THE TORSION

Whenever you watch bows to ascertain if they are crooked, you will find  out that some  of them will be clearly crooked, while other just seem like that but they are not. Most probably they are twisted .

Apart jokes, the non alignment between frog and head is sometimes misunderstood by non-expert watchers and it is considered as a direction problem but, in fact, it is not the case, or better, the visible effect is the same but the cause is totally different.

It is obvious that, if frog and head are non perfectly aligned, when we stretch the hair and the bow is submitted to a tension, we receive the impression of a crooked stick. In fact it is not crooked, if you try to release the hair and watch the bow as M° Daniel Navea Vera is doing, you will succeed in understanding which is the real problem.

The bow has to be held with both hands and set straight in front of you, at a 45° angle in relation with the ground. This position may appear a little bit funny, but it will give you many good parameters to be watched and compared and, as already told, comparison and watch are very important to understand bows.

In this position, preferably in front of a white wall that will help you to increase the contrast with the dark colour of the bow, bent your head downwards and look at the frog until you see both eyes, trying to place the stick among  them. In this moment you can see the two “eyes of  mother of pearl” of the bow and both sides – left and right – of the “ring”.

Rotate the stick on its  axis until you see the same portion of both eyes and consequently the two parts of the ring (Please note: it may happen that both eyes are not properly mounted, in this case it is better to concentrate on the ring, being the most reliable parameter out of these two)

At this step , having settled all visible parameters on the frog, do not move your head but raise your glance until you see the head of the bow. This is the crucial moment of this phase, now we have to found the references to be compared with those ones of the frog; the references, on which we have to concentrate on the head, are the “cheeks”and the “throat”. If the bow is without any torsion you will see , as showed in the picture no. 1, the same portion of throat and cheek on both sides of the head.

If, on the contrary, as shown in the picture no. 2, these two parameters appear as non-equal on one side and the other one of the head, it surely means that the bow has a torsion.

With the exception of a mistake by the bow-maker while making it, as an improper alignment of the octagon faces, every bow suffers from  a left-way torsion.

The reason why all bows tend to turn leftwards is to be researched in the nature and how a tree grows, I will explain it in details in my next blog “THE BOW IN THE TREE”

So long

Paolo