Fastflight on Perks longbow

[Beleg]

Hi all,
I bought a Perks longbow last weekend from Chase N. Nocks on here (really enjoyed meeting and having a yarn mate), and I have been having an absolute ball shooting it this week.

I want to get a new string for it, probably a flemish fastflight job, but I thought I better check if it would go alright on the Perks as I've heard some bows don't like the fastflight.


Cheers,
Steve.

[Glenn]

Steve, the Perks will have no trouble with fast flight string provided the string is made properly with the correct amount of extra strands of dacron to pad the loops. I shoot fast flight on all of my bows including selfbows without any tip overlays at all, and have done so for many years....Glenn....

[Beleg]

Thanks Glenn, I just wanted to make double sure before I ordered a string off Coach.

Also, I am using 50-54# Sitka spruce shafts 29 inches long out of the longbow, which is 48lbs at 28inches. The bow has a shelf but not cut to centre.

Are they the right spine shafts? They seem to fly OK but some people say they would be too weak, then I read somewhere that you need a weaker spine if your bow is not cut to centre.

Sorry for the newbie questions,

Steve.

[Benny Nganabbarru]

G'day Beleg,

By my calculations, they may be a little weak. Not everyone uses / agrees with this formula, but it works for me. Anyway, nothing like trying them to find out.

The formula I use to put me in the right zone is:

Draw weight at your length plus five pounds. Plus five pounds if using modern, low-stretch string material. Plus five pounds if shelf is cut to or past centre (yours isn't). Plus five pounds for each inch of arrow over 28". After 145 grains, plus five pounds for each 25 grains of point weight.

There's the limb design which has an effect, too, and I'd be tempted to plus five for a fast design. Individual shooting style can also have an effect. Then there's the complication when you get into the heavy spines for heavy bows that the five pound increments aren't as different as lower down, which actually makes it easier to select for heavy-ish bows, but now I'm just rambling.

So, that's the formula I use, and it has served me very well indeed, but there's nothing like shooting a few different arrows up-close through paper to let you know what spine range you need.

Cheers,

Ben

[Glenn]

Steve, dynamic arrow spine hinges on a lot of things as Ben pointed out but I would be looking at trying some 45#-50# spined shafts as well.
The less a bow is not cut to centre the more it has to bend around the riser when shot so therefore the weaker they will need to be. You can tune your shafts to your bow by by cutting the shafts lorger or shorter and by using heavier or lighter points which will effect the arrows dynamic spine.....Glenn.....

[GrahameA]

Hi Ben

By my calculations, they may be a little weak. Not everyone uses / agrees with this formula, but it works for me. Anyway, nothing like trying them to find out.

IMO. Better than many. It at least takes into account items that will vary the performance.

[Coach]

Steve, the Perks will have no trouble with fast flight string provided the string is made properly with the correct amount of extra strands of dacron to pad the loops.

Do you only use Dacron ? Why not pad the loops out with the same material you use to make the strings ?

Beleg , order away mate

[Benny Nganabbarru]

I'm curious about the same thing, actually, Coach. Glenn, can you use extra strands of the modern, low-stretch stuff to pad loops, or must it be dacron for padding?

[Coach]

My take on the situation is ,, you want a thicker loop , thats why you pad them out . Anyway , just for the record , I pad the loops out with the same material the string is made of and have never had a complaint

[kimall]

Its a good way of getting rid of all this b50 laying around after we found out about 8125.
Cheers KIM

[Glenn]

I use dacron to pad the loops because I find that the loops will stay a fair bit softer and thicker than the modern thinner no stretch string materials. When I padded the loops with fast flight the loops seemed to pack in hard and because I wanted to shoot the non stretch material on selfbows I started using dacron to pad the loops which do stay softer. I make 2 lay strings as against the 3 lay strings because the loops will stay a bit bulkier and softer as well, the 3 lay strings lay into a thinner-harder diameter string loop.
I had a longbow come back a while ago, the owner had a new fast flight string made for the bow and the loops weren't padded at all and the tip of the bow had been cut clean off. If the loops had of been padded this would not have happened....Glenn....

