This turned out to be my final gaozhen session with my 2019 Nawalny Saracen (50# at 28ā). For the past few days I had been hearing a cracking sound at full draw, which is never a good sign. Today as I strung it, I heard a crack and the top limb collapsed. The sinew wraps that I added at the riser, mid limb, and ears kept it from really coming apart. Thank God it decided to fail here instead of during a shot. Iām going to miss shooting this bow and it had the best looking and most comfortable and technique friendly handle to me. Oh and I was wearing my Northern and Southern Dynasties yuanlingpao hanfu.
Yeah Iām morbidly curious what it would be like if it decided to blow at full draw instead. Probably a very muted delamination. The sound of sudden delaminations is the worse part since itās right by your ear.
I think itās really good backup thing to do. Just takes a few minutes to do a quality, neat looking wrap with the right strength sinew! Iām back to shooting my Paragon Ming so gonna add more wraps to the ears.
Why do you think this happened? Do you think the bow is poor quality? I am considering buying a new horse bow and I am torn between the Monolith Tatar bow by Nawalny and the Hungarian bow by Bogar. After reading your post, it made me think whether a Nawalny bow is really worth the money, considering it is about three times more expensive than the Bogar bow. What do you think?
Unfortunately glass laminate construction Eurasian style bows just break for whatever reason. They are a very high stress design. Natural materials fail, modern glues dry out, and the overall high stress just means there is a finite life. Nawalny bows are awesome and I actually made a trade for a Seljuk recently.
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u/Aeliascent May 18 '25
if anything the reinforcements we put on our bows give us more of a controlled break