I really do.

There comes a time in every bows life when it is time to string it. I hate that. I fight to get the string on, and once it's on I put the bow down, carefully, and step back, expecting it to literally blow up in my face any second. I stand there, waiting for a minute, listening for the first sounds of breakage, the little "tck, tck" when fibers start to break.

Only extremely rarely does it brake at this stage, however. The real fear come later. Somehow you convince yourself that everything is just fine and you get on pulling the string. Scrape off a little wood, pull it farther, repeat a few hundred times – all the way until you're close to final draw length. What I do then is I sand the bow smooth, make it real pretty and nice. Then I pull it to full draw length, the draw length I want the bow to have and expect it to be able to withstand. At this stage, bows explode too. Bang! – and wood flies all over the place. Not often, but it happens.

But let's say the bastard stays in one piece. What's next? Well, what I do is REALLY make sure the bow holds up by pulling it at least 500 times to full draw length – and a 100 or so times an inch beyond full draw, for good measure. This can also turn a bow into a pile of splinters under dramatic circumstances.

But it's not over yet. Now it's time to shoot it. I have never been able to put my finger on what the difference is between shooting it and pulling it on the tiller board in the workshop, but there is a difference. I've had bow withstand 1000s of full draws in the workshop only to have them crack during the first few arrows shot. And maybe it's not the bow per se that breaks when you shoot it, maybe it's some minor thing like a horn overlay flying off, or something.

The bow goes through all this abuse in one piece. I finish it up and sell it. And now comes another type of fear. As long as the bow is in my hands, I can figure out what's going on and it's only I who suffer if the bow blows up. But once I sell it, it's out of my hands and in someone else's. I don't know how far that person actually draws the bow, how he/she stores it, if he/she oils it and takes care of it well, if he/she increases the string height, etc. I nurture a secret kind of fear, that every time I sell a bow I'm going to receive an angry email or phone call in a few weeks time with some semi-stranger calling me a hack.

But the greatest fear I have, hands down, is that I won't be able to support myself doing this work. That this annoying, scary love-of-my-life-thing I have with bows will have to regress into the background of my life simply because I can't pay the bills with the earnings. That I'll end up full time in a cubicle where I spend every minute the boss isn't looking over my shoulder browsing bows, dreaming I had more time to make them.

If that happens, I will still be able to tell myself that at least I gave it a proper go. That I played and lost, but at least I played. But then again I fear that thought won't console me much....

Rereading this post I realize I'm probably the biggest coward I know.