[Coach]

So are you saying that if an endless string of the new material was made and used on your bows , the tips would get cut off ?

[Dennis La Varenne]

Beleg,

You write that

They seem to fly OK

.

If your arrows fly OK, they ARE spined correctly for your bow. You don't have a problem at all.

Don't mess around with anything if it works. By all means learn the guiding principles of good arrow flight, but that's what they are - guiding principles - so that you can undertake a methodical assessment of what is happening IF you arrows happen to fly badly. Don't take too much notice of anyone trying to tell you that your arrows are underspined/overspined or anything else if they fly away from you showing only their nocks.

Bad arrow flight, by the way is where the arrows wave you goodbye (porpoising) or waggle at you (fishtailing) or veer sideways in a curved arc of flight as they go away from you. It does not include arrows which merely strike high, low, left or right of the mark. Those things are easily corrected on the bow by varying the amount of bow centreshot, arrow weight, centre of gravity or, more rarely, the bow's tiller.

John Perks used to make his longbows bows about 2-3 mm out of centreshot (at least, mine were) and shot almost any spine that I put through them. My only problem with flight was in using arrows which were seriously underspined by 5- 10lbs +, when you would hear them slap quite loudly against the arrow plate and bounce off the bow and wriggle to my left (I am a right handed shooter) by as much as a couple of feet at my home 18m range.

There are various formulae for working out the required spine for bows taking into account many/all of the factors which Ben Kleinig outlines. Your only problem will come possibly, when you decide to use arrows of another shaft material, feather size and head weight to that you are using at present. Use them to guide you in your selection of materials, but they won't guarantee optimum arrow flight - they just reduce the chances of it happening.

There is also the very real prospect that you may have no problems at all if you try other combinations of the above. I have used wood arrows in my glass backed and faced longbows which ran from 5lbs underspined up to 15lbs overspined without a single instance of bad arrow flight. There is also the corollary to the guiding principles of good arrow flight, that if you believe that your arrows will fly badly if you do not adhere to some formula, then they most certainly will. It is a mind thing.

As Glenn refers to above, there is a principle of dynamic arrow spine which is how the arrow actually behaves in flight and can really only be seen on high speed film, and that of static spine which is simply a measure of how much a shaft bends when a 2 lb weight is hung from its centre. Static spine is the only way we really have of measuring arrow spine on the home workbench. It is the number you refer to when you say your arrows are spined for 50-54lbs at 29 inches. Predicting what will happen in flight from a set of measurements done when the arrow and it components are laying on our workbench is a very rough guide indeed. At some time in your archery future, you will use a set of arrows which the textbooks say should not work at all, but they will. The trick of this bit of magic is to work out why.

In regard to non-stretch sting materials, the tips on Johns bows were quite thick and robust and would easily take a modern synthetic non-stretch string. It does help if you pad them out to make the loops thicker because a same strand string of fastflight or other similar material is much thinner than the old B50 and can crush into some of the less dense core woods used in glass-backed longbows and recurves. John used mainly Rock Maple back then which is quite hard and well able to stand fastflight types, but it does no harm and will not impede the performance of your bow if you have your loops padded out a bit.

Like Glenn, I too have used fastflight on my selfbows without the slightest problem ever since it first came out and most of them were without any form of padding. I could get away with it because I used mainly Osage or Australian hardwoods which are very hard indeed and have very high Janka hardness ratings (resistance to crushing). Rock maple too has a pretty good Janka rating.

My only caution with using fastflight would be on thin cored bows or where the core material is from a softwood or one of the less dense hardwoods. But, that would depend upon you knowing exactly what core material you have in your bow. Even then, a well padded loop could make the difference. The padded loop simply spreads the bracing/drawing strain over a bigger surface area of the nock surfaces.

My personal view is that it doesn't make much difference what material you use to pad your loops with, only that they are padded up to fairly well fill the nock groove of your bow.

Hope this elucidates a bit.

Dennis La Varenne

[Benny Nganabbarru]

Dennis, that elucidated quite-well, thank you!

