Juniper bow

There once was a juniper tree. It seemed an ugly spiny mess for years until one day, I realized Juniper makes good bows! This is the first bow from that tree, just messing around really, to see what the wood could handle. It can handle a lot. There are no straight branches on the tree so I made a deflex bow and then bent the tips with a heat gun to make a gentle reflex-deflex design.

Can I make a recurve instead? Can the wood handle 3+ inches of reflex without breaking? I'm going to find out. The wood doesn't look like much: it's spiral-grained, and some of it died and re-grew near the tip; it has lots of small knots and pins. And it's got a high crown. None of that seems to make a difference.

I had to keep the gun on the wood for about 30 minutes to get a bend out of it. This is my first experience using a heat gun to bend wood. I'm really hoping steam works better because I don't care who you are, you are going to get bored standing for an hour with a heat gun in your hand, waving it back and forth, waiting for something to move.
Anyway, this bow pulls about 38 lbs and shoots very nicely..about 64" long and 1 1/4" at the widest point. I haven't checked it for speed yet. I'm close to breaking the 40 lb. barrier!