HH bug got me ... Part One!

[Nate Steen .]

ralph,

Your description of the bow is very generic....sorry to tell you, but there have been a myriad of "so-called Hill style" longbows made over the years that are actually a very bad representative of the style.  Certain limb woods are very 'shocky', certain limb designs create more 'shock', and reflex can add to that.  Incorporate those bad factors with a light arrow, tentative Hill-style shooting form and you have the recipe for bone-rattling 'shock'.

Please don't think the bow you shot is a good representative.  I would get a good brand name bow and try it out before you make a decision.

try Howard Hill, Northern Mist, Miller, Belcher,
Great Northern,  and a few others...  and use an appropriate arrow, and squeeze the grip with the lower fingers for starters....

[rmorris]

Thank you everyone for the encouragement. I think I will go ahead with my plans of building myself a HH style bow. I assumed that with over 300 pages dedicated to this kind of bow there must be something to it. I still have the bug and I was fairly sure that the bow I shot had problems. I knew the arrow was to light when it was handed to me but I did not bring my arrows. At the same time I know enough about how the bow felt that I don't think a 550- 600 grain arrow would help enough for me to want to shoot that bow again. I did send an email to a couple of good friends who are very involved in traditional archery asking it they have any bows in their collection. I am still super excited about the HH bows and your faith in this tradition should keep modivated to keep on till I find a bow that feels good.

[cahaba]

I agree with all the Hill type comments. Shot this 4 arrow group this morning at 20 taped yards.. I promise there are 4 in there. I was shooting my Northern Mist. Got a Hill and a Sunset Hill ordered. LOve Hill type bows!

     

Got a little to tight on this group.

[stik&string]

Rmorris that brace height does not seem correct either. Perhaps finding the right brace height would calm it down some

[Rob DiStefano]

Originally posted by rmorris:
... The only bow they had in this style was a 68" – 50# which is just about perfect for me. The bow did not give any indication to who made it but it had 4 Purple Heart laminations in the limbs and 2 of the laminations looked like they tapered towards the tips (I would have to guess about a .004/ in taper) and the riser looked to be about 15 inches. The brace height for the bow was also about 7.5 "from the grip. So the archery tech on duty handed me the bow and I asked him for an arrow so I could give it a try. For starters the arrow was properly spined but about 200 grains underweight for my preference ( it was a GT 35/55 with about a 100 grain tip) I think that is about 360 grains total.
I pulled the bow back and was very impressed by how smooth the pull of the bow was I set my anchor and released. To my surprise the bow nearly jumped out of my hand and the shock of the bow had me reaching for 2 aspirin and a glass of water. ....

if the bow was 50@28, and for arguments sake your draw is 28", a 360 grain arrow would be 7gpp - waaaaay too light and a main reason for shock on release.  you want at least a 10gpp arrow - more is even better.  if yer a bowyer, you should know that.  and you have a pm about what was in yer sig line ...

[Nate Steen .]

Aussie Jeff......great story....I like it and now you've set the bar for us in our story-telling and photos...    

I've been conversing with Rod Cam and he's got me thinking about why I do this old fashioned stuff...I like doing things the old way...my bows are like the old boys', arrows, backquivers, plaid, wool, you know the usual stuff.   But for me, this also means still-hunting, no pop-up blinds, no treestands, no high-fences...etc.  I like to "hunt" like the old guys did...not just a modern camoed stickbow shooter.....I like to immerse myself in tradition.  The techniques and methods of the hunt included.  I try to portray this feeling in my photos and stories......

It's simplicity and it works very well, but as a traditional 'group', we've been talked into modern methods as the way of the modern traditionalist......

I'm trying to show and prove to other traditional bowhunters and outdoorsmen that hunting and shooting the longbow goes hand in hand with the time-tested hunting methods too...

getting off my soapbox now....

[Rod Cam]

Nate you are the man

[Rob DiStefano]

nate, yer livin' the lifestyle and the dream - don't git better than that, sir.  

[Ben Maher]

Well said Nate .....

[Brad_Gentry]

Outstanding post Nate. That's whats always drawn me to this whole thing. "Traditional", when talking about traditional bowhunting, has always meant so much more to me than no wheels... It's the whole process. I just wish I could express it as well as you just did.

[Mudd]

Our opener is in the morning and since I've accepted the challenge of doing it without  any modern camo I think it has heightened my sense of anticipation.

I am putting my last retouch on my Hill broadheads again.

It will be Carhart bibs,plaid shirt and Fedora.

I hope I can find my cork for face camo..lol

God Bless,Mudd

[Okie man]

Don't forget your Lazyboy Mudd. Good story in TBM. I enjoyed it. Good luck on the season opener.