How does bamboo compare to the Aussie hardwoods with a view to using low-stretch string on one with no tip overlays, and a wedge of glass or something between the laminates?

[Dennis La Varenne]

Ben and everyone,

I cannot find any Janka hardness figures for bamboo as it is not classified as a normal structural timber. However, a simple test of pressing a small diameter ball bearing into it from the side using a known force and comparing the amount of indentation with a known hardwood using the same force would yield a pretty good result. That is similar to the technique the wood engineers use for their Janka hardness testing.

For a simple home workbench test, try compressing a small diameter ball bearing of say 5mm against a bit of bamboo in a vice and carefully note the number of turns it takes to get the ball bearing to sink into the bamboo for half its diameter. Put the pressure on very slowly or the bamboo will split. Do it from the side and NOT against the outer rind. You will need a fairly thick piece of bamboo to prevent splitting - perhaps 10mm square or larger.

Try the same test against a bit of Osage or Grey Ironbark or other known bow wood and you will get a pretty good handle on how hard bamboo can be. Bamboo tends to be quite hard, especially if it is heat tempered. Osage (Maclura pomifera) certainly has no difficulty standing non-stretch string material in any bows I have made from it although I cannot find a dry Janka rating for it although the US Ag Dept's Forest Products Laboratory book - Hardwoods of North America (Harry A. Alden) - lists a Janka hardness of 9.1kN when wet which is pretty hard anyway. One could postulate (cautiously) that its hardness may increase by 25%+ when dry.

Rock maple (Acer saccharum) with its Janka hardness of only 7.3 stands non-stretch string material well unless it is very poor quality as do Victorian Red Ironbark (Eucalyptus sideroxylon and tricarpa) or Grey Ironbark (Eucalyptus paniculata) both with Janka hardnesses of 13 and 14 respectively according to Bootle (Wood in Australia). Queensland Red Ash (Alphitonia excelsa) with a Janka hardness of around 8.4 is susceptible to crushing when held even in a well padded vice when being worked, but I have not noticed it to crush in the string nocks when I have made bows from it and strung them with non-stretch materials.

The above test is quite simple and easily replicable so long as the same technique is followed each time and notes are kept on your testing.

Another principle in regard to the Janka hardness testing system is that generally, woods tend to be harder at the end-grain than on any other surface. The endgrain is the surface generally exposed to the non-stretch string material in wood cored and self bows.

Finally, like Glenn, I have never experienced a bow failure when using non-stretch string material except for a close call at my first attempt on a glass backed and faced bow with a core material of Tasmanian Celery Top Pine (Phyllocladus asplenifolius) with its very soft Janka rating of 4.5. This bow showed definite signs of crushing of the wood in the string nocks until a Flemish string with well padded loops was substituted. Further crushing was prevented thus.

Endless strings can also be made with padded loops by over-serving 3 or 4 extra strands laid against the intended loop area, but the string loops tend to be very rigid even if quite functional.

Regards,

Dennis La Varenne

[Brumbies Country]

Dennis

Thanks for that information. This is an unrelated question but you've accumulated alot of knowledge about these things. Is their documentation that bamboo was ever used in laminated ELBs before 1900?

Regards

Simon

[Coach]

OK , lets get back on topic re the strings .
You have FF compatible bows , does this mean they have reinforced tips and the strings dont have to be padded ?
And then we have people saying you can use FF for older bows that werent made with FF in mind , but it is OK as long as you pad the loops ?

Then we have Dennis saying that endless strings with an extra 3-4 strands in the served loop area is ok . I pad my loops in a Flemish string with 6 extra strands . But with an endless string , the loop is served ,, and to me , that makes a "saw" edge on the loops , due to the serving and 3 extra strands is gunna make bugger all difference .

So what the hell is it ? Is a bow truly compatible with FF , or is it a case of , so long as the string has thick loops it will be OK ?

Does a FF compatible bow need padded loops or not ? Surely if a bow is made to be FF compatible it shouldnt need padded loops If it does , then it really isnt FF compatible , as older bows can also use them and they werent FF compatible .
Confusing aye ?

