What is best material instead of horn?

For sure, nothing!
Every plastic will loose its elasticity after a few years cause the flexibilizer will disappear. Have you ever seen a modern bow made of glass-fibre lasting 200 years or a bucket made of plastic lasting more than 5 years.
You can really do good bows with modern fibres, but their few years of durability are not worth the effort to do them, not to talk about the pollution they are evoking.
Michael

I am going to make my first horn bow. I don't want to destroy good piece of natural horn. First I am going to make few test bows and than real one. So what is good staff to use as horn? I think I read something about araldite sheets too.

You can also use natural materials instead of horn. I know someone who use succesfully boxwood instead of horn. It seams to be a very good material in compression and not so expensive like horn.

Korean military bows often had wooden bellies. It looks like fruit wood. Maybe Thomas has done some research on it and knows the preferred woods. It might already be on the site somewhere.

Rapsod wrote:

What is best artificial material for horn substitute? I read (on this horum I think) about something called PHENOLIC. Is there any other material for hor substitute?

Rapsod, indeed the PHENOLIC that you mentioned can be used as a substitute for horn. It has several names depending on your location. It is sometimes called Pertinax or Paper Bakelite. It is a similar material of which they used to make printed boards for electrical appliances before switching to glassfiber boards. In fact Csaba Grozer is using a lamination technique called THR to make Asian bows. I own one - a Turkish replica in TRH. The belly looks very much like Phenolic to me. But actually TRH is Grozer?s trade secret - so that is only my guessing. :roll:

I know what peritnax is. I don't believe that pertinax is good for bows. I read that there is phenolic material made of glass fibres and phenolic based resin.


What is that movie: http://194.29.195.32/primitiivinet/pics/kassai-tv.mpg
Is there anything about bow making in it?
What is this picture: [external image]

Rapsod, to be honest, there is no true substitute for horn. But for your preliminary experiments you might be able to use the brown phenolic plates.
Please check also http://www.grozerarchery.com for the TRH mentioned.
The MPEG movie on my web site is about Kassai Lajos, the world?s fastest mounted archer. But there is not much about making of the Kassai bows, I?m afraid. Enjoyable material in any case, I watched it many times. The picture that you are referring to (with some strange text) is an extract of a so called Nostratic language poem, artificially composed by the late nostratic linguist Vladislav Illyich-Svitych. The Nostratic hyphotesis gathers almost all languages of Europe and Central Asia together to a "mother" group. The claim is that all Indo-european languages (including slavic), the Uralic languages and Altaic are related. The exeption to this are the Caucasian languages (Armenian, Tshetshen...) and Basque, of course. What impressed me most is that as a Finn I can easily follow and understand that text with some historical perspective. There is a whole story behind it but for the moment, at least, it is only in Finnish. / PV

TRH bows are made from action wood, which is by means bamboo. BUT you might be able to make longer bow with belly out of the IPE or bulletwood, which are strongest of all woods you can get. If you adjust the thickness it might work, I m working on such project myself.


Jaroslav

I can't get good piece of maple so it is very hard to get that action wood. I can get phenolic strips 5-12mm thick.