With apologies to Neil Young, yes, rust never sleeps. Our bodies are in constant need of training and practice to remain competitive. And even with the most robust program of fitness training and an excellent practice regimen, father time wins every time. So it has been with me. I had to drop draw weight to remain effective at archery. And I have to say my ego took a hit. But given a choice of competing effectively, or puffing up my chest, I choose to shoot well.
So sourcing new equipment was a primary concern. The subconscious is a funny thing and I bought new limbs months ahead of making the conscious decision to drop draw weight. I kept the poundage drop small enough so that I could continue to use my current arrows. So it might be of use for you to know that those arrows went from slightly weak to slightly stiff. If you do a bit of planning, you too can make a smart arrow choice based on what poundage your next set of limbs may be. For me it was a move down, for those on the correct side of the age bell curve, it may be an increase in poundage.
Next, I stripped my bow and started the set up from scratch. Yes, I even checked limb alignment and plane, set center shot, made a new string and made absolutely no assumptions when putting the bow back together. Was it time consuming? Sure. Was it necessary? Absolutely.
The next step was to tune. And with apologies to those who paper tune, I’ve found over the years that paper tuning a recurve to be a substandard way to go about shooting good groups. I start by bare shaft tuning. Next I group tune. Those last two sentences could and should be multiple posts, but for the scope of this post, let us just say they are necessary. One note about tuning. You can only tune as well as you can shoot. If you can’t shoot consistently good groups, forego tuning. Make sure your bow has a good initial set up and go practice until you can shoot consistently tight groups, then tune your bow.
Finally, I had to acquire new sight marks. i spent a couple of hours shooting all the distances I needed for target and field archery.
As you can see, making a poundage change is a bit of a drawn out process. The pay off is an archer/equipment combination which maximizes your talents.
