Thursday, September 1, 2016

Rehairing a bow

Most of the tools needed to rehair a bow are available at the Dollar Store. How's that for incentive to learn?

There are great tutorials out there on YouTube, which you should watch, but they do usually show using a jig that you don't have. Just use a C-clamp.

First: order some bow hair off of eBay. Get a lot of 5 hanks or so, so you have some to practice on. The cheap bow hair I got from China was advertised as Mongolian stallion hair or whatever, but I doubt it was. Just get white real horsehair, not synthetic and not black -- that's a different texture.

Clamps; leather or towel or something to pad; nail punch or screwdriver to poke with. Also: hair clips, floss, toothbrush, comb, candle, Super Glue (liquid not gel).

Hopefully your wedge, tip, and frog plugs are intact and you don't have to carve new ones. They are supposed to be maple. You can buy those from eBay too. I have carved new ones and it was so hard I'm not sure it was worth it! They are available on eBay too of course.

This is the shape the plug should be:

http://www.maestronet.com/forum/index.php?/topic/318696-rehair-bow-plugs/

Now, watch a few youTube tutorials.

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Some tips for beginners:

Add about 20-25 extra hairs to your 150 count to account for loss. More than that and you'll have too much bulk in your tips to fit the plugs properly, but you definitely will lose some along the way.

Use a C-clamp to hold it for you. I sandwiched it in cowhide shoulder which was perfect but I bet a washcloth or hardware rubber cloth would work fine.

Tie the end of the hair with the floss; trim; burn; brush off the char; apply Super Glue; dry; then root. The Super Glue is NOT supposed to hold the hair in the bow, just to hold the hairs together to each other.

When rooting the tip and the frog, make a sandwich - hair in the hole, rosin powder in on top of that, then wood plug. Smush it in good with the nail punch. The rosin makes everything much less slippy.

Do not forget to slip the ferrule on the hair before rooting the frog! I have done that almost every time.

Smush the crushed rosin into the hair with your fingers, then brush with the toothbrush. Otherwise it takes forever to apply enough.

Do be careful not to introduce any twist in the hair between tip and frog, I comb tangles, brush taut, apply barrettes every 6-12 inches, and tie the barrettes to the stick with rubberbands to keep everything straight. An extra pair of hands comes in pretty handy if you can recruit them, too,

Run the bow hair over the candle flame to shrink the hairs nicely. Pull out any hairs that are too loose for this to fix.

If you don't like the first result, try again. You will get lots of practice because your first job will probably lose hair faster than a professional job, but that's OK.

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