It's been awhile since I posted here. I spent my spring and summer shooting local 3-ds as well as some state target archery championships (my first experience with these events). So, I haven't spent much time on archery forums this summer. Anyway, as our Illinois deer season is approaching, I began to transition to tuning my deer hunting bow, as well as attempting to find and tune the perfect arrow for my setup. First, a little background. The bow I chose to hunt with this year is my Wallace Mentor 64" 52@29. I had this bow up for sale here before and boy am I glad I didn't sell it. It has a Shedua riser and red elm limb cores and veneers. I have shot bows with bamboo and maple cores, but never with red elm. I was pleasantly surprised at the performance of these limbs. They're are not fast, but they have great cast IMHO.
Now, on to the tuning process. This bow has a brace height recommendation of 7.5-8". While shooting it, I noticed quite a thump upon release. I began adjusting the brace height from 7.5" and worked my way up. Once I got to the 8" mark, I noticed the bow was very quiet and had very little felt hand shock. Perfect! Now, I wanted to find the best arrow for my setup. I wanted to avoid hunting with carbon arrows for a couple reasons. One big reason is that I wanted a very heavy, full length arrow that would reduce my gaps (since I will be gap shooting). So, that left wood and aluminum. The wood arrows that I have are too weak for this bow and I didn't want to spend more $ if I didn't need to. That said, I landed on aluminum. I have a good mixture of various aluminum arrow spines in full length shafts, so I began tinkering with different tip weights and arrow spines. When I shot my 2317 arrows with 200 grain tips (bare shafts), I immediately could tell this arrow flew exceptionally well. I fletched up a few shafts and shot them against my bare shafts. BINGO! They grouped together! Now, I had to select the broad heads I wanted to shoot this year. I don't buy new broad heads each year, but since I didn't have any 200 gr. heads, I decided to shoot something different. I selected the RW Grizzly single bevels. Today, I decided to shoot my broad heads with my field tips to assure they group together, and they did. I was very pleased. With this arrow/broad head combo, my arrows are a whopping 700 grains with 13.46 gpp. The final issue I wanted to resolve in my mind was to determine what this bows point on distance would be with these arrows. Today, I determined that to be 33 yards. That said, this would be perfect hunting rig for animals up to elk.
I thought I would include some pics of my bow and arrow combo for your enjoyment. What bow(s) and arrow combos are you guys/gals hunting with this year?
4" four fletch
Guess that’s proof enough, works for me!
