| ok.. ive got a issue here...
ive had a glass of wine over dinner, but ive got an image of our workshop with a trap door, leading to a dungon, and some leather bound bow torturer. Thashing bows who are begging for mercy. Chained and flogged daily...
on a more serious note though
We have tested bows by dry firing them, They started with 4 dry fired shots before breaking, which is unacceptable in our books, after some re-enforcements and some design changes to prototypes, we managed over 4000 dry fires without failure. We stopped due to the slackenning of the riser pocket due to excess vibration during the process, the bolt holes were oval behind the limb pocket. This doesnt mean that the limbs would last forever after being abused. As for anyone walking by, That be a saftey issue, when some bows break they explode, Violently. We have tried our best to design a limb that if it breaks, it does so in big chunks, (like in two peices) or folds in a predictable and safe manner, but our bow torturer cant overcome all eventualities.
We have video of a 64" Black douglas (21" riser) with our CXC laminate being pulled to 42" before partial failure. The recurves on this hex5 were like ballarina's heals by the time the it passed 40". We do not support abused bows, there are maximum draw lengths for our bows and Maximum braceheights to prevent over drawing them. This is because there is a safety margin built into every product.
What happens to a limb thats been shot thousands of times? then has an accident? Dont know... The vaireables are huge. Drawlenght, string type, number of shots, weight of arrow, level of care taken, amount of preload on limb bolts, knocking point type. All these relate to each other making a total sum of stress the bow is under. Then we can get into the accident, how far into the draw length were you, what riser was it in.... list goes on.
Im sure you have answers to all these variable Dougal but we have tried to deal with this with a fair conclusion. So we dont feel the need to persist.
We test our limbs to distruction, and we have a dialema, How far do you over draw a bow, to test it. lets take a max designed draw length of 28" Lets pull it to 30", It survives, but will it do another 10,000 shots, but will it survive 31" & 10,000 shots, and can it survive 30 dri-fires.before and after the 10,000 shots... But was it unique, lets test another 30 limbs, and lets, test it for different bow weights, string types, riser types... up to 10% past the recomended on all variables. This kind of testing is beyond most companies, which is why a garentee is there.
We test new materials, but Limb failuers would not happen if all eventualities were covered, plaines would not fall out the sky, and cars would not suffer mechanical failures. You would be surprised how many twisted limbs with radial failures from twists are explained as "woops it wasnt me, It just happened". Why are we to be viewed as responsable for them, and why are we to be publicly paraded around for these twist failures too. Even when they possibly were due to a badly set up riser. There are alot of them about aswell. Are our broken limbs to be shown as potential product issues for a bad riser setup, is that fair?
The kind of failure in your case is not clear cut, As this is a first in our books, is this a bad setup, bad accident, or bad luck, bad design, bad material. Im not sure, i can guess, as it is the only one in our history and that it is probably one or a mix of the first three, but we are offering help.
We hope that when your current situation settles you can take us up on our offer.
There is no trail of evidence for us to analyse, we cant say, yes its 40lbs bows that suffer, so we cant learn much from this, nor can anyone else out there as there are no trends, as this is such a rare break. so we have never been sure what you would gain from asking so many people so publicly.
The only thing to learn is that we now have some paranoid ML2 customers that were happy with their product, due to one failure in a 7 year history of the ML2.
Always check your Gear, wither it be 1day old, to 99years old. Simple, that was the case before your misshap. The rest is speculation from this point on, and that would be the case for any make/model of limb in this situation. Not sure why this is a border thread...  |