My Journey into and through Archery with some hints and tips too!
You can ignore the chaff and head straight to the hints and tips if you want!
A bit of history
Firstly: I'm not a historian and only have anecdotal information on the history of Archery. If you want a history lesson check out
Wikipedia and consider donating to them
Archery has been part of human civilisation for hundreds, nay thousands of years, evidence points to 64,000 years to be exact!!! It has been used in times of peace to put food on the table. It
has been used in war to defend our land and take land from others. There are records of bowmen back a few hundred years with a differing bone structure around the shoulders to "normal"
humans. The ancient archers were a breed unto their own, the were honoured and feared at the same time. A detachment of archers could literally rain death - or fire - down on their enemies
decimating infantry and cavalry a like! Traditional war archery was not used as a "sniping" attack, it was used as more of a
blitzkrieg attack. Taking out vast swages of soldiers in a devastating attack.
Original bows were all made out of a single piece of Yew (Yew trees nearly went extinct because of the demand for bows) that was sanded into a D style section. Over time people started to realise these single wood bows could be improved by laminating, the process of sandwiching and glueing 2 different types of material together! The thing is you want the back of the bow (the bit that is facing away from you when you draw) to behave well in tension but the belly (or front) of the bow to be a material that provides good compression resistance. As you can see bows require different kinds of wood to be perfect and, instead of breeding a tree that had the perfect harmony (which we could probably do now with genetic modification) old time fletchers laminated because it was easier.
As time has passed bows have evolved from a posh stick and some string into a plethora of different styles and technologies. In modern times we can choose from:
- Recurve
- Reflex
- Self
- Long
- Flat
- Composite
- Take down
- Compound
Each of the above types have varying sub-types as well but I won't go into detail here, there is a plethora of archery sites out there that a quick google can find for you that have all the info you could ever need or want and a lot more than I can furnish you with! Needless to say in modern times archers are well and truly spoilt for choice, so spoilt in fact that it can be hard to decide which way to go. Here starts my journey!
The Choice
For me, there was no choice.. I wanted a compound bow!
)