Monday, March 2, 2015

New stablizer, new target.

I am in the process of slowly upgrading my archery gear. The first thing I upgraded was my target. I have been shooting at stacked up cardboard boxes. They were fine for the recurve not so fine for the compound bow. Precision of the modern bow combined with power and I was blowing right through the boxes. So I spent 50 bucks on amazon, and bought a Morrell Yellow Jacket target. Vast improvement. Stops arrows dead. They come out like a dream and it's holding up better than I expected. If you're interested in archery, don't waste effort trying to figure some homemade rig. This is far better and not much more expensive than anything you could make. Heck I prefer it to the targets at the range "near my house" (which is nearly 45 minutes away). I took some PVC from the hardware store and built a sling for it. You can see it here (backstopped by my old cardboard target.

old stabilizer and sling above no longer attached. New stabilizer below.
The next improvement was less for performance and more for comfort. New bows have limbs that come out of the riser nearly (or exactly) parallel to the ground.So when the arrow is released the energy from the top limb releases up, and the bottom limb releases down, and they (mostly) counteract one another. My bow is not new. Not by a sight. So the limbs both release forward. Which causes a ton of vibration in my hand. Also the sling that I had/have was made out of a fleece material that was making my hand sweat and itch like crazy. So I decided the first component upgrade I would make was a new stabilizer (one that did a better job of absorbing vibration), that also happened to include a new sling. Now the new sling is nothing fancy, it's braided nylon that attaches to a metal bracket that sits behind the stabilizer, but it's sturdy enough, and it doesn't make my damn hand sweat. I'm super happy with the vibe dampening effects. I'm getting a fraction of the vibration in my hand. I'm not a good enough shooter to notice the stabilization effect (or lack there of). Over all, I'm super happy with the upgrades. More comfortable shooting is (generally) better shooting.
More updates when I have updates to update.
Mahalo.