[Beleg]

Thanks for all your responses, heaps of information for me to digest. From all of that I take it that fastflight is OK for my bow if the loops are padded, which they generally are. I will get a String King string soon.

As to arrows, there is some great info there too. I should have mentioned that those arrows I am currently using have 125g points on them. I also should have mentioned that the arrows seem to be OK to my very untrained and inexperienced eye, haven't done any tuning at all. When I am able to shoot reasonable groups I will do some tuning, at the moment I am sorting out my form with the trad gear, as well as learning how to shoot instinctively.

The rabbit trails are wonderful, and informative, don't mind where the thread ends up at all.

It's funny, I was talking to a bloke about the Janka hardness of Australian timber just today. He showed me a bit of Bull Oak (allocasuarina luehmannii), which has a Janka rating of about 22, the piece was incredibly heavy and dense, a beautiful timber but prone to 'shakes' apparently. Might be good for footing a timber arrow, if you could find a decent piece.

Dennis, that was great info about the Perks bows, I was actually wondering about the history of the bow, i.e. who made it, when, where, what the wood is in the riser and limbs, etc. Any other information would be greatly welcomed.

Cheers,
Steve.

[greybeard]

When I am able to shoot reasonable groups I will do some tuning, at the moment I am sorting out my form with the trad gear, as well as learning how to shoot instinctively.

If you don't tune your bow and arrows how will you shoot reasonable groups?

Take one step at a time.

Daryl.

[Beleg]

[quote="greybeard
If you don't tune your bow and arrows how will you shoot reasonable groups?

[/quote]

That's a good question Daryl. Since I am a newbie at trad archery, I was wondering the same thing. Will I be able to tune my bow without good form, i.e. stance, release, consistent anchor, etc.?
I did some thinking and it seems to me that to be able to tune my bow, I first have to have my form sorted out. Does that seem logical to everyone? Or is it a chicken and the egg question.

Please correct me if I'm wrong.

Cheers,
Steve.

[Dennis La Varenne]

Brumbies,
I have no information in regard to ELBs being made with bamboo laminates prior to 1900, but I suspect there would not have been many if any were made at all. To my knowledge, such bows did not feature in any of the literature of those times that I have read.

I presume you are asking this question in regard to the legality of such a bow for use in ABA comps. I have a few things to say about this scenario which ABA has got itself into later.

Beleg and Daryl,
I think the chicken and egg analogy does apply here. If Steve's arrows are flying well as he says, where is the need to 'tune' his bow, whatever that means.

In all the years that I have been shooting longbows, both self and laminated, and recurves (less often), I have never had to tune any of them. So long as all my arrows were within the one spine group within a range of anything from -5lbs to +15lbs of the bow's draw weight, I never had a problem. If I practised often my groups got smaller and if I practised even more, they got even better. I have never really understood all the fuss about tuning trad bows. The closest thing to tuning that I have ever done was to lift my string nock if my lower bow feather was chafing.

Even allowing there is something of benefit in this tuning business, my thoughts would be to let Steve see how good he can shoot with practice with what he has and undertake some sort of tuning process when he is shooting as well as he is capable and no further improvement can be got from diligent practice.

Coach,
I don't think there is any hard and fast rule about padding out string loops. Certainly if you pad them out as a norm, no harm can come of it, and if you don't, harm may come to some bows, particularly old thin limbed recurves with shallow tip overlays or bows with softer core lams.

Your technique of including 6 extra strands for your loops sounds fine to me. I have used fewer and they seemed to work OK too. The only general principle that I can evince from my experience is to thicken the loops to fit as snugly as possible in the bow nocks so that the greatest amount of surface contact is possible between the string loop and the nock surface so that the load from the string is taken over the greatest available surface area.

These days, most tradbow manufacturers make their bow tips with thicker overlays for much the same reason as far as I can see. Certainly the same wood core materials and the glass lams being used are the the same. Increasing the load bearing surface seems to be the only real change to allow for the modern use of non-stretch string material so far as I can see.

