So your telling me that it is not common to have a bow that draws higher than it is rated when the limbs are maxed out? Because there a lot of bows that do this, right off the shelf at the pro shop. Mathews used to horrible for it, sometimes 5 lbs over what there were rated for. And on some designs changing the draw length will effect it as well.

I will give you that given the two extremes the higher poundage bow turned all the way down may be a tad slower. However how much are we talking, most likely not more than a few feet per second. Certainly not enough that it will make a difference in real world shooting. And believe me being a smaller archer I have played with this quite a bit. Using different weight ranges, different draw lengths, different string lengths you name it I have probably tried it. I have even shimmed limbs to get more weight than what they were rated for. Even out of time bows don't even vary a great deal.

My point is that limbs are adjustable for many reasons, two of them being to match the draw weight to the archer and the other to match the draw weight to the spine of the arrows. I would bet you good money that 9 out of 10 average archers that have their limbs maxed out are over bowed as far draw weight goes and could have a much better spine match if they played with the limb adjustments. And both of those are in my opinion much more important than any advantage you might gain from having your limbs maxed out. Especially with the newer style bows.

I'm certainly not suggesting that someone goes out and buys a 70 lb bow and shoots it at 60 lbs on purpose. However there are a lot of people that will get a 70 lb bow even though it's a bit much for them then they turn it down to 65 or so hoping to increase strength later. Maybe the will, maybe they won't. Then they read a post like this and get the impression that their bow will shoot better maxed out so they go ahead and bottom the limbs out thinking it will magically make them shoot better. When in most cases it simply will not. It might be slightly more efficient in a machine but that doesn't mean you will actually shoot it better.

So I'm not really saying your technically wrong, because your not. I'm just saying that in my opinion it really doesn't matter enough to worry about. And it's really nothing more than my opinion.

Paul