My New Bow

[Ken Smith]

That's a beautiful looking Bow David. Is there a specific German model he used to base your Bow design on?

[David Powell]

His comment via e-mail (he read your question) was that rough dimensions only were borrowed and the only real influence worth mentioning is Tourte, which could describe a lot of bows. It might be the first German bass bow that he has made. He didn't say.

He did mention that he knows of no other makers that have used Osage Orange. He was certainly the only maker that was actively using it that I found when I was searching for an Osage bow. I did find two other mentions, both historical in nature. One was a baroque violin bow that was made for plausible authenticity for Daniel Slosberg portraying frontier fiddler Pierre Cruzatte, the early 19th century American fiddler who accompanied Lewis and Clark. I found the article again googling and it does mention the other maker. It was several years ago when I was trying to find any information about that wood for stringed instrument bows. It is purely coincidental that I thought it might be a good candidate among North American trees and that Martin was already making some bows from it.