Expectations

[Urufu_Shinjiro]

So a quick question for those who are more familiar with flight shooting. What would you expect out of a fiberglass limbed Manchu style bow that's 50# at 28" being pulled to 33" and shooting a 35" bamboo arrow around 500-700gr? Just looking for a rough idea. Thanks.

[Badger]

  Maybe 250 yards or a little more. The weight between 500 and 700 could make a 100 yards difference in distance. I think an arrow that long might be hard to control coming clean out of the bow also. I would not expect a great shot. If the arrow was not stiff enough it could easily drop down below 200 yards.

[Urufu_Shinjiro]

Ok, cool, that's what I wanted to know. I was at a shoot this weekend, we were shooting at 100yrds (the shoot was loosely based on the Antient Scorton Silver Arrow shoot)  and out of the 20 or so of us me and one other person were the only ones not having to go almost 45deg to reach the target (in fact I was surprised how little elevation I needed to get there) so once the shoot was over we shot for distance. We didn't have an exact measurement but with the gear described I was right around 230-250. I was trying to figure out if I should be impressed with myself or not, lol. The other fellow had a modern longbow at 50lbs and shooting much lighter 29" arrows and he bested me by about 20yrds, lol.

[loon]

I wonder how heavy my 3rivers ~50# spine 32" (33" with field points) wood arrows are. I had to arch quite a bit to reach 145m with my 45#@31" Nomad Korean bow drawn to 32", and undershot a lot at a clout shoot. It was rather disappointing... but that's to be expected if the arrows are heavy. Korean bows don't store that much energy, I think less than a straight line at full draw.  But so much better than my glass Magyar bow which handshocks below at least 10gpp. My heavier horn Magyar bow is most definitely not a flight shooter, except maybe for broadheads. Anything below 9gpp would damage it, I think...

A Manchu bow would also be great for broadhead type arrows, but not so much with light arrows, I imagine. as long as they're around 12gpp at least.. or if one optimizes it for speed.

[mikekeswick]

Haha! The Scorton Silver Arrow. Scorton is about 10 miles from where I live! It is a good shoot and i'm surprised you had heard of it, it's the oldest still running competition in the Country.
Loon - your hornbow can shoot a lot less than 10gpp quite safely. Proper Korean bows store quite a bit of energy and are very effective at 100+ yds. I suspect that your glass bow isn't really made for top performance.

[Urufu_Shinjiro]

Haha! The Scorton Silver Arrow. Scorton is about 10 miles from where I live! It is a good shoot and i'm surprised you had heard of it, it's the oldest still running competition in the Country.

I belong to a historical recreation society, we do armored full contact combat, rapier combat, combat archery and target archery not to mention any number of period arts and crafts skills etc. We're not a reenactment society where every stitch has to be perfect etc, we call it the middle ages as it should have been and just do our best to recreate history without being exclusive, more mead and singing round the fire after a day of tourney than "You're buckle is 8 thousands of an inch too wide and looks plated, you're now outcast", lol.

[loon]

Haha! The Scorton Silver Arrow. Scorton is about 10 miles from where I live! It is a good shoot and i'm surprised you had heard of it, it's the oldest still running competition in the Country.
Loon - your hornbow can shoot a lot less than 10gpp quite safely. Proper Korean bows store quite a bit of energy and are very effective at 100+ yds. I suspect that your glass bow isn't really made for top performance.

It's a Nomad KTB. Has a decent amount of reflex. It should do well with lighter, 350-400gr arrows and a full 33" draw and clean release. I wouldn't be too surprised at 300 yards then..

I wonder how well a Korean hornbow would do. Apparently not much differently than the better synthetics. But there's no way I could maintain such a thing.

This is my hornbow. It has horn on the ears. It's not that fast, but not that slow. Seeing that Adam Karpowicz has apparently tested hornbows at 3gpp or so, I guess you're right about this being able to stand lighter arrows, but the notch blew up once already. I had  to reglue it, file the notches deeper and wrap the ears with sinew below the notches...

[Marc St Louis]

Thomas Duvernay lives, or used to live, in Korea and shot Korean hornbows, I think he was friends with a horn bowyer over there.  He claimed to have shot a light carbon arrow, with a siper, over a ski hill once using one of his bows for a distance of over 500 yards