The Amazing Black, Hunter Longbow. (Archery Longbow Review)

Eight bows, all under $200. Which bow is best for you? The number one question I get is what bow should I buy? And thank you for all the support. By purchasing our archery products, this allows me to buy these bows having no affiliation with these companies so that I can give you honest reviews. Specs, speed, smoothness, snagability, and sacrifice is the scale we are testing these bows to. Each person is different and each bow is different, meaning I don't know exactly what bow you will need, but my goal is to give you enough information so that you can make an educated choice on the next bow to buy. So let's get right into it. Now with these bows, they don't go into great detail about what the specs are, but I'm going to go ahead and compare exactly the specs that they say with what we find out. And that's part of the reason I wanted to make this sort of video is to show you what you're actually getting in comparison to what they say you're getting. So let's jump into the specs to see how accurate they are. The limb design is a continuous taper, meaning at the riser, it is the widest. And the limbs continue to taper down all the way to the limb tips. These limbs consist of fiberglass and bamboo. If you look close, you can see the bow limb has two veneers of bamboo in the center that are sandwiched between two pieces of fiberglass on the back and on the belly of the bow. There is this extra piece of dark wood right here in the middle. No description I can find mentions it at all. It's just a hard piece of wood here to keep the limb from bending right near the handle section. It would be comparable to what I call a power lamb on the bows that I make. So this piece of wood right here that's 12 to 14 inches long, I call that the power lamb or the power lamination, and it really stiffens up the handle. So I'm not sure, but I think that's what they're going for with that extra piece of wood right there near the handle section. The limb has a locator pin hole and a hole for the bolt. Moving down to the limb tip, we have fiberglass tip overlays. As a matter of fact, this part of the bow appears to have had some problems in the past. I found a couple of one-star reviews that state, right out of the box, first shot the string snappy and tip overlay broke off and latched God knows where. I'm in the process of making an overlay. I do love the look of the bow and where I'm fixing and unable to shoot something I paid money for and having to spend money and time before doing so. Really upset. And the other one-star review, tip of limb sheared off and broke string and shot 14. Returned refunded with no problem at all. Thanks, Amazon. If you are someone who left one of these reviews, it's good to meet you. How you doing? Hey, Anthony. With this being said, one review was August 22nd, 2019. The other one was in December of 2019. It looks like it's been a year since then with four and a half star reviews. So this problem has probably been fixed. These limbs can be purchased individually, which means you can have different draw weights with only having one riser. This can be nice so that you can practice with a lower poundage and then move up in poundage as you desire without having to buy multiple risers or multiple different bows. This is not a new concept. In fact, it is what the ILF system is primarily based upon. This is not an ILF bow, but getting the ability to be able to change out your limbs for an extremely cheap price like this is pretty cool. At the same time, the downfall to this is kind of the price. It is comparable to a printer and ink. You go out and buy a printer, and then when it comes time to replace the ink, you go to buy the replacement ink cartridges and find out that the ink cartridges cost more than the printer cost in the first place. The bow costs $95.99, and the replacement limbs or the extra limbs cost $75. Now, depending on the draw weight of limbs you get, some are cheaper. They go down to about $63. This means that the riser is valued at 20 or $30. With all that being said, you could still pick up a bow that has a specific limb weight and then get a replacement set of limbs for the price of around 160 to $175. Getting a riser and two sets of limbs for under $200 is unheard of. Well, that is, unless you've heard of this bow before. There is a Black Hunter recurve bow that I reviewed a while ago. It's basically identical to this long bow, except the limb tips are recurved a little bit. So here are a couple of the differences between these two bows. One is the limbs have a different shape because one's a recurve and one's a long bow. Secondly, the risers are like exactly identical, except where the limb contacts the riser. With saying this, the pin locator and the bolt hole are the same dimensions for each bow. So you can put recurve limbs on the long bow, although they don't necessarily recommend this. It works completely fine to interchange these limbs. It just doesn't look perfectly because the way they shaped the riser. And saying this again, the manufacturer doesn't recommend this. I couldn't find them saying anything on this to do this or not to do it. But I interchanged the long bow limbs with the recurve limbs to see how they would perform. And they perform just fine because the risers are identical. It's just the shape that doesn't match up perfectly. So in my