broketooth-
I didn't grow up in Belgium. I've been an Illinois resident my whole life, but a bunch of my childhood and teen years were spent in the Belgian part of town. My dad is the son of two Belgian immigrants (sp?), so I'm 1/2 Belgian. I grew up shooting pop n jay archery. To answer Kenny's question I found my reply to another thread to help explain that big blunt arrow your grandpa is shooting.
That is an old tapered blunt arrow for popinjay archery. All us Belgians know that. We had this old dude name Maurice that made his own, though they weren't quite that fat on the end, and his were also fluted! All wood except for a thick phenolic ring glued to one end. I remember them to be gorgeous arrows. He shot a lemonwood selfbow with horn knocks, and I don't think he ever missed by more than 1/2"! (I might add that he was about 80 years old at the time) You were basically trying to knock a "bird" off of a rack of steel pins or rods, about 20 yards away. The original game was shooting to knock "birds" off a vertical mast, but it can be set up horizontal too. You can do searches, but here's a pic of what we used to shoot at.
http://www.belgianhall.ca/clubs/index.php You had to hit the pin, just in front of a peanut sized plug that was tapped onto the pin to knock the bird off. Simple... knock the bird off and win some money! A round would last until the top 5 birds on that rack were knocked off. In my day, the small birds were worth .50, the kalles were worth .75, sides worth about 1.50 (depending on # of shooters) and the top bird was $2.00 or more. At the end of the night, we'd have a king shoot. Everyone paid X-$ to shoot at the top bird and the first to knock it off won the pot. Everyone who paid got to shoot. If more than one knocked it off, there'd be a tie breaker round. There were, and still are tournaments where you shoot for score though. Back then, the most durable arrows we shot for this sport were microflites. It took a lot to ruin one of those.
Topic: Full draw pics (Read 4751 times)
