CSE-Crossbow Components Explained

Our ultimate goal in bringing you the crossbow safety and education video series is to provide you with a full understanding of the crossbow, how it works, how to properly shoot one, and to introduce you to some basic methods of bow hunting with a crossbow. However, in order to learn everything you need to know about crossbows, we must first take a look at the components that make up a crossbow. So let's take a look at a common compound crossbow and define the components that make it up. Okay, so a crossbow is primarily constructed from two key components, the stock and the bow. But we're going to take a deeper look into the actual components that make up the stock and the bow. Let's start with the bow. The bow of a compound crossbow is made up of four key components. We have a riser, which is the metal piece that bolts onto the end of the stock or barrel. We have limbs, which your crossbow may have two or four, and the limbs give the bow its power and they bolt on to the end of the riser. At the end of the limbs, you'll find a wheel, which are most times referred to as cams. And then connecting the cams together, you'll find one string and two cables. Now, if you have a recurve crossbow or a reverse draw crossbow, things might look a little different on your bow. On a recurve crossbow, you won't have the cams and you'll only have one string. If you purchased a reverse draw crossbow, you'll still have all the same components that we just went over, but they'll be in a different location. In the next segment of the crossbow safety and education series, we'll go into detail about different bow technologies. But for now, we'll focus on the traditional compound crossbow, like this Wicked Ridge here, because it's the most widely used platform. Okay, on to the stock. The stock is the part of the crossbow that you'll be holding. It has three main areas. The butt of the stock that you pull up against your shoulder when you're aiming or shooting the crossbow, the forestock, which you hold with your hand opposite of the trigger hand, and the grip, which is where you'll place your trigger hand. The grip can be of traditional design, like you'd find on your favorite shotgun or rifle, and like you see here on this Wicked Ridge crossbow, or you'll find that many crossbows will have a thumbhole style grip. But the stock also has many more components. One of its jobs is to house the rail or the barrel of the crossbow. The barrel of the crossbow is where the crossbow arrow will sit when loaded, and its job is to guide the arrow when the bow is fired. Some barrels are molded into the stock and are one solid piece, like you see on this bow. Others are manufactured from an aluminum extrusion and bolt into the stock. At the end of the barrel, you'll find the trigger housing. Now, most trigger housings are also comprised of multiple components, including the string latch, which holds the string back when the crossbow is in the cocked position, the trigger, which will fire the crossbow when you pull it, a safety mechanism of some sort, which prevents us from accidentally pulling the trigger until we are ready to fire the bow, and on many models, you'll find an anti-dry fire prohibitor or mechanism, which prevents us from firing the bow without having an arrow loaded. And then last, we have the sight bridge, which will hold your sight of the crossbow. Now, on this particular crossbow, it's equipped with a scope, which is most probably the most common sight that you're going to find on a crossbow, but you can also use a red dot or a halo type sight if you like. Also, on the front of the sight bridge, you'll normally find an arrow retainer of some sort that aids in keeping the arrow in place when moving the crossbow into different shooting positions. Now, the last component that we'll look at is the foot stirrup. The foot stirrup of a crossbow is the area located at the very front of the bow, and it's where you put your foot in when you're going to cock the crossbow. Sometimes they are mounted directly to the riser, or sometimes they can be mounted to the end of the barrel. And in some models of crossbows, the foot stirrup is actually incorporated as one piece into the riser itself. Well, we covered lots of information in this segment of the Crossbow Safety and Education Series, and you should now have a better understanding of the components that make up a crossbow and what they do. In the next segment, we'll take a look at the types of crossbow bow technology.