Tillering Perfectionist Removes One More Shaving, Bow Explodes

A bow that had taken nine months to craft was destroyed in an instant Tuesday when its maker, Howard Flemish, decided to remove 'one final, imperceptible shaving' from the lower limb during what he described as a 'tillering refinement session.' The resulting failure was both immediate and spectacular. 'I had her on the tillering tree and she was bending beautifully,' Flemish recounted, still visibly shaken. 'Both limbs tracking perfectly, the tiller was symmetrical to within a millimeter. But there was this one tiny spot on the lower limb that I felt -- I felt, mind you -- was just slightly stiff.' Flemish took a single pass with his cabinet scraper. The bow, a 55-pound yew longbow intended for competition, delaminated along the grain with a sound witnesses compared to 'a gunshot' and 'the disappointed sigh of a thousand medieval archers.' 'He does this every time,' said workshop neighbor Gladys Nock. 'He gets to ninety-nine percent perfect and then decides perfection requires one hundred and one percent. The math doesn't work.' Flemish has already selected a new stave from his collection and told reporters he has 'learned from this experience,' adding that the next bow will require 'maybe two fewer shavings.' His tillering notebook, examined by this reporter, contains the phrase 'just one more pass' written forty-three times across various projects, each entry followed by a small drawing of a broken bow.