Recurve instinctive

[mzombek]

I am in the process of exposing my 12 year old son to trad archery.
I have a 25# recurve that I purchased for my oldest son years ago. This recurve was set up with sights.
I want youngest to try traditional shooting. My question is, when I remove the sights, does my son shoot off of the rubber rest or on the shelf?
Thanks for you help,
Mike

[ChrisM]

The closer you get the arrow to his hand the better, provided that the arrows have feathers instead of vains.  If you have plastic vanes then the rest it is.

[McDave]

Some bows are designed to shoot better off a rest, based on the way they are tillered.  You will have to shoot arrows off the shelf to determine whether they will fly well.  He can learn to shoot instinctively shooting off a rest, but a bow shot off a rest shoots best with the bow held in a vertical position.  If a person wants the flexibility of shooting at different degrees of cant, shooting off the shelf works best.

[RETARMY06]

When I was 12 or 13, my step-dad introduced me to archery. I shot no sights (bare-bow recurve)off a flipper rest with plastic vanes and aluminum arrows, gap shooting.
That's how he shot field archery, so that's how I learned. He did teach me however how to use crude adjustable sights for hunting with cedar arrows. Compound bows were just getting popular then.
 Flash forward to today, I'm using a longbow with no sights, both eyes on the target and shooting better than ever. Maybe it's because I'm 51 years old, but I can't do two things at once...I need things to be simple. A simple stick and string, focus on my target and I'm fine.

[Sirius Black]

Don't mean to high-jack the thread, but I think we can all learn from the answers. McDave, which tiller works best for off-the-shelf shooting: even,positive,or negative tiller? Myself, I shoot 3 under with a "0", or even tiller.

[McDave]

Probably get a better answer to a question about tiller from someone who has actually made some bows, in a different section of the forum.  However, my understanding from talking with bowyers is that the goal is to have both limbs pull and recover equally rather than to achieve a particular tiller measurement.  I think that even tiller often turns out to be the point where the limbs pull equally for 3 under, and maybe 3/16 positive for split.  But this could change with different limbs, and the deciding factor would be to actually pull the bow on a tillering stick (or whatever more sophisticated aparatus the bowyer might have) using the desired grip and observe what happens as the bow is being made.