Primitive Archer
Main Discussion Area => Bows => Topic started by: Joec123able on July 16, 2013, 04:56:45 am
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Quick question I'm wondering about- does the temperature outside effect the performance of your bow when your shooting ? I heard something about wood bows perform better in colder weather not sure if that's true or not
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Never noticed much difference,seems much heaver in really cold weather but I think that is just me, never weighted one to see,they will,depending on the wood feel a little sluggish in really humid weather. :)
Pappy
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S'common sense ain't it? We use heat to soften wood so we can manipulate the shape of a bow.
In very warm weather, the bows will be softer, lacking in punch a bit. Perhaps not enough to be a real issue, but depending on the wood you can feel it. Yew bows for instance take a performance hit in hot weather, and feel harder and tighter when it's cold.
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I think Keenan brought this up a few months back. Not one person could prove any performance difference in normal temp fluctuations. I believe his premise was trying to disprove yew bows are heavier or brittle in cold weather. They aren't from what I learned from his thread.
I left a few osage bows baking in the direct sun this weekend for 5-6 hours. It was about 90 degrees and about 90% humidity as well. The bows were very hot to the touch, but shot as if they where 72 degree's. As far as using heat to manipulate wood, we sure do. But that heat is incredibly hot and direct as compared to the sun or its ambient heat.
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Interesting stuff! From my own experience, a yew longbow is easier to draw in hot weather. My 80# bow felt far easier to draw last Saturday during a really hot weekend here in the UK. In fact it got to the point where I had to be really careful not to overdraw as some of my rougher bodkins were starting to snag on the bow which never usually happens.
When I returned home, I tried drawing the same bow having left it in an air conditioned room for a few hours and I was really struggling to get the arrows to the head. This may well be an illusion, perhaps I was more settled or comfortable or something during the shoot, but it seemed a heck of a coincidence!
May be worth mentioning I didnt notice a performance drop per se, the bow didn't feel slower. But it felt easier to draw.
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Could be your warm muscles feel the weight less than cooler, stiffer muscles will. I cant argue the wood changes in some ways with heat fluctuation. Whether or not we can feel it is something Im not sure of.
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I do a lot of shooting in August to tune up for the opening of bow season Oct 1. Lots of days over 100 here in Central Texas, 105-110 mid afternoon. I sense a difference early morning to late afternoon. I say sense, because it's only that. The bows seem to lose a little umph as the day heats up. Could be that Pearl is right and it's the shooter not the bow, don't know for sure, but I feel a difference and won't shoot one for too long in that kind of heat. No lasting effect as far as I can tell.
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Could be your warm muscles feel the weight less than cooler, stiffer muscles will.
Didn't think of that, that's a really interesting point. I remember hearing from a few people that you should always rub a yew bow before shooting. Apparently it softens the wood fibres so they're not in danger of breaking. I think it's almost impossible to generate enough friction heat by hand to avoid breaking a bow, but it probably warms up the archer's muscles to the point where drawing the bow feels more comfortable than jumping in cold.
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Could be your warm muscles feel the weight less than cooler, stiffer muscles will. I cant argue the wood changes in some ways with heat fluctuation. Whether or not we can feel it is something Im not sure of.
Yes.
My sinew backed yew pulls and between 55-58# depending on temperature. But selfbows, I weighed my osage it 19deg and 90deg... No change in weight.
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Wow thanks everyone
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Take the speed of the arrow on a hot day and compare to how fast it is on a cold day.
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Certainly there is a difference, how negligible is the question. O:) Maybe some woods are more sensitive than others. How is that for an enigmatic answer?! ::)
Thinking of yew, it seems that tensile strength/elastciity would increase in warmer weather and compression strength would decrease resulting in a softer bow.
I wont string a bow fresh out of a hotbox at 105 degrees F.
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Take the speed of the arrow on a hot day and compare to how fast it is on a cold day.
Exactly right.
If you are just relying on feel then the results would be far too subjective to mean anything you need a measuring device that doesn't have feelings!
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That would be me Mike ;) ;D ;D I told a guy the other day that made a slid remark,
that would have hurt my feeling ,If I had any. ;) :) Good discussion guys, their is probably some change,but for hunting which is mainly what I do, it's not enough to matter. I have been hunting in singal digit weather and I swear the bow was 100lbs and hard to draw over 20 inches. :) Head to the cabin and after a 10-15 minute walk all of the sudden it went back to 50 lbs like it was to start with. ;) :) :)
Pappy
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It really matters when you get to tillering or any beening of a limb. Then hummitly can make a VERY BIG difference on set and string follow. Here in WV HUMMITY ON SUCKS white woods exspecially HICKORY. As soon as I get to bending limbs I start out by buting my bow in a hot box for 1/2 hour. This gets rid of the realitive hummity it dose help with the set and string follow.
