What are we going to do now?

So now I had my dream riser it was time to set it up and get it tuned. At home I took some time and made sure the centre shot was right and set a knocking height about 5mm above the rest and set the rest so that my nice new Easton Lightspeeds sat nicely with the button touching the centre of the shaft. So the first thing I did was to get one of the other members down at my club to check out that I had set up the bow correctly and had not done anything silly. Then I got all set up and put a boss out at 10m and then got to shoot my first arrow, I was rewarded with a nice thrumm-thunk and wow that was so cool I was grinning like a village idiot, it made my winstar feel like a bucking bronco by comparison. Once I had got over the initial excitement it was time to look at what it was doing and do some fine tuning. The big issue was my groups had gotten much too big in fact they were only groups in the widest sence and I mean widest. After a bit of testing it turned out that the lightspeeds were quite a bit too stiff and I changed to a set of Sky Art Sapphires with a weaker spine and that was that sorted. The only other inital problem I had was an issue with clearance, with the fletchings catching on the top of the handel and the bottom of the sight window. I had thought that the Sky Arts being thinner than the Lightspeeds would solve the problem but they did not and I almost resorted to bending up the arrow rest the increase clearance (NEVER DO THAT!), it was then that I found out you can loosen off the two screws that hold the rest in position get about 5mm of vertical movment, once again job done.

 At this point I will point out the biggest weakness of the Spigarelli......the manual, it was I am sure originally written in Italian and then I think an early 90s translation  program was let loose on it, it really is abysmal and if  you are novice you really do not stand a chance . So that was that one Spigarelli Revolution all set up and ready to shoot.

If you are reading this blog and have any questions or hints and tips about the Revolution or archery in general please do post them in the comments and I will include them in the blog.

Tony G

My own personal Revoultion

I have been shooting with my Revolution since February 2011 and was hooked from the first arrow I shot with it. I had seen it on line and read all the information I could find on it and people  really seemed to either love it or hate it. But as I have said before most of the people posting were repeating things they had heard second or third hand. So there I was looking at this riser that looked totally different to any thing else on the market and unable to find out if it was really any good, so I did the only thing I could and bought one. Now at this time I was shooting a second hand Winstar II and had just been bought a pair of Kaya Tomcat carbon limbs for Christmas by my very understanding and totally wonderful (is that too much) wife Ruth. The difference between the two bows is huge, the Winstar was fairly quiet with no too much vibration, but when I shot the Revolution it was so quiet I got looks from the other archers on the shooting line and there was almost no vibration.  So that was it love at first shot and I haven't looked back since.

 I would still advise anyone looking to buy any new riser to try and have a go with one before you buy, I got lucky but lot of archers at my club say they really don't  like the way the Revolution feels.

The Revolution

There seems to be a lot of IMHO and AFAIK posts on various  forums about the Spigarelli Revolution but very little actual information or real advice from people who use them., so I thought it was time for a change.

Of all the things people say about the Revolution, the one that they all agree on it that it is unique among risers being the only one of laminar construction. It is formed of three segments held together by seven bolts forming a triple layer sandwich, with each bolt holding two nylon bushes between the centre and outer segments.This construction is what gives the Revolution its unique internal dampening system.

 When the Revolution was first launched in the 90s it seems to have suffered two main setbacks, the first was when it was ruled to be illegal for bare bow use as it had moldings in the sight window that could be used as sight marks, this took away what could have been it's biggest market. The second  blow was from a series of failures of segments (mostly the centre one). I was not into archery at the time so I cannot comment on all the accounts, but several of them seem to be the same bow or people who by their own account had 'fiddled' with the bolts. Thus the Revolution gained a reputation as unusable (for bare bow) and unreliable riser, which does not seem to have been able to shake off.

 Both these 'problems' seem to have been dealt with now, first there was a bare bow version with a flat sight window (now the only version), and they now seem to use some sort of 'snap off bolt at the top and bottom of the riser that cannot be undone.