320 Muscle Activity of Drawing the Bow with Kyoto Bow

Kyoto Bow is a Japanese traditional bamboo bow which is made from 100% natural materials. The bamboo bow is made by sandwiching maple, wax tree and burned bamboo planks between two strips of bamboo. This configuration is similar to a hybrid composite. The perfection of the bow very much depends on the skills and sensibility of the craftsman. Therefore, it is desirable that his implicit knowledge is quantified. There are some special procedures, which are considered to be implicit knowledge, during the making of the bamboo bow that provides the bow with some interesting characteristics. The purpose of this research is to quantify this implicit knowledge in bamboo bow fabrication by using scientific procedure. In order to understand the implicit knowledge, experiments were performed in two different areas corresponding to the strength of materials and motion analysis. In the case of strength of materials, the mechanical properties of each material were characterized. FEM analysis revealed the effect of the asymmetrical core structure (Nakauchi) of the bow on the rotation moment. Motion analysis confirms that Kyoto bow is more user friendly as compared to modem composite bows. As the result, it was clarified that bamboo bow has some excellent properties come from hybrid structure.