[Max]

Nothing wrong with healthy debate even if it is completely off the wall and seemingly pointless - great new ideas have come from such debate. Why not just roll over and buy what the manufacturers offer - ie. not re-invent the wheel?

Well, as an engineer who has worked at solving R&D problems for nearly 40 years I can put it in one word - 'compromise'. Now for the detective work, because as punters with no knowledge of what goes on inside the design houses of the manufacturers we have to look for evidence. With compound arrow rests there are two basic approaches which come at the problem from opposite ends of the spectrum. Both can't be right, but must meet somewhere in the middle at the 'sweet spot'.

One rest (the spring rest) appears to keep the rest in light contact with the arrow (well more or less - without high speed video I can't say). The other, the drop away, does exactly what it says on the tin and drops completely out of the way. OK - so what does the arrow actually need? does it need to be lightly guided or only held up until the string can shove it forward - if so for how long?.

If only one answer is the right one, why are we not all using one type of rest? There must be a compromise somewhere - each design approach will deal with a major compromise of the other, while introducing a compromise of its own - some of us will prefer on compromise over the other. Now - we can go on trying to solve such problems by trial and error, but in the end you need to get to the fundamentals - what does the arrow actually need. Identify that correctly and you can design a rest that is sweet, forgiving and tolerant of variations in setup. Unfortunately the equipment needed to identify that is not available to the majority of us, as is the knowledge of aerodynamics needed to inerpret the data.

No doubt there have been many hours of high speed video shot, but a lot of that will be locked away as commercial secrets. No - we amateurs need to keep dreaming of custard, becuase one day at 3am in the morning someone is going to jerk awake and have a better answer inside his (or her) fevered head. Then they will make shed loads of cash and we will get better kit.