Chapter 6: Violated Backs
I’ve said that you want your bow to have a clean strip of fibers that goes straight across the back without interruptions. In other words, most of the time you want an unviolated back.
Yet, not all historical bow finds have had chased ring backs and many had violated backs—most notoriously the highly esteemed English Longbow. When it comes to the back of the bow this design embraces brute force over finesse, and takes a ‘good enough’ approach to the back of the bow. There’s not always time to chase every last ring, and it may not even be a realistic goal for woods with very tight growth rings.
The key is keeping the violation to a reasonable amount: You still want to avoid as much violation as is practical to avoid.
With some woods you can get away with a lot, and it’s pretty common practice to blatantly violate the back of the bow. There should still be some effort to follow the general lay of the fibers, but it’s not strictly necessary to get it exactly right, down to only one single growth ring.
Yew wood can take an incredible amount of violation, and it seems to suffer less from violation than other woods do. Bowyers frequently say that you can violate yew but you can’t violate osage. Really there is a continuum between them. You can violate anything, somewhat… yew can just take more violation than other woods.
Many tension strong woods such as hickory and elm are also notorious for surviving violation on the back. This seems to be a property of many other close grained woods as well. For instance Juniper is often given the same treatment as Yew. Yet it also has a reputation for being brittle in tension and exploding unexpectedly. I often wonder if this reputation has anything to do with the popular advice that it’s ok the violate the back of a juniper bow.
While a violated back is historically accurate, or good enough in many instances, I still try to chase a single growth ring as much as I can. These days, prime Yew wood is much more valuable than it used to be. So I think the balance of things is that its more worthwhile nowadays for a bowyer to spend a little extra time on violating the back a little less.