Will's Bow part 2. Cambering.

When the stick is planed out to an oversized taper the cambering or imparting of the bow’s curve begins. Apart from the quality of the wood, the camber is probably the single most important element of the bow’s playing quality. You could compare it to a violin’s arching. Each bow-maker has a personal idea of what constitutes an ideal camber. Camber gives the bow its feel, contact, flexibility and level of power and it works hand in hand with the bow’s graduations or taper. The camber is also where the maker relies on his intuition or sense of what will feel right because these things are so hard to quantify. Sometimes after many years a stick can warp a little or lose a little camber. This can be restored but if the restorer does not respect the maker’s original intent, the bow’s original camber may be lost forever.

If heated to a certain point, Pernambuco wood can be bent and maintain that curve indefinitely. We heat up a few inches at a time and slowly put in the curve we have in mind. Every bow I make has the camber traced on a strip of mat board and this gives me a reference to refer to as I camber. But each bow ends up a little different depending on the wood and the requirements of the player. Will and I have discussed his bow in depth and he has tried several bows belonging to a colleague so I now have sense of what should work.

Here Charles Bazin is cambering a stick. In Mirecourt the bowmakers would go to the bakery when they swept the coals out of the oven. They would fill an old ‘Marmite’ or Dutch oven with coals and use them for cambering. I use an old fashioned hotplate with an exposed element to give the same even heat but in other traditions an alcohol lamp is used as well.