Ya... That's what makes archery so interesting is all the different philosophy. You can take most of it with a grain of salt if you ask me...
Its all really just a personal preference thing. Every bow you shoot has different characteristics to it that either makes it appealing or not. I believe a good experienced archer can pick up most any bow and become pretty accurate with in a very short period of time, but it's really tough to do that without being able to establish a solid anchor point for me.
The old recurve vs long bow thing has been around for ever.....Both can be deadly accurate, but the feel of the draw, and the balance of the bows are quite different. But the way the bow fits in your hand, the grip shape, and pressure point applied to the grip makes a huge difference between these two types of bows.
The old school straight grip, dish, and slight locator grips you see commonly on ASL, string follow, and slight r/d long bows all have one thing in common, and that's a slightly lower pressure point on the grip with a more hand contact on the riser, and are often seen shot with a cant that matches your natural wrist rotation from 1-2 o-clock angle, even when standing vertical. The draw cycle on these long bows are typically lower pre load and come back effortlessly the first part of the draw cycle and steadily increase with the draw to anchor. This effortless feel of the low weight early in draw cycle, in an ultra light mass weight bow is highly coveted by many, but has the disadvantage of excessive hand shock, and loss of performance in draw weights less than 60#. Once you start getting into 70-80# draw weights and higher, these bows can perform really well with heavy arrows and have much less hand shock.
Another thing seen commonly on these long bows is the arrow shelf is rarely seen cut past center, and on some of them, no shelf cut out at all. With these type bows the arrow is tuned to flex around the riser, and gripping or torque on the riser has less effect on the arrow shaft.
Then you have the high performance R/D long bows.... These have much higher preload at brace height and have a lot more early draw weight in the draw cycle. These Hi-pro long bows can meet or even beat the best recurve performance out there if designed right and balanced perfectly.
The recurve bows typically have a sculptured hand grip with a slight wrist rotation angle built into them, and are designed to shoot with a higher pressure point on the grip and higher wrist angle putting most of the pressure to the grip just in the web of your hand, and thumb pad only. These type risers are commonly shot with an open hand, or very little finger pressure at all. When training for target shooting it's always pointed out to never "Grip" the bow, but draw with an open hand, and just relax your fingers. Never applying any torque to the grip.
Some of the RC bow design's often have a deeper past center cut riser that allows a closer to-center shot capasity with stiffer arrows and less sensitive to exact arrow spine tuning. These are commonly shot with the bow in a vertical position, although can bet shot at a cant by bending at the waste with proper full draw alignment at full draw.
The pros of the recurve design is higher performance with a shorter over all bow length.But A high performance static tip RC design typically has much higher string tension or preload at brace, and the early weight in the draw cycle is very noticable. A straight long bow with low preload will only have 2-3# per inch weight in the first few inches of the draw, where a hi-pro, high pre load bow will have as much as 6-7# per inch in the exact same 50# draw weight . But.... After the initial few heavy inches, the pounds per inch drop way off creating a let-off feeling in the draw cycle that is very desirable to many. If the RC limb design is good, it can be drawn much further without it stacking up with less PPI at the tail end of the draw ,and give you a much better string angle to help get off the string cleaner...
A lot of this stuff most of you guys already know.... Sorry for getting long winded here.....
Bottom line is there are a lot of different bow designs that all have their own feel. Once you find one that fits your preferences, your accuracy will excel. It's the archer that makes the bow perform well, and all of them can get er done.... Kirk
Topic: New bow start (Read 6506 times)
