Excalibur Assassin Unboxing

Hello Crossbow Nation, this is Lucas, and I have got a new toy that just arrived today from Excalibur. It is the new Excalibur Assassin Crossbow. I thought we would unbox it for you today and have a look inside. I'll try to do this without dropping the bow, and if I do, then you'll all be here to laugh. Perfect. Now I had a chance to briefly test out the Excalibur Assassin when I was at the ATA show and as well as SHOT Show, actually. I got to do it both places, so I have some limited experience with this bow. It actually comes in a new case, which is kind of cool. That's new from Excalibur, I think, for this year. I didn't know that was going to be there. That's pretty cool. For ease of use, I'm just going to cut off this cardboard kind of shell on it and try not to drop the crossbow, because it would be a shame if I broke it before I shot it. Put it up here. Really nice system they've got designed here. So I believe this is the same front end you're going to find on the micro-suppressor series of bows, which we had last year. I think this one's got a little bit more speed out of it, I believe somewhere in the neighborhood of 360 feet per second. It's got a 285 pound pull, I believe, but not really, because Excalibur has a new cranking system on their bows this year. It's called the Charger Crank, and it comes built right into the bow. So just 12 pounds to crank the bow up at any given time, that's the most pressure it's going to have, which is pretty great. One of the great things about having an Excalibur crossbow, which is just a recurve design with no cams, is it's basically bulletproof. You can change the string yourself in the field, but the drawback is the draw weight to get any kind of high speed of it is tough. It's tough to pull back, and especially if you shoot a lot, I like to shoot 50, 60, 80 bolts a day if I can, and it gets exhausting with the bow that you're pulling that kind of weight out of. Now, with just 12 pounds on the crank, they kind of solved that problem for us, which is pretty neat. And it's also a perfectly silent crank, so there's no clicks in it at all whatsoever. So that's pretty cool. Another new addition from Excalibur this year is the trigger. A lot of people would replace the stock trigger with an aftermarket design. Excalibur decided to solve that problem themselves by making their own new two-stage trigger. I brought it down here, it is called the Pro-Shot Match Grade Two-Stage Trigger, and again, it's a very light pull, very crisp trigger. I'm told I get, hang on, I shot it a little bit at ATA, a little bit at shot, but I will have a better understanding of this once I send a few bolts downrange with this bow. But I am really looking forward to setting it up. I'm going to set it up a little later on tonight and see if we can set it in and throw some bolts downrange. This is, Excalibur built this to compete with the likes of your Missions and your Ravens and your High, your TenPoints, your high-end crossbow market. So this MSRP is a bit higher, because it's got the crank built in, the MSRP is a bit higher than the traditional Excalibur bows. I think you can get this bow for about $1,600 at your local dealer, but that still comes in a little less than those other flagship models, so Excalibur will have a leg up financially on those things. But with the new cranking system, again, it's just going to take away the one drawback a lot of bows had with a recruit design crossbow was just the effort included in it, the effort you needed to draw back the bow. It was usually, it was always a fairly short draw cycle, but it was a pretty heavy pull compared to other ones, usually twice as heavy as you're going to find on another bow. So that's really cool that they've addressed that, and really at 12 pounds, anybody, any adult or most kids even that are over 12, 13 years old can easily crank that bow down, and you can let it down with the crank as well. So again, not every crossbow will let you let it down, Excalibur, no mission won't let you let them down now, and Excalibur has always had that feature in the past, but now you can let it down with the crank. So that's about it. We are going to set this up and look for some more videos, a full review video, and maybe some head-to-heads later on this summer. So thanks for watching Crossbow Nation, and stay tuned for much more.