Just a little post to show off our new indoor range, which some of our members have built, the whole of the right hand side can be removed to allow shooting from under cover. 

While I am on here I will update on my new limbs as well. I shot them on Sunday in a frostbite and I still like them a lot, I also had the first chance I have had to weight them on the bow and I got a bit of a surprise. My Kaya Tomcats were rated as 34 lb @ 28" and with them fully wound in I had weighed them at 37.5 lb, now the Uuhkas are rated at 40 lb @ 28" so with them wound out I was expecting a small overall increase in weight, what I got was 42.7 lb nearly five pounds more, no wonder they feel like hard work! Guess I need to spend more time building up my strength. I will have to see if there are any funky training aids at the European Festival on Saturday.

Feed back

OK guys been doing this blog for a while now and I know people out there are reading it but I am not getting much feed back. So either I am covering everything and getting it all right first time or I am really failing. I will publish all comments as long as they are suitable for my son to read and not blatant commercial adverts. So come on lets have some input, even if it just to say "your blog stinks I hate it". 

I got them and they are..................

OK so Christmas has been and gone and  have my nice new shiny Uuhka EX-1s. With the filthy weather and the need to be sociable over the festive season, it was not until the 31st of December that I managed to get up to the club and have a proper got with them. I did have a rather stupid go in the back garden on Christmas day (yes I know I always so don't do it unless you have a proper safe area to shoot), I just wanted to try them so shot two arrows into the lawn, or that's what I meant to do (you know it's not going to go well don't you), the first one was fine and felt nice the second one went a bit further up the garden and embedded itself in one of the sleepers we have setup in front of the throwing board (my son has no interest in archery but instead throws knives and now axes) it is only about twenty feet away and you heard the shaft fracture as it hit, when I tried  to pull it the pile and about one and a half inches of shaft stayed in the sleeper and the rest came away.
Anyway I did get to the club, had my first go in our new indoor range and shot my first indoor round. I had done a bit of setting up before hand and as I have gone up fair bit in weight from my 34lb Tomcats to the 40lb EX-1s I moved the limb bolts from all the way in to all the way out ( I am planning on getting the at least halfway back in by the time the summer season starts......where are those bands), so at 28" I would in theory be going from about 36lb to 38lb. Spigarelli recommend an 8-9" brace height and Uuhka say about 9" on a 68" bow for the EX-1s, when I first strung it up it was at 8.75" so I started there. The limbs are a little bit tight on the limb bolts so it is hard to settle them before you shoot and my first shot had a nice loud crack to it as did my second, third and forth, hmm that string is slapping on those limbs (they really do have an impressive recurve on them), time to look at that brace height. I took it up to 8 and seven eighths and it was a bit better but still there so up it went a bit more and a bit more until it hit a sweet spot at 9 1/8".

  On to shooting and how they feel, well my first impression once the brace height was sorted is that they feel quite a bit heavier than the Tomcats, after just two and a half dozen arrows I felt just about done, they also feel faster than the Tomcats with more of a snap to the shot. But of course all of this is very subjective, I don't normally analyze how my bow feels I just shoot it so when I am looking for a difference I'm going to find one even if it is not there and until I weight the bow and maybe see if I can borrow a chrono I can't really confirm anything. One thing I can say is that they feel very smooth through the draw and seem very stable to shoot even if it did seem harder to hold at full draw while settling on the gold.  I shot a Bray, my first indoor round and my first round with my new limbs, I scored 205, no records there but no too bad as that included working out a sight mark and then 2 days later shot a 220 so heading in the right direction.

  One thing I have noticed on the limbs is cracking on the decals on the back of them obviously due to the outside edge stretching as they bow is drawn and something I have seen mention by others. I did try a few shots outside from 30yrds out to 80yrds and even wound in there is a big improvement in sight marks, they went up when I changed from Skyart Sapphires to my ACGs but are now better then they were wih the Skyarts, whether I can hit 100yrds will have to wait until I work up to getting them wound back in and we have some better weather.

What to do....

Hmm... struggling for consistency my biggest problem is height, a clicker would solve the problem I am sure but I really don't want to go down that road, I have seen too many archers up at full draw struggling to get through the clicker. But it would help with my consistency so what to do what to do. 

Hello again,

I went out and shot an Albion round on Wednesday my second long round of the year so far and I was quite pleased, my score was 607. Last season I had managed to get to a personal best of 701 but then I did not shoot for about eight weeks and that put me back a bit and the winter set in and well you know how it goes. But now it is a new season and I am going to get my first class classification this year ( I think). I managed to get some groups of three four and on one end five arrows out at 80 yards, which is nice because now I can start to get my sight setup properly. I see so many people adjusting  their sight almost every end and sometimes every arrow, what is that about?

You cannot get you sight adjusted unless you have a group, otherwise it just does not work and all you do is chase your arrows around the boss. Once you have a group (all your arrows don't need to so close that they are touching as long as they are all in an area maybe a foot in diameter that's a group) you are shooting consistently and  then you can adjust your sight so that they are centred around the gold.   

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.