The Need for Speed

aroney@bowcast.com — Sun, 04 May 2008 20:39:01 +0100

The weekend kicked off with a batchelor party for my good friend. We met at [[Coors Field]] for a Rockies game, and that ended with about 30 police officers escorting the entire batchelor party out of the stadium....more on that in another blog entry.

I did get some shooting/testing in this weekend. I was thrown for a couple of loops on the range today. Here goes ....

Quest 33 Arrows had good elevation at 20 yards, but I noticed I was clicking about an inch to the right. Not sure what was going on there. The last time I shot was through paper, so I am assuming I just had my sight off a bit when we were playing around. Anyway, couple of clicks of the Sure-Loc, and everything was back in order.I headed out with the last sight tape I printed off of Archer's Advantage. Things were fine until I started focusing on 50 yards. Wind picked up a bit, and I couldn't get a round off arrows to fly consistent. I was clicking in a 3 inch circle, but just not the same place....kept going round after round until I started to notice I was getting WAY off the left (like 8 inches off). I was stumped for a couple of rounds until I looked down at my sight and the 3rd Axis bolt was loose...the entire housing was moveable back and forth. I eye-balled it back and tightened it down....all was good again.
Katera
This was really the first time I shot any distance with the Katera this year. 20 yards was spot on. To my disbelief, 30 and 40 yards were clicking as well. I have some minor windage issues, but I thought my main focus with this bow today was going to be to adjust elevation....no need - didn't touch a pin on the G5 Optima XR sight.

Once the wind got unbearable (and my arms were starting to lose it with those 80 lb limbs), I headed down to the Sportsman's Warehouse in [[Aurora, CO]] to run both these bows through a chronograph. I was very interested in seeing what going with 80lb limbs was going to buy me. Keep in mind, I have not done any real "speed tuning". Basically this is out of the box, cranked down a bit (Quest is at 76 lbs and Katera is at 73 lbs currently). The results of the Chronograph:

Quest 33 - 271 fps

Katera - 286 fps

Now Chronographs can be finicky, so I don't take either of these measurements as the gospel....but I am very happy with those results. I'll do a little more tinkering to figure out if those speeds are actually accurate.

Came back home and entered those speeds into Archery's Advantage software to see what kind of Kinetic Energy I was getting. The results:

G5 Quest 33 - 61 ft-lb @ 80 yards

Hoyt Katera - 55.6 ft-lb @ 80 yards

Hmmm.....Katera is faster but has less Kinetic Energy. Interesting, don't you think?

More soon.

Aneal

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Blog Entries tagged 'Colorado Rockies'

The Need for Speed