All About Archery!

Choosing and finding arrows that are just right for you is as much fun as finding the bow! 

Shaft materials range from wood, carbon, aluminum, carbon/aluminum, and fiberglass.

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Finding an arrow that suits your bow is extremely important for accuracy and getting the most out of your set up.

Here are some good reads for help in understanding arrows, but remember it's good to talk to someone experienced if you can. (Reading is great for familiarizing yourself, but a hands-on how-to definitely helps to understand a bit more!).

Warning, all but one mention "bowhunter" and "hunting" (no hunting pictures); not excessively, just a heads up if you'd rather not read for that reason. They're all a bit long, but there's a lot of good info:

Bowhunting with Wood Arrows

Traditional Archery

Choosing arrows

Carbon Arrow University: [x] [x]

Fletchings stabilize the arrow's flight path and come as either feathers or vanes.

Feathers can either be natural (from a bird) or plastic feathers:

These are better for a traditional bow, they compress as they cross over the riser/shelf so they don't knock the flight path off course.

Then there's vanes, solid plastic fletchings. They're a bit more rigid than feathers and are popular with compounds:

Fletchings (of all kinds) come in different lengths, designs and colors; just like your bow, they're a lot of fun to customize to your personal tastes!

Points are the end of the arrow pointing toward your target, and there's a lot of choices for these too depending on what you're going to be shooting. I won't list them all but here's a few you might see in the archery tag:

Field points are solid points for target shooting, they can have a rounded or pointed tip, but do not have blades:

Broadheads are points with blades and come as fixed or mechanical, and are used for hunting:

Other tips used for hunting include: judo tips, stoppers, blunts, and snaros.

Nocks are the end of your arrow that attaches to your string, they come in a variety of colors and designs; some even light up so you can find them in the dark!

Still in personal limbo with job/volunteer related things, original posts have kinda been pushed to the way-side but they will come back when I have the energy to type up a decent post!

Things to come when that happens:

Strings! And what you and your bow are suited for.

Releases/gloves/finger tabs/etc - they each might/probably will get their own post because that's just a bit more handy haha.

Bow accessories - separate posts again for each one I write about

It depends! There's competitions for both compound and traditional, and they each might have different specifications for what you're allowed to shoot.

The compound bow has a system of cams/wheels and cables, and the limbs are much stiffer than a traditional bow. The cams compress these stiff limbs and magnify the power in the string when drawn.

(Compound bow with a cam and wheel system.)

(Compound bow with a dual cam system.)

Unlike its traditional cousins, the cams provide a feature called "let off".  The "let off" point is once you draw to a certain point, the amount of weight you're holding is reduced; the amount of let off varies from bow to bow. For example, if your compound has a draw weight of 50# and has a 10% let off, you're holding 45# at full draw. I've heard of some compounds having so much as 80% let offs!

A downside to compounds is having so many parts, there is more that can go wrong. They can also be costly to repair, as you need a bow press to be able to get the string off and replace parts; and that's something you don't normally have lying around at home haha, and you'll need to take it to a shop.

Hi there! We've got a couple new faces so I just wanted let them know and remind everyone that submissions are very welcome! It's always exciting seeing people shoot! Doesn't have to be a shooting session either, if you want to type up something informative for fellow archers that's cool too! If you have any questions or are curious as to what posts are coming up (or any suggestions on what I should cover), just click the Fire Away.

But that's not all, if you're building a bow we'd love to see it! I'd really like some bowyers to submit their work, until then I'll go search through the archery tag haha.