single pieces of bamboo flooring

[CarvedTones]

I want to find one or two single pieces of vertical grained bamboo flooring; either 2 pieces of 2" wide or one piece of 4" wide. Length 6' or more, though anything less than another 6' would be waste.

 

[CarvedTones]

Replying to myself partly to bump it back onto the front page so folks just getting home will see it and also to mention I may also be interested in hickory, but pickier about the specific piece. I am looking for stock for building a bow. I made one out of white oak that was a little too thin and fixed it with fiberglass. I want to make another and use one of the preferred materials for a good strong bow that won't need glass. A hickory piece would need to be clear with little or no grain runout.

 

[CarvedTones]

I got more info on this. Using bamboo to back a bow is a good idea, but using bamboo flooring is entirely different. I just wanted to document that in case someone else stumbled across this thread and filed it away as useful information. Bamboo flooring is very pliable and strong by itself, but when it is the outer lamination (the back of a bow is what most people might consider the fron - the outside of the curve) it tears easily. Raw bamboo (cut from a large diameter stalk) is much stronger.

I ended up getting a couple of pieces of oak flooring, one rift and one QS, out of the dollar bin at the ReUse Center in Raleigh. I planed the faces, wet out a 2" strip of fiberglass tape with epoxy and sandwiched it in between. Once I get it cut down to form, I will put another strip as backing over the QS oak. I don't understand all the reasoning, but apparantly rift sawn is preferred in compression (inside the curve) and QS is preferred on the outside. The fiberglass isn't required but substantially reduces the chance of splitting/breaking.

I still would like to get some hickory, but according to some info I got from a bowyer's board, a perfect piece of oak is actually better but the tolerance for imperfections is much higher with hickory; you can get away with more runout.

 

[BumoutBob]

Andy, find your local flooring supplier and get him to show you his extra stock. Our local supplier had more wood than you could ever emagin when I went there for some pieces. This appears to be job left overs and broken boxes. It could have been 1000 bd ft, so you will be able to find what you want.

 

[CarvedTones]

Well, since bamboo flooring isn't such a great idea, the only reason that flooring is a good choice at all is that if you can find singles pieces cheap (like at the ReUse Center), you can get one stave for next to nothing. But the QS piece I found did not have any twin brothers that I could find. There were others that had the QS look, but possibly too much runout; one bowyer quotes the figure of 2 grain lines per limb (above or below center of the bow) as the max. If I decide to make more, I will probably follow some directions I found using a flat sawn wide 8/4 board. You rip QS strips out of the middle for the outer lamination and rip/resaw the sides to get the rift sawn pieces. Because I am using glass tape to sheathe, I could probably get away with less perfect boards, but reading about bows imploding during testing inspires me to be a bit picky...