Materials verse design

[Jason Kendall]

I agree with OL on this one, my friend Chad at Lost Creek Bows has been trying the foam and they are smooth but no different than his bows with other cores. Through the chrono his black glass and maple was the same as the 'foam' stuff. I think its mostly design too.

[myshootinstinks]

OL & Jason,
    That is my experience as well, from a shooters standpoint. I have been shooting bows w/ maple, bamboo, and foam.  The foam definately has a nicer "feel" to it in the draw,(in this recurve, can't compare apples for apples 'cause I don't have an identical recurve w/ boo or maple core).  Faster? Not really.  All are very close within the weight range.

[Jedimaster]

I've had a couple of foam core bows and I thought they were plenty smooth, quiet and lastly fast.  Well, I just reckoned they ought to be - they were quite a bit more expensive than similar bows with more familiar limb cores.  

What I'm saying is that I expected that performance because I paid for the bowyer's expertise, research and development to produce a very efficient and smooth limb ... and I got what I paid for.  It really made a statement when my little Orion recurve shot as well (tonkin boo) at quite a significant price difference.  Both were well designed but one employed a more modern technology and that was reflected in price.  I can at least preliminarily conclude that it is design over material that wins - as long as the materials selected are of good quality.

[mooseman76]

Will the consistency of foam ensure that each bow the bowyer builds performs the same?  I've had multiple bows of the same model from the same bowyer and some were faster, louder, stiffer, etc...  I assume this is due to the fact that they had natural cores and they may differ as OL said earlier.  So a bow made cut on a cnc machine with foam cores should be the ultimate in repeatability with each bow feeling and shooting exactly the same?  

Mike

[amar911]

O.L., I stand corrected on the weight of the foam. I know that syntactic foam is actually lots of tiny hollow glass spheres in a hard synthetic resin, not foam as we usually think of that term, but I did believe it was as light as actionboo, which is pretty light itself.

Allan

[O.L. Adcock]

Allan, I'm sure there are many desities available so some of it might be. The pieces we got our hands was supposedly the same stuff Hoyt uses and it was 20-30% densier then Actionboo but a few grains per cu/in doesn't make a lot of difference especially in bows that don't have a lot of core to start with. It would be consistant, at least in the same lot, inexpensive, and easy to machine so I can see the popularity.....O.L.