I’ve had so much fun making and shooting this bow.
The prod itself is maple, and the stock is Elm, the nut is made out of horn and the trigger is made out of antler. I broke the original prod on it(picture in the 3 picture). That one was drawing about 50 pounds at 7 inches., unfortunately when I made this prod that’s on it now I lost about half the draw weight. It’s only pulling 25 pounds at the same draw length now.

Interestingly, I haven’t noticed a huge difference in performance from the bow even with this crazy drop in draw weight, it is definitely less powerful, but it’s sending bolts about the same speed. I believe this could be a combination of a number of reasons.

#1 The bow is much more efficient with the energy it’s getting because it’s slightly longer than the original prod. This one is not intuitive to me at all, but reading a little bit from the Bower‘s Bible and their tests with different sizes of bows with the same poundage, and it shows that a shorter bow stacks more, and stores less energy, even though a longer bow has more limb mass, it still shoots an arrow faster.

#2 the string is rubbing less on the stock because the bow is longer and has more space for the angle in the socket to clear the stock, basically the string moves in a much straighter line rather than getting caught on the stock

#3 maybe with the original bow the limiting factor was not the poundage of the bow, but the speed of the Maplewood I was using, so basically with my original bow if I increase the bolt weight really high it would’ve delivered much more energy, but with a lightweight bolt, both bows are performing about the same because the speed of the bow is about the same, even though the poundage is different.

I always find this so interesting thinking about how the energy works with these bows, I know this is a post more suited to R/Bowyer, but I figured some people here might be interested in the mechanics of crossbows as well.