Do Tip Overlays Slow A bow?

Ever have one of those moments where you realize that you might have got it all wrong? In a recent video, I said something that seemed obvious at the time, but after putting some thought towards it, I think I could be way off base. And today, we're diving into a little archery experiment. Does adding heavier tip overlays or a heavier limb tip actually slow down your bow? Or is it possible it could make it faster? I always thought it would slow it down, add more mass, slow it down. But right now, I'm in a thought process that is kind of believing it could be the opposite. A while ago, I did a test with Cass on the Shatterproof Archery YouTube channel about beaver string silencers and what was the limit to them. We ended up adding beaver string silencers to the entire limb. We started with a section and we added more and more and tested the speed and the noise to see where the diminishing returns were. And as expected, by adding beaver to the entire limb, it created a lot of drag and it slowed down the bow a lot. And we found that, okay, maybe 4 in is the optimal spot where it barely slows the bow down, but you get 90% of the benefit of the noise dampening. But I wonder if the same sort of thing is true with tip overlay weight. The hypothesis is by adding more weight here is going to make the bow faster. How could that make sense? Okay, did you see that the angle at which the limbs are coming forward is like from here to up here? So it's moving like away from where the knocking point is. So if taking the idea from uh like kinetic energy versus total arrow speed will change the amount of penetration on an arrow. So a heavier arrow that's moving slower could go further in to a target than a lighter arrow with a faster speed. A train hits something versus a feather hitting something. In my mind, it makes sense that if this is heavier and this is heavier, they're both moving out potentially at a slower speed, but it's going to have a slingshot effect on the bow string and the arrow specifically. It's going to want to pull those limbs forward further because it has more weight on them. And as long as the bow can handle the stress, in my mind, it makes sense that it's going to snap that arrow faster. Am I crazy? This has always been my method here on YouTube is if I have an idea why, just test it. Like, there's nothing to lose. Well, except breaking a bow and it's a good time. Plus, that's how we learn is by uh stretching the limits. So, I have some lead weights and we'll uh weigh these out and we'll start with a very small amount. I'm not going to start with a big piece. So, we'll shoot through the chronograph and I'll do a bunch of tests to get a really solid baseline. Okay, I got feet per second and let's h zip through these. 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We'll take off the two fastest and the two slowest and then take the middle eight shots and average those. This will hopefully help compensate for my inconsistency and form. So, the question is, how much lead do we start with? This is get dicey when you're actually thinking about taping lead to the tip of your bow. I say very little. I was setting up so that I could melt some of this down and then I could uh pour it out into uh exact form so that I would get the exact weights I wanted. Then I realized no because normally the the thing you need's right in front of you. Example field points 75 grain up to 350 I believe. So we can take these and apply them to the ends. They're thin. They're already pre-eighed. If we need to go over 350 grains we will with the lead. get this piece and tape it on tight enough that it doesn't fly off. This is absolutely ridiculous. I've talked in the past about stiffening the limb tips without adding mass so that it's not slowed down. But if you think of seas, that is a lot of extra weight and those are some of the fastest bows. Could it maybe not be the design that's making it just fast, but also the weight distribution? It's actually probably really safe to shoot this. I'm not concerned about that at all. Just 75 grains. 75 grains may not be enough to make a difference. Who knows? Maybe it'll be just like 5 ft per second slower. And we're like, ah, debunked crayer crazy. We'll see. Uh, these arrows are the exact same. And I'm standing at the same distance trying to make everything as consistent as possible. Uh-oh. Okay, it looks like I'm uh potentially debunked already. I'm not done there, though. First, we need to add some more weight and test it on a long bow, too, because that could have something to do with it. A little bit of weight made it a few feet per second slower. What will going from 75 grains to 200 grains do? Let's find out. 200 grains on each tip. Let's see what happens. Prediction. slower. Okay, this is good news. So, more tip weight makes it slower. Long bow test. Man, this long bow is bad. So, we'll start with the uh 75 grain and tape those on here. And real talk, guys, there there's days like yesterday. I had five videos I had to finish yesterday for this series and I was here all day and just did not have time. What did I do? Well, I brought Hule with me and had a Hule meal for lunch, which pushed me over until I could go home for dinner. The convenience is unbelievable. And the other real big benefit is it's like $2.65 per meal. Try getting that somewhere else today. So, if you want to try it out, again, use my code Kramer 15. It gets you 15% off. Kramer and uh QR code's right here. Let's shoot this and see uh see if the long bow gets the same results as the recurve. 