When did string silencers become standard?

[Roger Norris]

I was putting some otter fur on a new string for my Baraga last night, and it got me thinking....I remember brush buttons when I was a kid in the late 60's, early 70's.....and I remember seeing those big old plastic star shaped things (I think they were made by the "Qickee Quiver" folks) once in awhile.

But I don't remember my Dad EVER putting a silencer on our bowstrings. I have a lot of his old stuff, several old Bear bows...the old strings I have for them were all endless loop, and not a silencer on any of them.

Today almost all of our bows have Flemish twist strings and some sort of silencer....wool, rubber, fur. When did this start? Is there any record of NA bows, or old English longbows having silencers?

Inquiring minds want to know....  

[Bear Heart]

Not sure but I do notice that heavy cedar arrows make for a quieter bow than my carbons.  Could aluminum arrows be the onset?

[JimB]

Roger,I looked through the Bear catalog CD and I see the first silencer they list in 1963,the Kwickee which was that 3 pronged,light.gray one that slid down your string,using a bobby pin to install.In '62 the show almost no small accessories like that.In 1970,they show thos black,spider or "jack" looking ones.That's all I got.

[Phil Magistro]

Roger, through the 60s and 70s we all used brush buttons but I doubt any of us looked at them as silencers. I don't recall using silencers until the late 80's.  Before that none of my recurves, including two Asbell Bighorns, had silencers.  I first remember using them on longbows during the early 90s.

[Roger Norris]

Originally posted by Phil Magistro:
Roger, through the 60s and 70s we all used brush buttons but I doubt any of us looked at them as silencers. I don't recall using silencers until the late 80's.  Before that none of my recurves, including two Asbell Bighorns, had silencers.  I first remember using them on longbows during the early 90s.

Thats the way I recall it too Phil. I was 12 in 1975, and that was my first bowhunt. But I was shooting them along with my Father way before that. I remember the brush buttons.....maybe they doubled as silencers and we didn't know it? It seems like my Grandpas Grizzly had those big plastic silencers on it. He lived very near Grayling, and would have went to Bear Mountain (as we called it back then) and had his bow set up there.

I'm going to have to call my Dad. I sure as heck would remember something as cool as beaver fur on our bows.

Seems odd to me...something as traditional looking as beaver fur on a string is a relatively new development.    :confused:

[black velvet]

I would say when shooters first realized there bow was making noise. In the late 50s I remember using sponge, rubber bands and pieces of leather shaped like a pennant with a slit to silence bows.

[Blackhawk]

Up until the introduction of the working recurve in the 1950's, hunters would only hear a "thump". Then the "twang" came along and a need arose to quieten the string to keep game from "jumping the string."

I believe I began putting that 3 pronged star-shaped rubber thingy on my bow in the mid-60's.

As bows and strings and technology advanced into the 70's and 80's, the silencer became a standard accessory.

I've found that shooting a fairly heavy arrow from a properly tuned bow (especially brace ht.) can most likely be used without silencers.  However, those beaver balls or strips of otter fur just look cool.

[Keefer]

Rodger,
 I remember that in the 70's if there was something new that made your bow stand out more then your buddy's then you had to buy it and when I first saw the gray 3 star silencer I had a set on my string,then those black and green puff balls....
 All of a sudden the Flipper rest was invented then a stablelizer was needed...
Now came a Kwickee quiver that mounted on the bow and everyone needed one...
Out of all those gagets the one thing I still like is the Puff ball and now make my own and even if the bow doesn't need it I got to have it and don't care if I lose a few feet per second cause  my bow looks naked without it to me....  

[Bill Carlsen]

I was using heavy rubber bands in the 60's....after college. In high school it was brush buttons.

[bobman]

we used a piece of old bow string from the early 60s on for silencers ,I still use the same thing

[Jon Stewart]

Dad had an archery shop on the late 50's early 60's and the first silencer I remember selling in the store was the three pronged kwickee silencer.

I have Archery magazine starting from back in the late 40's and the first silencers I remember seeing in photo's on  strings were the Kwickee 3 prong in the 60's BUT a lot of the bows had brush buttons on them.

Wonder if they worked as a silencer also.

[Roger Norris]

Thanks...interesting

[Orion]

Yep.  I must be about Bill's age.  Used brush buttons initially, but the idea was to keep brush from getting between the string and the bow limb.  Really didn't work very well for that so I quit using them.  Never thought about them as string silencers.  I do remember putting Dr. Scholl's material in the recurve string grooves and sometimes wrapping the nylon loop servings
with wool to quiet string slap on my recurves.

Sometime shortly after that, I came upon the idea of tying rubber bands onto the string.  Not original with me, I'm sure. That worked to silence the string some.  That was in the late '50s.  Just carried that practice over to longbows when I started shooting them. Somewhere along the way, I switched to wool, which is what I currently use.

[Fletcher]

The brush buttons were really common back in the 60's thru the 80's.  I thought they helped with grass and light brush getting caught.  They also helped with noise because they stopped the string slap where the string hit the limb.  I'm sure they cost us some arrow zip, tho.

[two4hooking]

I dont use them. But then my Hill style bow is pretty quiet.

[kstout]

We were using silencers in the early 70's that we called christmas trees.  They looked like minature christmas tree air fresheners about 1" long.  They looped around the string, and you pulled the pointed end thru a hole in the base to tighten them.  They wer some type of rubber material.

[Ron LaClair]

This was 1958, no string silencers on my 1955 Bear Kodiak but I did have brush buttons.

   

You can't see em here but in 1961 I had yarn on the string of my 1960 Bear Kodiak Deluxe. I use to buy a ball of yarn, and wrap around four fingers seven times (for luck) stick it through the string and clip the loops ....worked fine.

   

[BowDiddle]

String silencers, and vibration dampeners have been around for almost as long as I can remember, except in the early years all I ever saw was homemade stuff.

As a pre teen kid back in the late 60's/early 70's I remember being in hunting camp with all of the partners of my dad's business.

A couple of those guys bow hunted with recurve bows. They had narrow strips (about 1/8 to 1/4 inch wide) of inner tube in their strings, and had wide strips (about 2 inches wide) of inner tube wrapped around their limbs at the fades to about 1 inch thick, and then taped into place.

In those days I had no idea what I was looking at or why it was there, but I remember it distinctly. I now know why, and realize - Texans are very innovative fellers.

[Bjorn]

Ron you sure were a lanky dude back then!      

[Stinger]

Kstout's memory is close to mine.  In the late 60's we used to make silencers out of old tire inner tubes.  For you youngsters, back in the day, car tires had inner tubes.  I never thought of them as Christmas trees, but they were that shape with a rectangular base and maybe an inch long.  They would wear out after a hundred shots or so, but were so easy to make you just carried extras with you.