Hey fellas,
I have a black bear magnum coming in soon, I got it on a decent deal. We'll see the shape of it. It's AMO 52" like a kodiak mag, but if you look at it closely it's hardly a recurve bow like the k-mag. I've looked through the catalogs and found the '77&'78 that has it in the lineup, and it's strung length is 51' advertised, so I'm assuming it really is more of a R/D than the recurve k-mag.
I can't find much information on them. Anyone here with experience have an idea on BH to start tuning when it gets here? Anyone have any experience with this particular bear bow?
To the best of my old memory, The Black Bear Magnum was a cheaper version of the Kodiak Mag, built for the "Big Box" stores. (K-Mart, Sears, etc.) It was built on the Kodiak Magnum form, with a solid piece riser, and no overlays. If it's a 52" AMO and listed as 51" strung, my guess is, it has the wrong string on it?
As for a brace height 8-1/2 8-3/4 inches should be a good starting point
Here they are from the same '77 catalog. You can see the difference in limbs, and the BBM doesn't have grooves on the limb to keep the string centered either. K-mag at 49" and BBMag at 51". I wonder if brace height would still be about the same between the two?
I know that the black panther models were for big box stores, and that they were never in the catalogs. I wonder if it was just a newer design that got rapidly overshadowed by the up and coming compounds? It looks a lot like a shrew bow to me when strung.
Definetly look different!? Still a recurve though. The shorter ones always seemed to have more "curve" due to the angle of the limbs coming off the riser.
Like the difference between a K-Mag and a Grizzly.
I have a bunch of old Bear recurves and all of them seem to shoot best at about 8-1/2 inches
I had a Black Bear Hunter, and a Stag Hunter that had blonde maple risers, and didn't have string grooves or tip overlays