Re the 1900 rule,
It is a bit of a mystery to me why ABA has chosen 1900 as the cut-off date for its rules of shoot within the trad division. 1900 was entirely unremarkable in archery history. Nothing at all special happened in the development of archery equipment in 1900. It seems to me to be a decision made arbitrarily with no genuine knowledge of western archery history at all.

One would think a decision to create a cutoff date for the classification of different bow types would be premised on an historical change in the nature of archery and/or its development. What was it that happened to bow design/construction in 1900 which did not exist before this date????

The answer is . . . NOTHING!!

The first significant changes came in the mid to late 1920s when, in the USA, first Hickman, then Klopsteg (both physicists) and later Nagler (an engineer) applied their mathematical expertise into working out the stress loads on bowlimbs and found that the hitherto much preferred ELB (my personal favourite) was very inefficient and that, by comparison, the flatbow design with which we are now all familar was far superior. It was much faster than the ELB, and could be built with less material and more easily. Being rectangular, it could also have its tips reflexed forward into static bends to further increase cast by increasing the leveraging load applied to the limbs.

These three shooting scientists also worked out the mathematics of how to test bow woods for maximum bending load without breaking in order to store the optimum amount of energy in the limbs - principles which were easily and well adapted to the rectangular limb design - but which couldn't do much for the ELB design BECAUSE of its inbuilt design problem of a wide back and much narrower belly.

Russ Wilcox, again in the USA, invented a wood laminated version of what we now call the Recurve bow back in the 1930s - pictures of which can be found in Robert Elmer's TARGET ARCHERY. His bow was not a clone of Eastern static recurved bows although I wouldn't doubt its influence. His was a thin limbed full working recurve whose outer recurves unwound in a camming action as the bow was drawn. At the loose, the recurved outer limbs 'rewound' the string which greatly increased arrow speed.

Later, in 1949, Eric Eicholz, invented the sheet fibreglass with which we are also now familiar and was very quickly adapted to existing bow designs in order to improve them even further. Because of glass fibre's superior elasticity (in the engineering sense of having the ability to return to an original shape), it made them quicker and much more resistant to breakage as well. Howard Hill was very quick to incorporate it onto his existing bows if Craig Ekin's biography is to be believed. By that time also, Easton was already making aluminium tubing arrows.

It was not until 1967/68 that another US archery inventor by the name of Allan invented the first modern compound bow. That was the only true radical development and departure from tradition and historic bow designs that humanity had seen, and it very nearly wiped out trad archery, such was the popular success of the design. It is also the reason why archery in all its forms has the hugwe following it has today.

If I were to choose any kind of cutoff date for a trad archery division, 1949 would be it because the introduction of modern synthetic materials first became widespread in archery equipment after this date. Historical and traditional archery equipment designs still remained largely unchanged apart from construction materials up until 1967.

Regards,

Dennis La Varenne

[Glenn]

I think the whole think about FF compatible bows is a selling ploy myself. I think the question should be, is the string made so that it wont damage the bow.
Me personally I do not like and have never liked endless srtings as they always seem to be very hard and abrasive in the string loops and I would never shoot one on any of my bows.
A FF string with padded loops always feels soft when you remove them from the bow. The reason I use dacron to pad the loops is because dacron is a softer material.
As I have already said I use FF strings with padded string loops on selfbows and some with no tip overlays at all and those bows are still shooting after many years of shooting. If I had not of padded the string loops I doubt they would still be in one piece today....Glenn....

[GrahameA]

Morning All

Morning Dennis

Re the 1900 rule,
It is a bit of a mystery to me why ABA has chosen 1900 as the cut-off date for its rules of shoot within the trad division.

My opinion. It was an arbitary decision that makes it easy to use. If you can show it was used pre-1900 you can use it otherwise you cannot.

There was nothing special about the date just the the act of choosing it makes things easier.

Personally, "That's the rule - just work with it". It is the constant tinkering of rules that annoys me - you will never please everyone so just leave them and get on with "The Game".

Morning Glenn

Me personally I do not like and have never liked endless srtings as they always seem to be very hard ...

