The Evolution of the ARCUS Bows - 20 Years of Research and Development 

Thanks Norman! Hope it can be helpful!

Hello Norman, we do indeed use FEA analysis to design our sticks, the graduation and curve. Initially (25 years ago) I used a huge spreadsheet, but only with FEA you can get it perfect.

@@BogenmacherD neat, FEA. What FEA are you using, I mostly use MSC.NASTRAN. If you ever want to chew over FEA ideas and music instruments, please let me know, I’m always into challenges and like to freely share my knowledge and learn from others.

@@normanfreund We use Solidworks, but any other FEA would probably do the tasks for us just the same. We're not crashing cars with it or design planes anyways. The hardest bit is to find out what you want and how you want your bow to behave under different loads. So it's been quite a bit of going back and forth with ideas and designs. For the Arcus bows the bass bows were our last big project, and since we have been quite busy with the Müsing range. The woven CFRP "tubes" have completely different properties than the 0° and 90° prepregs, which caused us quite a bit of extra work. :)

Thanks! Have fun testing them!

Thanks for the feed back! That's actually a really good idea, we'll add that to our To-do list.

Making a video on that topic is actually almost impossible, as everything looks the same, only it feels completely different. So if you really want to know the difference you have to get a pair of Arcus S or P bows, one with a round, the other with an octagonal stick, and play slow spiccatto and all the other off-string bowing, and you will know.

If you are in the market for a, 8,000 $ wooden bow, in terms of sound quality you would have to spend a third of that for an Arcus bow that probably sounds better than any of those wooden bows, plus is more comfortable, faster, more agile, much more robust and virtually indestructible. With a 7-class Arcus, still less than your budget, the sound is a significant step up from any wooden bow, not matter its price. :)

Thank you so much!! We will try to shoot a video of our ARCUS workshop one day even though we won't be able to show all of our genious "inventions"...;-)

The stick and the tip are made in one piece. That's one of the tricky bits, as the stick is very thin walled and the tip is solid. If you don't know how to do it, that's one of the placed where you will fail. :)

Hi Michael, Bernd here, I had no idea, I have never been to Australia or New Zealand ever. My best guess is that it is probably just a wild mix of what I took up in the USA, Canada, England and Asia. :D

Thank you, Lauma! Glad you like it!

Yes that would be possible. You can send us an email to info@arcus-muesing.de and we'll look it up for you.

Hello Brian. When we started out 22 years ago we painted out bows. We started with piano black, but of course could have done some brown too. Then some soloists started using our bows and with their heavy playing they managed to destroy the paint really quick. This left us with two options: Either make the paint a lot thicker (including a clear coat) which would not only ad weight but high frequency damping, which was exactly not what we wanted. So we tried to make our stick so nice that we could avoid painting them. When we showed the result on the next exhibition to dealers and players, every single one preferred this finish over any of the painted version. It just needs a little bit of light and is shining and sparkling,... When you touch an Arcus bow you may be surprised how soft and warm it feels, but the best thing is that this surface is immune to scratching and to sweat, so you can play col legno for hours or play in the sauna and even after 100 years the stick will still look like on the first day. On top of that, the surface has a microscopic roughness, which stops any slipping 100%, no matter if your skin is dry or moist. So no, we have no intention whatsoever to ever give up this surface quality for a possibly ugly wooden imitation paint. All that said, I guess you have not held an Arcus bow in your hands up to now, right?

@@BogenmacherD you could change the resin color

@@calmsouls4502 Oh, you mean the colour of the expoxy resin? We have tried that, both with the Arcus and the Müsing bows, the effect was zero, nil, nothing. :) We would have to cover this sticks in a pretty thick coat of resin (or paint) to change the color, which is not a good idea as it ads a lot of damping.