Hello. This is my first post here, so I'll give a brief background. I've been shooting trad bows off and on for the past 7-8 years, but mainly just casual target shooting, both backyard and at a couple local ranges. I started off with an old Bear longbow (don't recall the model name) at 51#@28" (somewhat less at my 26" draw) and a Martin X-200 at 40#@28". A buddy of mine broke the Bear trying to string it without a stringer a few years back and I traded in the Martin and bought a customized Howard Hill Wesley 70" at 48#@26", and later a HH Bobcat 62" at 30#@26" from Craig Ekin. These are my current bows.
I recently bought some Gold Tip Ultralight Entradas for the little Bobcat, just to see how I liked them, since I'd read and heard for a long time about the straightness and durability of carbon/graphite shafts (I've always shot cedar for the most part). I've been very impressed with both aspects of the GT arrows.
In any case, after several years of hunting only with guns, I've started looking into the possibility of taking game (up to deer size) with my Wesley. I'm thinking about going with some GT arrows for this purpose, but I'm not sure about the length I should start with. My entradas are 28" from insert to bottom of nock groove with 4" rw parabolic feathers and 100 gr. field points. My cedars for the Wesley are the same length, but with 5" barred shields and 160 gr. field points. Both shoot very well, but after reading a bunch of stuff here, it appears that not only do I have to worry about spine and OAL, in a hunting arrow I need to also look more at forward balance and overall arrow weight (two things I haven't been too concerned with up to now).
What I'm looking at are some GT Traditional Hunter shafts in 3555, with three 5" rw shield feathers, 100 gr. brass inserts, and 150 grain Woodsman heads (as a starting point). At 28" that would give me about 510 grains overall, including shaft, nock, insert feathers, and head.
I've been thinking, though, that leaving the shafts uncut or cut longer than 28" would give me a few extra grains of weight to play with, but I'm unsure how spine would be affected. Would the shafts be too limber at, say, 30-31"? I hear that in a non center cut longbow, less spine is desirable, so I'm taking that into consideration, too. The thing that has me confused, though, is how to put it all together and figure the math with my shorter than AMO draw length, since everything seems to be measured at 28". I know you have to test out arrows with each particular bow to get good tuning, but I'm just looking for a good starting point for now.
Any help appreciated.
Topic: Gold Tip traditional questions. (Read 250 times)
