Recurve Bow Maintenance 101

If you care for your bow, it can last for generations. Well, if you don't care for your bow, it could be broken yesterday. There are three things that you need to shoot a bow. A bow, a bowstring, and arrows. And in this video, we're gonna cover how to care for the bow and the bowstring while you're shooting it, as well as how to store it. Let's get to the point. All right, there's a ton of ways that you can break your bow and so we're gonna cover those ways that you could break it so that you can know how not to break it. And the first way is stringing and unstringing your bow. There are two ways you can easily break your bow when you're stringing the bow. The first is to break the tip overlay. If you're using the leg method and you put the tip overlay into the ground, into like concrete or something hard, you can sometimes break that tip overlay off. And so when you're using the leg method, you want to make sure you're doing it on something soft or keep that tip overlay off the ground. Or you can also use a bow stringer or a bow stringing jig to protect your bow while you're stringing it. The second way you can break your bow while you're stringing it is by twisting a limb. That just happens when everything's not in alignment. And so when you're stringing it, you want to make sure everything is in a line and check the tip overlays once it's on to make sure nothing's out of line. If you do happen to twist your limb while you're stringing the bow, the good news is that if it's easy come, it's easy go. So if it twists while you're stringing it, honestly, you can often just with your hand, twist it back and then it'll come back into alignment. But those are the two issues you can run into while stringing your bow. The next way you can break your bow is by dry firing. Now, dry firing is drawing the bow back and letting it go without an arrow. Now, most people know not to do that. However, I've seen a lot of people dry fire on accident. Here's how. If your knock fit is not good, let's say it's a loose knock fit so your arrow easily falls off the string. I've seen a lot of people, they'll be drawn back and then the arrow falls off the string and they don't realize it. They let go and it's a dry fire and they don't know what happened. So one thing that can help you take care of your bow is making sure you have good knock fit on your arrow, making sure it's not too loose. Having a knock point is also helpful for that. Now, another way that someone could dry fire on accident is maybe they do have good knock fit and then their serving wears out. So now they don't and the knock falls off the string. That's one way you can dry fire your bow. And now a final way you could dry fire your bow is if your loop wears out and breaks in the loop when you're at full draw, then it's as if your bow dried fire. So it could break your bow as well as breaking your strings. A couple things to check regularly is your serving where you knock the string as well as your loops, making sure they're not wearing out too much to the point where they might break. So now you know how to take care of your bow while you're shooting it. How do you take care of your string? Well, I've got two tips for you for taking care of your string. Number one is waxing it regularly. I would say every 100 to 300 shots to wax your string. That keeps it from drying out and helps it last longer. And number two is don't trim the tag ends. On a Flemish twist string, tag ends are in this splice section right here and they can pop out and it can look like your string's breaking, but it's really not. It's just the string tucking back into the string. And so to help your string last longer, I actually recommend not trimming these. You can trim them if you want your string to look clean, trim and wax. But what I like doing is waxing the rest of the string, but right where the tag ends pop out, just pull them out. And then as I shoot, they begin to fluff up and they actually act like string silencers on my bow. So I actually leave my tag ends sticking out and that can keep them from popping out in the next seam over and over again. And that can help your string last longer. Once you're done shooting your bow, then what do you do with your bow? Do you leave it strung? Do you unstring it? How do you store it? That's what we're gonna cover next. Now you can leave your bow strung sometimes. Check your manufacturer for what they recommend, but in my opinion, I'll leave my bow strung if I'm shooting it on a weekly basis or more and it's in a temperature controlled area. If it's gonna be in a hot area or I'm traveling or something like that, I'll unstring it, take it down. But if it's in a temperature controlled area and I'm shooting it on a regular basis, then I'll leave it strung. What's the cost of this? Maybe one pound over a year of it being strung. Now there are some bows that if you leave them strung will be a lot more detrimental to them. This is a laminated bow. So it's got fiberglass, bamboo. Now if you have like an all wood bow or a self bow like this, you do not wanna leave it strung. The reason being is the wood's gonna remember it being strung and you're gonna lose energy. You can see this bow has what's called string follow. It looks like it's already being bent because it's remembering being strung, being shot, that bend. And so on bows like this, all wood bows, self bows, you don't wanna leave them strung. I would always check the manufacturer to make sure what they recommend. But that's my recommendation. To be absolutely clear, don't leave your bow strung unless you want to. Now once your bow is in storage, there are three things that could really hurt your bow in storage. Number one is extreme heat. Number two is extreme moisture. Number three is extreme sunlight. You wanna avoid all of those extremes. So when you're storing your bow, if you can store in a place that is not hot and if you are storing it outside somewhere like that, you wanna unstring the bow. And I would recommend not storing it standing up like this, leaning up against the wall if it's gonna be hot. Over a long period of time, that could cause the pressure for a limb to start to twist, something like that. I would store it laying down like this so any pressure is not on the limbs. You don't want your bow to be stored like in a car in an area that's gonna get really hot because that can cause the glue to fail. So you don't want it in extreme heat. Now you also don't want it to get wet and stay wet. Most bows are totally fine to get wet but if it gets wet and stays wet, obviously that's where it could cause an issue to the bow. And finally, and this is true for your bow string as well as your bow, you don't want it to be in direct sunlight. For a bow string, it's gonna dry it out. For a bow, it'll most likely affect the finish. It may not affect the actual performance of the bow but it'll start to fade. Finish will wear out by it being in sunlight. So what it says is on all the packages that don't go in the fridge, store in a cool, dry place. My name is Kaz Dean with Shatterproof Archery. If you need any traditional archery products, we got you, shatterproofarchery.com. Have a great rest of your day. Stay shatterproof. This is a hack commercial.