Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Bowhunting Is traditional........high tech?

What is your definition of traditional? No wheels? No high tech gadgets? How about fast flight strings, modern laminations, machined risers. I was just looking at the latest Hoyt catalog and noticed their recurves. Not exactly a bent willow and a sinew string. At what point do you draw the line? It appears to me that anything without letoff qualifies. But even to that extent a recurve stores more energy than a longbow. What about adding a sight, most will admit that helps accuracy, but now it's not traditional. What say you?

I'm no purist as I do use a laminated recurve (two of them) but with aluminum arrows, not cedar. I do not use fast flight strings but do use reusaable, resharpened Zwickeys or Magnus two-bladed heads and feather fletching. While I consider myself traditional some might think me not for the arrows. There's quite a continuum from "primitive" to "traditional". In my mind once you hang wheels on a bow you've left the world of the traditional archer.

I tend to agree with good news. I use Schafer Silvertip recurves, 1 w/FF 1 w/o. I also use Gold Tip carbons with weight added and 160 Snuffers. I use the recurve for 2 reasons: 1. I bow hunted with my granddad and he always used a Bear recurve. 2. for me the recurve is the better hunting bow, it's simple without stuff to break, fall off or get out of whack. I can shoot it and hit with it from several positions from sitting flat on my butt to contorted in a tree. I have nothing against compounds and some of my friends use them and in the future if I can't handle a stick bow in hunting weight I'll switch to a wheel bow.

One can go back in time as far or as little as on wants, and call it what one wants. I know a guy (RIP) that hunted with an atlatl, which predates the longbow by a long time. The IBO requires archers competing in the longbow class to use wooden arrows, shot off the shelf (no rest). Personally, I consider any hand-held bow without wheels, drawn by hand without a release aid, to be "traditional." I will admit that man-made arrow shafts can produce more consistent results than wood, but they won't make a good archer of a bad archer or a non-archer. There are no shortcuts there. Using a fast-flite string doesn't change much of anything, except cast arrows an insignificant amount quicker, and subject your wooden bow to more wear and tear.

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I don't hunt traditional because it's "traditional." I hunt it because it's simple. The bow is light as a feather. It's simple. It's effective. I can walk through the woods like a soft breeze. If I pick a set up and something changes, I don't need to pack up a bunch of stuff and move. I just start to sneak off to another spot. Stick and string.

Dan