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I've shot from -5 to 95 F and my bows seem do get stiffer in the cold. Cold or hot I let them acclimate for 5-10 minutes before shooting. I don't keep bows in a hot car either.
Of course humidity is to be avoided especially with hickory so my hickory bow to be is in AC where I should be now rather than on my porch drinking my morning coffee. Temps are expected to be close to 100 F today. I'll tell you this- I'm staying in my house which has central AC and I'm not going out to shoot. :) Jawge
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Well thanks to those who answered the question I learned some from it. Those who said it was a negligent or common sense question well I have nothing to say
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Nothing has been proven yet.
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After a morning elk bull hunt I laid my bow and wet coat down in the yard. Bright sunny morning and really thought nothing of the damage that could be done. After lunch I came out to put my gear away. One of my limbs on my take down was delaminated. Beware the heat of the sun it will do your gear under.
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I'd do the test myself if I had a chronograph. >:( Gotta get me one of those!
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My sinew backed osage bow was "theoretically" a slug in warm weather, so I ran a few tests years back when I first bought a chronograph.
To test, I left the bow overnight in the vehicle when overnight lows were around 20 degreef F. I shot a couple strings of arrows thru it and found that around the 10th arrow I was getting a slightly slower arrow, about 5 fps slower. Several weeks later, I am shooting the same bow that has been kept warm in the house at 70 degrees. Virtually the same speeds, with very minor variation that could easily enough be attributed to sloppy releases. But the bow began to lose those few fps sooner...like the 5th shot!
I repeated the experiment several times at different temps but dropped the whole thing and threw out the records when I realized I was not getting any significant variation. YOUR MILEAGE MAY VARY.
Take all this with a grain of salt because it was late winter and humidity levels were almost zero here in the west during the whole time I was running the tests. If I pull out that bow today after a month of heat and humidity, I gar-ann-tee it will be like shooting pool with a well worn old rope.
And then there was the guy that told me that I needed to shoot only left feather fletching in the Northern Hemisphere because of the Coriolis Effect, right fletches in the Southern Hemi. Hehe, yeah, and I always remember to correct for the rotation of the Earth and lead my targets!
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So that's been my problem with accuracy. I didn't account for the Coriolis Effect. Shoulda known.
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In February I had my snake skin backed hickory bow weigh in at 55.46 @ 27 inches. As of yesterday it is 49 lbs @ 27 inches. In February it sat in my mud room where there is a wood stove so MC content was low now the bow is sluggish. It will still kill a deer no doubt but it has slowed some. ??? In April the bow had 1/2 inch of string follow. The bow has 1.50 of string follow now. In april the bow would cast a 540 grain arrow 189 yards. Last month I used the same arrow and could only get 168 yards. So temperature I don't think would affect cast but temp and humidity affects quite a bit.
Greg.
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See what they been saying for years is true...it ain't the heat it's the HUMIDITY!
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wouldn't heat help force moisture into the wood?
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Nothing "forces" anything, its just that warm air can hold more moisture that your bow can suck up. Heat by itself would dry the bow out, as we see with heat-treating/bending
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So then what effect does moisture have on a bow that's well sealed up ?
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So then what effect does moisture have on a bow that's well sealed up ?
Unless hermetically sealed in glass, a wood bow will find a way to absorb moisture from the air (or from direct contact. The better your finish, the longer it will take for the bow to take up that moisture. BUT once the moisture is in, the finish will trap the moisture and make it difficult for the bow to lose the moisture.
Some woods are less prone to be bothered with moisture, osage being one. But hickory LOOOOVES moisture and is loathe to give it back once absorbed. Some say that is why early 20th century bowyers considered hickory to be one of the poorest bow woods, an opinion that has changed now that people know how to keep a bow in a dry situation.
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For the purposes of this discussion, you can't seal out moisture, you can only slow the uptake. The wood is going to seek an equilibrium with it's environment over time. A good sealer will slow the uptake, but over time the wood will take on moisture in a humid environment. Conversely, a sealer will slow the woods ability to dry out once it has taken on moisture.