opinion, functionality is going to be the exact same. And what this means is it gives you a recurve bow and a long bow, depending upon the limbs you have, if you want it to interchange recurve and long bow limbs. Another thing to notice about the difference in the recurve and the long bow is with the recurve bow, they made the limbs thinner. I like this. I'd rather the width on the limbs be thinner and then to leave a little more thickness on the belly of the bow. Or in this case, it's all calculated based upon their veneers. And so that'd be probably thicker pieces of bamboo in the center. The reason I like this is from my personal experience in general, it tends to lead to a faster bow. You can differentiate the top limb to the bottom limb based upon the riding. The riding always goes on the bottom limb. To string the bow, get the bigger loop and slide it over the top limb and the smaller loop will go into the knot groove. Slide the pocket of the shatterproof bow stringer on top of the bottom limb. And then you're good to go ahead and pull up and string the bow like that. Here is the profile of the bow. We're gonna pull this down to 28 inches to see that it is indeed at 40 pounds. So there's the tiller for you. 28 inches is dead on right there. And 39.8 pounds. So this Black Hunter long bow does come with a Dyneema string. The serving section is six inches and it's better placed than the last bow review so that your fingers stay on the serving, Again, I prefer it to go further down so that it protects from arm guard slap. But what are you to expect with a bow this cheap? The last thing that's not really specs, but they say there's a 12 month 100% satisfaction guarantee and they'll return and refund you 100%. Which is really interesting that they're guaranteeing that. But the specs online, they don't show very many of them. It's basically the poundage at the draw weight and it's a D97 string. So as far as everything they give us with this bow, I'm gonna say this bow is a nine out of 10 on the specs scale because it's just about perfect. All right, coming in with maybe one of the most important things about a bow, the snagability test. How long does it take to shoot good with this bow? In the sense of when you pick it up in your first 50 shots, does it take a really long time to figure out the bow or does it take not so long? So I did this with eight different bows and the average of these eight different bows taking 50 shots at 20 yards on this target was 406 points with a total of 500 possible points. This bow right here came up at 426 points. So better than average. And as a matter of fact, this bow was second out of all of the eight bows. So this bow on the snagability test was great and it was really smooth. Now, I don't wanna be too biased because part of this could be because I have shot the recurve version of this bow. So maybe because they're fairly similar, it was easier for me. I'm not sure, but the shooting experience I would agree would be at number two out of all of the bows that I tested under 200 bucks. And the crazy thing is, I tested quite a few bows at $180 price point. This one's only 95, somewhere in there. That's just crazy. So on the snagability test, I'm definitely gonna give this bow an eight out of 10. All right, so the smoothness and the quietness and how comfortable the bow is to shoot all kind of go hand in hand. This bow right here, I'm liking it so far. Let's take a shot and listen to this. It's kind of like a snap. It's a quick, loud noise. And then it fades off quick. It doesn't rattle much. And when you don't hear that rattling, generally you don't feel that rattling. And that's the case with this bow. In general, the longer bows are gonna be smoother and recurves may not be quite as smooth as long bows. A well-made recurve bow will shoot better actually than a bad made long bow. Now there's plenty of ways to quiet a bow. The bow string, string silencers, felt, et cetera. But today we're not doing any of that. We're just testing it with what it comes with and what do we get for the smoothness with this bow? I'm gonna give it a seven. I am absolutely shocked with the Black Hunter bow and the price of it, how comfortable it is to shoot. The grip, I really like the feeling of this grip. It feels really good. So the smoothness, the quietness, the comfortability all kind of go hand in hand. And on the Black Hunter, we're giving it a seven. How do you test speed when I've got some 35, some 40 pounds and 45 pound bows? How do we test speed and keep it consistent? Well, this is how I'm gonna do it. I'm gonna use arrows that equal 10 grains per pound of draw weight. What this means is that if I have a 40 pound bow, I'm gonna have a 400 grain arrow. A 35 pound bow will have a 35 grain arrow and so on. With this, I'll shoot it through the chronograph and this should give us a good baseline for how fast it is. And once all of these bow reviews are done, I'll post a video with all the bows and all the specs comparing the 40 pound bow to another 40 pound bow to another 40 pound bow. And then the 35 pound bows and the 45 pound bows compared to each other. Now, keep in mind that my draw length is gonna be slightly longer than 28 inches. It's more like a 29 inch draw length. So just keep that in mind that I'm gonna be drawing it a little further, which will make it shoot a little bit faster. If you draw the bow to 24 