Yes, they are "hard". The lack of twisting in the string results in it stretching less during the shot cycle. Some people would consider that to be a desiriable and others an undesirable characteristic.

[Glenn]

Yes Grahame the stretching of the flemish twist strings is a drawback with them. When I make a flemish string I always over twist them and then I place one loop on a bolt I have cemented is my shed floor and then I place an iron bar through the other end and lay into it with all of my weight. This really pulls the whole string together and I have very few problems with stretching after that, settles them in straight away, makes them behave themselves from the word go....Glenn....

[Gringa Bows]

that's a good idea Glenn, i'll do the same with mine from now on..........Rod

[Dennis La Varenne]

To all,

I agree with Glenn's string stretching idea too. It makes a lot of sense. All the Flemishes I have made have a bit of a break-in period. It isn't long, but his idea would obviate it altogether.

Grahame,
I understand your concern with 'tinkering' with rules all the time. But, in this case, an arbitrary decision was arrived at with no consultation with people like ourselves who are the best experts in this field. Particularly, ABA people with a good handle on archery history should have been consulted for input into the final decision. There is no shortage of us on Ozbow and I don't ever recollect anyone from the branches putting out the call for input. Archery Action and the ABA website would have been the best forum to canvas opinions on the issue.

This kind of decision making is what rankles people and makes them stir the pot for continual changes to regs is just the same way that the present regs came about. Having the cut-off date between modern and historic tradbows at 1949 would have been just as easy to apply and historically better justifiable.

Anyway, it's done now.

Regards,

Dennis La Varenne

[Coach]

All my strings are stretched and served on a jig

[GrahameA]

Hi Dennis

My opinion was that ABA went with IFFA. Which is where the classification appears to have originated.

http://www.ifaa-archery.org/index.php?o ... Itemid=125

I am of the opinion - after seeing a couple of local examples of Rule/Decision Making it was a smart move. My opinion is that if the decision was taken for local input people would still be arguing.

The way it is at the moment is okay by me.

Another approach that has been taken is the US chooses later dates and has a couple of classes. http://usarchery.org/pages/5095 But once again there are still people who are not happy.

[Dennis La Varenne]

Grahame,

You are probably right about it being a top-down decision by ABA most probably to allow the use of tradbows to be used across disciplines where they were not previously. The classifications adopted by the US Archery Organization make more sense to me in that they are broader in classification and potentially more flexible for the long term.

The IFAA rules seem to have the shortcoming that as other non-compound bows are invented, their buyers and manufacturers will want them to be included in the trad arena and have standing definitions altered to accommodate them as has happened with the present debate about including the most recent version of the deflex-reflex design included in the longbow category.

As I think you already know, they were extant in the late 1940s to the 1960s and called semi-recurves. I have old archery catalogues from those times advertising them as such. Now, just because those same bows are longish (with many not even having the basic qualification of being long) and the manufacturers are advertising them as such with no historical justification for it, disgruntled owners have been arguing for their inclusion as a longbow - including on this forum.

As manufacturers tinker with old designs and re-market them with advertising about their astonishing performance, this debate will surface again and again.

My own preference would have been simply for a traditional division for all non-compound bows of whatever design allowing both wood and aluminium arrows and a compound division allowing for all the various synthetic arrows for the compound designs. Within the trad division, I would have divided it into fibreglassed using wood or aluminium arrows and non-fibreglassed using only wood arrows and not based on specific designs. This kind of a breakup of categories would be much more flexible and allow for technological developments in trad designs.

At least the new definitions have gotten away from the old longbow and recurve only categories which were far too restrictive. Anyway, we have strayed well off topic.

Jeff,
Seems you are doing the same thing as Glenn anyway. Like him, I have used both dacron and FF for my padding, but I haven't been able to find any difference in the degree of padding one provides over the other. On the surface of it, what he is saying about dacron as padding is quite credible. It is just that I haven't noticed any difference. Have you?????

Regards,

Dennis La Varenne

[kimall]

The other thing is that FF string material is so much dearer to be using for padding.
Cheers KIM