Quote:
Originally Posted by BorderBows  |
Very interesting. This makes a lot of sense. The syntactic foam are hollow microspheres glued into a composite. And all foam by definition is a structure which is a combination of air pockets and a material designed to keep those air pockets intact. Why foam is light - it is mostly air pockets. Given the stresses going on inside limbs, it is likely that even microspheres can be forced to collapse - as in squish. Once a microsphere collapses it probably can't recover. But that process could take thousands and thousands of draws/arrows to reach a point of limb failure. I can imagine a similar scenario with any material. In wood the individual fibers could break - like hair line fractures - after many uses these build up until an area of the wood looses integrity. But the same can be said for carbon fiber composites, glass composites, aluminum, steel, and pretty much any material that we use to construct things. I don't think any material is immune to all failure modes.
I guess what I was trying to say in my original post which some others say in different ways is... a top archer can shoot well with any set of kit. I have a friend who was on the UK juniors olympic training squad and she had several bows for different training purposes. And she could shoot well with all of them. I guess the point I was trying to make was not to encourage people to try to buy several identical limbs, but to encourage them to think of their equipment as disposable and changable. To get to a point where they could pick up any bow, and after an end or two, be able to shoot it close to their abilities. I think one way to get there might be to not always shoot the exact same set of limbs - similar but not exact. To effectively have several bows to shoot with - like the way my friend was training. I have 2 compound bows and a recurve setup and can shoot well with them all. I was able to shoot an 1168 hereford on my Merlin Max2000 last year.
But like I said earlier, I loved the Border Carbon Premier limbs I was loaned for 6months. They had amazing feedback. When I made a mistake they responded with a predictable response - small mistake was a small increase in cluster size, big mistake was a big error in cluster size. The worst thing is to have kit where you make a mistake and you don't see a response - or where you shoot a bad arrow and you don't know why. Until I can shoot over 1250 on a FITA I want my kit to show me my errors. I don't want forgiving limbs that dampen or correct my errors with lots of torsional ridgeness to 'correct' for my bad releases. I want smooth, responsive limbs with feedback and it seems that limbs like this are getting harder and harder to find.