The limbs for my riser arrived yesterday and I’ll admit to being excited about the prospect. For one, having the limbs would officially make the bow mine, instead of half borrowed. I’d been using my neighbor’s limbs in the interim. Also, these limbs are longer and more appropriate for someone with my draw length and finally, they’re a tad bit heavier in draw weight.
So after about a half-hour of setup time, I marched outside and took my first shot and exclaimed “OUCH!!” Didn’t see that coming. At least the shot hit the target with a satisfying THOCK.
On the release, the string had smacked me on the bony part of my wrist just below the thumb. Right where my arm guard wasn’t covering because I’d never been struck that far low on my wrist before by the string. In fact, since I’d started shooting more regularly, I hadn’t been striking my arm much at all anymore. To do so on the first shot with the new limbs was disappointing.
I fired a second shot. I figured it was a one-off. Alas, no. My new bow gave me the exact same treatment as on the previous shot. In fact, that would be the treatment I’d get on every shot I took with it. I ultimately slid the wrist guard down to over that spot. The pain stopped, but I could still feel the impact.
The short of it, literally, was that my brace height was way to low.
What happened was when we strung up the bow, the neighbor wasn’t sure how many twists it would take to measurably shorten the string. So we started with 10 turns, with little change. Then we went to 20 turns, again with little change. Finally, we stopped at 30 turns because that just seemed like way too many turns. Still, the brace height was only about 7 1/4 inches. He told me that for the longer limbs, I should really be closer to 9. It seemed like it would be impossible to shorten the string almost 2 inches when after 30 turns, we’d barely shortened it a quarter inch.
So after shooting today and continuing to hit my wrist, I basically became desperate. I’d tried various different grips and positions to keep from getting hit and none of them worked. I realized that if I had to tolerate getting hit like that on every shot, I’d drop this new hobby as quickly as I’d picked it up. The bow was almost unshootable.
I took a close look at the setup. When I gripped the bow, the string rested just a few inches above the wrist-hand joint. I also noticed that when nocking an arrow, the fletchings were almost touching the riser. As compared to the previous setup with the neighbor’s medium length limbs, both of those were different- the string rested in the middle of my forearm and the fletchings came no where near the riser when nocked. So I decided to go back to the brace height and resolved myself to twisting that string right up to the point of knotting if I had to.
Before doing so, I did a little investigating and determined that the 9 inch measurement for brace height for a recurve with long limbs was a starting point. It could be decreased or increased around that for tuning purposes. I wasn’t interested in tuning, since I don’t have enough consistency to know the difference anyway. All I wanted was to make sure I was getting it to a reasonable point and hopefully stop the string from striking my arm.
So I unstrung the bow and started twisting. I counted my additional twists at first, but then stopped counting after realizing what mattered was the measurement, not the number of turns. I was able to significantly shorten the string with the twisting without any sign of knotting in the string. The first time I restrung the bow, I could immediately see I’d made a significant change. My measurement confirmed it: I’d increases the brace height to 8 1/2 inches.
Encouraged, I opted to keep going. From this point, I counted 10 turns and immediately noticed I had a hard time getting the string back on to the bow. Once I did and then restrung it, I was astonished to see that the brace height had increased a half-inch! I was now at 9 inches. So this is why I couldn’t find any information about the number of turns earlier- because it’s non-linear. There is an inflection point beyond which individual twists can significantly alter the length of the string, but prior to that point the change is minimal.
After getting a chance to shoot, I was much relieved. I was no longer striking my wrist. In fact, I don’t think I was hitting my forearm at all. The bow seemed significantly quieter as well, with little of the loud THRUM I’d been hearing and had simply assumed was what to expect. Interestingly, the brace height had shortened up to about 8 3/4 inches after shooting, which I wasn’t entirely surprised at. The string is under pretty significant tension after all.
Most importantly, though, it’s shootable.