You'll hear a lot of opinions about stabilizers, so here's mine.Most people feel that for hunting that they need a short stabilizer but if you go to a 3d shoot everyone has stabs that are 30" long. IMO, 30" is way too long to hunt with but there'sno reason to limit yourself to a 4" stab. When I started out I had a cheep 4", then I bought a 7" Doinker thinking that this was about the max size to hunt with. One day while shooting at a buddies house I tried his Switchback with a 10" stab. He insisted that walking through the woods was no problem. That started the experiment, I machined 2 pieces of 1" diameter aluminum rod about 3/8" long. I drilled and tapped a center hole for 5/16-24 then I drilled four holes to accept old arrows, about .296 diameter. Now I can screww my doinker on the end and adjust the overall length by cutting the arrow pieces to size. To make a long story short longer was better for accuracy. I decided to go with 11 1/2" overall length including the bracket for my front mount STS and a QD so it all fits in the case easily. Then I found a guy on e-bay selling 6 sims modular nodes and I won the bid for $36. I put three of them on the end of my homemade extension and they work great, I really did notice a difference over the doinker and with the other three aI made a second stab for my son. As far as it being too long, it's still shorter than the arrow sticking out the front of the bow.When you're walking around in the woods you have have to watch where your arrow tip is, if the stab is shorter it won't create a problem. Just my .02.