[Archers] Flemish Stringboard for Youth Bows

[Garth Groff]

Noble Friends of the Bow,

I've been contemplating building a Flemish stringboard to make 
replacement strings for the smallest of youth bows.

The Bear First Shot and other similar 9-pound youth bows in our loaner 
kit came with a 35" string. Nobody that I know of sells a string this 
short. Even Bear does not show them as available on their web site, 
though I suspect that a call to the company would get some strings at a 
modest cost. They were very helpful when I was looking for some 
additional arm guards that are supplied with their youth bows. The big 
problem I have is the strings that come on these bows have the small 
metal clip to close the loops. While 9-pound bows have not been an 
issue, when Lord Janyn was DEM he banned such strings for bows above 20 
pounds draw. Just in case, I chose to replace all the clipped strings on 
my bows of all sizes, and had to order custom-length strings through 
Black Rhino Archery for the 9-pounders. The clipped strings can last for 
years, but Flemish strings will wear out much sooner, and I would prefer 
to be able to make my own.

A design for a typical string board can be seen here: 
http://www.stickbow.com/stickbow/features/flemishstring/flemishstring.html 
. The shortest string this board can build is 42 inches (count down the 
un-marked center pegs by twos). Adding up the two 24" sides, plus two 
cross-board runs of 2.5 inches (the adjustable center pegs would not be 
used) yields a working string length of 53 inches for the first string 
around the board. That means the working string length is 11 inches 
longer than the desired finished length of 42 inches. This 11-inch 
should be constant no matter how long the finished string will be.

I'm thinking that to get a 35-inch string, one would need a 46" run for 
the working length. This would require reducing the side lengths to 20.5 
inches, keeping the cross-board distance the same for easy working (2 x 
20.5 + 2 x 2.5= 46). Building a board like this should be easy, and I 
plan to tackle it after building some longer strings on my full-length 
3Rivers board to learn the technique.

Have any of you built or used a shortened string board? Any thoughts on 
this project would be welcome.

Yours Aye,


Mungo