75 grains. This is so cool because I don't care the results. I want to know the truth. And if I can get closest to the truth, then I can make a better bow. So, I think we can draw the conclusion that mass alone is not going to make it faster. As a matter of fact, it's going to make it slower. And this video is an intermission to a seven or eight part series. And in one of those later videos, I say that you don't have to add a tip overlay, but you can. But if you do, it might make it a little slower. So, how much slower? Well, 75 grain is tending to slow down the arrow 4 to 8 ft per second. But how heavy are tip overlays? Okay, I've gathered various different tip overlays. Let's see how heavy they are. It'll be like 2/3 this weight cuz this will be shaped a little bit. But that's a maple one. This one's maple with fiberglass. Okay, this scale is not registering. Let's uh here. There we go. We're at 194. Okay, this one's the heaviest and it's doing uh six g grains. I mean, and six. So, these tip overlays are so light. The heaviest one is six grains and um it's going to be less than that. It's going to be four. And the other ones didn't register cuz that scale, I guess, isn't going to measure a grain or two. So, it's not that tip overlays will make the bow a lot slower, but you're going to expect the tip overlay to make the arrow fly a quarter of a feet per second about slower, which is a small enough number. It's irrelevant. Unless there's 20 places on the bow, you can make it a quarter of a foot per second faster and end up with 5 ft per second faster bow. You might find this interesting. This here is not a recurve, but it is the most efficient bow I've made when it comes to speed. And I did add a really really small tip overlay, but it was unnecessary. You see, I added this piece of I don't remember what it was at the time. It's either fiberglass, carbon fiber, or phenolic. That piece stiffens up the limb tip so it doesn't bend, making the working limb shorter, giving it a a lever, which seems to be more effective than weight. I was curious if bow design or weight made the bigger effect. Well, it's clearly design, but with that lever, you want to add as little weight as possible. Now, we know that for sure. So, if speed's the goal on a bow like this, we'd want this non-bending area to be as light as possible. Same thing with a limb wedge design like this. Now, just imagine I've done 10 or 15 tests like this. And I try to make them as accurate as possible so that I can draw some sort of conclusion that says if speed's the goal, let's try to reduce the weight of the limbs. There's always limitations and trade-offs you have to make. But having as accurate as information as you can can help you decide which trade-offs to make. This is what? Oh yeah, the bear magnum wide limbs. And then take this test bow which is 1 in wide limbs. So basically I don't know 2 1 and 3/4 in to 1 in. The wider limb is going to create more drag through the air. But what if the wider limb allowed you to go lighter on the material for the same draw weight? Does that wider limb with the same draw weight go faster than a thinner limb with the same draw weight? The thinner limb is going to need more thickness. The wider limb is going to need more width. The question is, does width or thickness add more mass to accomplish the same draw weight? The quick answer to that is on fiberglass bows it tends to be width adds more strength to the bow with a lower incremental increase in mass compared to a thinner limb and making it deeper. But I can't say that conclusively. I've shot a ton of bows and made a ton of bows. I haven't made two like identical bows with only that one variable. If you've scoured the internet for uh speed in bows, there's a very very very many theories that people have, but the testing uh some people have done some testing and then there's a whole another group of people who speak their mind without doing any of the testing. Now, those people aren't necessarily wrong. They probably have a 50/50% chance of being right, but I would rather go into all of these scenarios with a open mind, test it, and see what I can figure out myself. With that, thanks for watching. Hope you learned something today. I know I did. And I can take this nugget and apply it to the future. Be happy today. I'll see you soon.