practice range

[bowhunter]

im almost totally new to archery. i have a 70lb compound bow. i live in the middle of the country and plenty of room to set up a practice range. id appreciate any ideas, for distance and making a decent target. nearest club is about 120 miles from me. so no help there. thanks guys.

[abcwarrior]

Assuming you are new to Archery, not just to Compound Archery...

Firstly, drop the poundage on that bow as low as it will go, probably 50lb or 60lb. (See note below about setup in a shop, don't adjust the bow if you don't know what you are doing).

Not many people can pull 70lb all day anyway, and if you are straining or have difficulty at all, then your body will quickly develop shortcuts and bad practices in your form that will prevent you getting past a certain standard and score.

(Also, 60lb is the max allowable in UK competition, 70-80lb are USA hunting weights of fashion)






Before I joined my local club, whilst I waited for the beginners course to start, I messed about a bit with making a target.

I filled a 4ft x 3ft x 18" box with two massive rolls of the ultra-thick shrinkwrap stuff they use to wrap palletts of gear at work. Took blimmin' ages to unwrap the rolls, crunch it down and pack it really solidly into the box. (I'd heard that this was the stuff to use!)

For good measure, I also packed the back of the box with interleaved and folded open issues of FHM and BMWPower magazine to a depth of about 5 magazines.

My 50lb Browning put 2315 Aluminium arrows a foot out the other side. My 60lb supertec punched through and destroyed the fletches on the arrows!!

Home-made targets aren't too hot for compound bows!






You have some quality kit. Why not take the plunge and buy a proper target? Quicks.com are not the cheapest, but they do proper archery-club foam field/target butts for £87, plus a stand £36, and delivery whatever, that's for the biggest 122cm butt so you can use small or big targets on it.

(There are two sizes of FITA target, 80cm wide for up to 50m range and 120cm for 60m to 90m range. Don't worry, as you are learning, buy a couple of 120cm paper targets and use them at all ranges, makes you feel good as the gold is bigger! lol)

Get one and you're good to go for 100m shooting as and when you get there! Spend the money and get a proper one!!

Foam butts are better than straw ones for compounds. "Danage" butts are even better than foam but at 300 quid plus, not really for home use. Most clubs can't even afford them.

You really will need to spend proper money though, the very cheap foam targets, the £20-£40 jobs, are designed for training bows or light recurve bows at 10lb to 30lb draw. They are totally unsuited for your 70lb monster!




Remember your arrows from your powerful bow will go miles if you miss, so keep safety in mind when you set it up so no-one will go behind it without you seeing them.







As you are so far away from a club, you might also want to buy a good few books and DVDs to show you as much proper stance and technique as possible, then camcorder yourself and critically look to see if you are doing it right.


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The most important thing of all will be to make sure your bow is set up right. I really cannot recommend strongly enough that you make the journey, by appointment, to a good archery store with a test range and explain to them that you want them to check that the draw length is correct, (critical), plus let-off, tiller, poundage, timing, centreshot and all the other gumf that comes with a compound bow is set up all ok.

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Once done, start off at very short distance, no paper target on the butt, at 10 metres range. Not 5m, but 10m please, important. At this 10m range, you can't miss.

Get yourself familar with your bow, how it feels to hold and shoot. At this distance, you are learning to draw back and release, you are not aiming at anything. Don't try to get the arrows in a bunch, all you'll do is smash them into the back of each other. You are learning to shoot, not learning to score points at this time.


Once you are happy, (maybe 200 shots at 10m, over several days, camcorder furiously working and a friend comparing you to the books!!), put a paper target on the butt and move it out to 15m, then 20m. Practise at this, getting the camcorder out at this point will be good, then once you find that the arrows are all going to gold and getting in danger of smashing, go to 30m.

Once you have mastered 30m, it is time to try the longer distances, adjusting and marking down in a notebook the sight markings for each distance. At this point you should roughly be seeing that moving out with the target another 10m is meaning you have to move the sight down a set number of marks.

(eg my bow drops the sight 11 marks for 30m to 40m, 12 marks for 40m to 50m and 14 marks for 50 to 60m, you get the idea).

This will give you a rough idea how much the sight need adjusting for each distance. After a while, you will have a notepad with every sight mark from 20-100m and 20-100yards. Cool. If you can hit the target and not the scenery, you are now offically an Archer!





Above all, have fun!!
All the best.


Ivan

[geoffretired]

Abcwarrior has given you a comprehensive list of things to look out for. On the safety front again, when drawing the bow, have the arrow fairly level at all times. It can be tempting to point the arrow/bow uphill to draw; it feels easier that way. If anything goes wrong when you draw that way, the arrow can be well over 1/4 mile away when it lands. Not good for finding and not good for safety. Drawing with the arrow pointing uphill was banned for that reason.
Enjoy.

[Jerry Tee]

If you can find a place to put your target so that there is an earth bank behind it that will be a great advantage. Firstly the bank will stop any arrows that miss the target thus saving you a lot of walking around looking for the misses, secondly it will reduce the chances of you hitting some thing you shouldn't.

[bowhunter]

thanks for all the advice.

[NeilM]

Target Butt: If you are in rural countryside, and I assume in Scotland you are. Then see if you can get hold of some old haylidge bale wraps. The big round ones or the big bales. Use one bag and stomp as many of the other bags and wrap into the first as you can, a few old tarps will do as well. Try to get something about a metre or so square (round) that is pretty compressed and then tie up the top with bailing twine.

Put a face of some sort on, you are really looking for a point to concentrate on, and then place you 'target' in a safe spot.

Start off at 15 yards and as you grow in confidence / ability you can go further back.

I use a similar target to that above from 20 yards out to 70 yards and it stops the carbon arrows from my compound, which is set to 60 lbs and is throwing arrows at 285fps.

Bow: I would turn the poundage down a lot, until you are starting to get consistent groups. I know nothing about Target archery, but in NFAS Field archery there is no limit to the poundage of the bow, but there is a strict velocity limit of 300 fps, which may be a 70lb bow with big alloy arrows.

Just a word based on your name. Bow hunting in any form is illegal throughout the UK.

You are exactly where I was about 20 years ago. I had a 70lb compound, a bunch of arrows and did not know where the nearest club was, or how to find it. By the time I did join a club I was able to shoot well at up to 35 yards, and learned longer distances from there. Now I am an occasional competitor in field / 3D shoots, and have won my class on several occasions.

Have fun, and we are always here to help.

[Macbow]

Bowhunter - whereabouts are you? North coast as in Wick/Thurso or Moray Firth? If you can make it down or across to the Inverness direction our field archery club has a lot of good compound shooters who'd offer you any advice or info you needed.
If not, then what the guys above said. And please be careful what arrows you are using. Assuming you are a beginner then remember that arrows are the business end of archery. An underspined carbon or horror of horrors a wooden shaft shattering on release will really hurt.