inches, it's gonna shoot a lot slower than if you drew it back to 28 inches. I found this out with a 100 pound bow I made that drawing a 100 pound bow as far back as I could still shot slower than drawing a 60 pound bow all the way back. Very interesting on how much faster, not just poundage makes, but actually the draw length makes. So on the speed test, I take this and I shoot it through the chronograph five times, 10 grains per pound of draw weight. And what we came out to on the average is 191 feet per second. For this caliber of bow or price range, that blows my mind. For a beginner bow or something that's, I don't know, archery is so different because you can go barebow, Olympic archery. You can go extremely primitive and historical. There's so many different variations you can go. But for this category of bow, this is really fast and it's smooth, it's crazy. So 191 feet per second at 39.5, 39.8, somewhere in there is the reading of poundage. Now this is with a 400 grain arrow, giving this a nine out of 10 on the speed. It just, I shot this, I shot this right next to the recurve bow, the similar one that I've been talking about. And the recurve does go three feet per second faster. But the reason I think they are so close in speed is because the thinner limb design with this long bow. And you know, I like the thinner limb design instead of wider limbs. And I think from my personal experience with making bows, I mean, there's a few of them back there I've made, that the thinner limb designs do go faster than wider limb designs if, if the material could handle it. Because if you do it with too thin of material, then you're getting into dangerous territory where the bow might break on you. I'll stop on that and just say, thumbs up to this bow on the speed, nine out of 10 on the speed test. So what, what do you have to sacrifice for this bow? Just a little bit of plasma. No, in all reality, like not much. Like I can't complain with this bow. I got this bow because I really liked the Black Hunter recurve. And I was like, I wonder if I'll like this one as much. Now, personally, I actually like this one more. And I know each person's different on whether they prefer a long bow or a recurve bow or whatever type of bow you like is a personal opinion. For my body, for the grip, for my hands, this bow just feels good, fits really good. I would buy this bow again. Now I can't tell you to buy this bow. I don't think I should ever really tell you to buy a bow because you might be different. You might be shorter, you might be taller. You might not need as long of a draw length. And that's exactly why we've got all of those bows down there that I'm going to continue to review. And there's some other really good options out there. But if you're looking for a bow under a hundred bucks, this is the number one bow I could recommend at this time. Now that recurve is like $112, $115 range, somewhere in there. And so it's very, very close in price. You get three feet per second faster, but at the same time, it is a little bit less smooth and there's a little more hand vibration. So what do you like? I personally love smoother bows. I would rather my bow shoot 15 feet per second slower and it just be like a smooth, perfect dart, little hand shock. That's my style. So with that kind of picture in mind, that's where I'm coming from, but I cannot complain at all with this bow. I would definitely buy this bow again. I didn't know you could get a bow that good for that cheap. And you may not always be able to, but you can right now. So sacrifice, we're going to give it the best score you can, a 10 out of 10. You don't really have to sacrifice anything for the value you're getting in the archery world, $100. And anything I would want to do, I could do with this bow. As a beginner, this would be such a good bow to learn if you like archery, because I mean, you're only a hundred bucks into it and you know it's a smooth shooting bow. It's going to be an enjoyable experience because what you don't want to happen is to get your first bow and it just be a terrible bow. And you're like, this is just, I don't even like archery. And it's like the bow's fault. I'm not saying it's always the bow's fault, but what I am saying is the bow does make a difference. The archer makes the shot always, but a good bow and a good archer can create great shots rather than a good archer and a bad bow. It's going to be harder. On the Shadowproof Archery Scale, this scores a 43. That's the best bow we've reviewed yet. We'll see on the rest of these, how they turn out, but I couldn't recommend a better bow under a hundred bucks. I literally couldn't. Great scores, great bow, did not disappoint and actually exceeded my expectations quite a bit. I was going to say this much, but quite a bit, like I just give it a thumbs up and I have talked plenty today. So thanks for watching. I hope this is beneficial to you. If you've used this bow, let me know in the comments and your experience. Hopefully it's the same as mine. The only caution I saw was a couple of reviews where the limb tips were having problems, but again, that's more than a year ago and I'm assuming they fixed the problem with all the great reviews since then. So stay shadowproof guys. Thank you so much. Stay positive, do all the good things. Keep your mind right, keep putting in the good stuff and I'll see you guys on the next video.