[MikeNova]

I remember when I started going on dog drives with my dad in 1983 all the 60,70 and 80 year olds wore alot of plaid, alot of them seemed to mix plaid and camo usually camo pants or those anti briar pants with a plaid shirt. Wool or camo jackets. Clemson Tiger or carolina gamecock caps. Yeah I get real nostalgic about the past I would love to hop on a time machine and experiance the kind of fishing and hunting those guys did. Seems back then if you wanted to hunt you could just about go up to any landowners property and ask and get permission.
My dad had alot of stories about what they used to catch and shoot and people would kinda grin in disbielief until he pulled out the pictures.

1983? You should have experienced Iowa in the 60s. I was kid with either a longbow or a recurve on a Bridgestone 90cc motorcycle,rain or snow.  There was only one property that I could not hunt on and I used his field drive to take a short cut to my favorite river bottom.  They talk about how many deer there are now, there were a lot more in our river bottoms back then and we cannot even begin to consider the pheasant numbers compared to the last 30 years..

[MikeNova]

Its not bowhunting but I really like a book called classic deerhunting stories edited by Lamar Underwood. A bunch of short stories most all written before my birth. Pavan I assure you I would love to have experianced it back then.

[Looper]

Ralph, I'm wondering if you went in the same shop a buddy of mine did to get some arrows for his r/d longbow. They sold him some 27" 3555s with 100 grain points. He was shooting them out of a 55@28 bow drawn to 26". They only weighed around 330 grains.

He called me over to help him tune his bow and see if I could help him with his accuracy. After watching him shoot, and hearing how loud his bow was, I went back home, got some heavier points and inserts for him.  We ended up using 300 grains up front, and upped his arrow weight to 520 grains. The difference was astounding. His bow went from having a twang, to nothing more than a thump.  His groups sizes shrank from 3 feet at 15 yards, to 6". To say he was thrilled was an understatement.

[Aussie Stickbow Hunter]

Well put Nate!!!

Jeff

[sticksnstones]

It's been a week since I posted anything about my switch to my Hill. The new string and arrows with tuned nocks was an essential step. I also started from scratch and moved brace back up to 6.5" and put the bottom of my nock at exactly + .5" and started over with a clean slate and some bare shafts.

I shot it another two hours Monday and the results were so frustrating I put together my recurve Tuesday night and threw a few dozen arrows just to make sure I still knew how to shoot at all and confirm that I'd have a bow for opening day if things didn't improve. All was good with the recurve so I spent two hours shooting the Hill at a blank bale, still erratically.

My last 10 minutes I thought about Roy's post about trying 3 under and I thought why not, I'm peppering this entire bale anyway.... Short story the diameter of my group cut in half immediately. Shooting a glove, one nock point, and a canted bow. It was at least as tight as my very first group out of my recurve.

Today on the bench I'm trading one brass nock point for two tied ones, and tonight at the range I'll try out the 3 under tabs I made last night. Going to start with the glove so I'm only making one change at a time and confirming.

There have been some frustrating moments on this journey, but there have been some really rewarding ones too! Who knows, maybe I'll even get a group worthy of posting a picture!
Thom

[StanM]

Great post, Nate!  Your philosophy is old school, too.       I like that.  I was just thinking about this last night after I bought a Traditional Bowhunter off the newstand.  Noticed an ad in there for a bow with "IBO speeds of 253 fps".  Not saying there is anything wrong with other peoples equipment choices, heck I own a compound (torn rotator eliminated traditional bows for nearly 4 years) and a couple of Bear recurves.  But it got me to thinking about when I first fell in love with traditional archery.

It was in the early '80's and I was a kid.  I found a copy of a paperback "Hunting with the Bow and Arrow" by Saxton Pope.  Read it a hundred times and tried to make a bow.  Then I saw a very small ad in a bowhunting magazine for a new magazine called Traditional Archery.  I ordered it immediately.  Great magazine, though it only came out about three times a year.  Never did get all of the issues that I ordered because it went under.

Last night I dug the issue that I had out just to look at the ads and see how the sport has changed over the last 30 years.  It was pretty interesting to say the least.

BTW, if any one has a copy of some of those old Traditional Archery magazines, let me know!

I have all of the early Trad magazines somewhere around here. Sorry, my kids are already fighting over the collection, so I have to keep them, especially the ones where I have articles. The one thing we had with the Overshiner tests from Longbow Shooter's Digest, was that at Louis Armbruster's place, we always got higher arrow speeds then Oveshiner came up with. We could never decide if the difference was in the chronos or in the form.