Pat asked me to bring some Shrews, a couple of Morrisons, and my favorite Brackenbury so he could see them. I stumbled into the range carrying all 6 bows, an arrow tube, a quiver full of arrows, and a bag with the rest of my gear. That was all I could wrap my arms around, so it was all I was going to show him! I brought my Shrew Buffalo Bow to compare with his amazingly gorgeous new Shrew Safari, my Shrew Koa Classic Hunter, the first Shrew with foam cores (a one piece Classic Hunter), a Morrison Shawnee, a Morrison ILF with longbow limbs, and my incredible Brackenbury Peerless (Peerless #3). That is a great selection of bows out of my "collection", although there are many other superb bows I had to leave at home because I simply couldn't haul any more of them around with me. Pat is going to have to come to my house if he wants to see more than 6 at a time.
After our initial greeting and the stringing and admiring of our 10 bows, we headed over to the lane on the range where there is a chronograph. Right now I will tell you that we could not get readouts on most of the shots we took (particularly Pat's shots), and the readings we did get were often obviously incorrect, so we gave up on trying to make this a true speed test session, as we had originally planned to do. We were able to get enough good readings to assure ourselves that the speeds from the various bows were about what we would suspect, and were within the fairly narrow range that we have seen from all traditional bows. Some of the bows were a little faster (like the Morrison foam carbon bows) and some a little slower (like the Howard Hill) based on the velocities that would be typical for the grains per pound of the arrows we were shooting. However, it is interesting how small the typical variations are. I have a very consistent draw (until I fatigue) and release and tend to have very consistent velocity readings (within a couple of feet per second). To give an example of the speeds we were seeing, my Shrew Buffalo Bow (68#@29.5") shoots 850 grain arrows (12.5 gpp) at about 160 fps, which we were consistently seeing when I got good readings with the chronograph at our session. That is just about what we expected from the bow, and was about average for the range of speeds, with the fastest bows doing a few fps higher to the slowest ones doing a few fps lower (when the speeds were adjusted to take into account the arrow gpp factor). Traditional archers who are on a search for speed are looking at the wrong kind of bows. Compounds can and do store more energy, and there is only so much that can be done with a linear power curve such as we find in a traditional bow.
Allan
Topic: Heavy bows and a strong guy -- Patrick Kelly and his Shrew Safari ... (Read 4973 times)
