c-903, I know the moral. Ruger never made a decent over&under shotgun, and a Springer would have come back with the wing tipped bird.

c903,
I' m trying to draw a parallel here in my mind........

" My buddy decides to shoot his $1000 brand new BowTech set up w/ a new Copper John ANTS sight bar, Extreme 3X scope w/ Zeiss lens, 30" Shrewd Devibe carbon stabilizer w/ v-bar assembly, Drop away rest, and a sweet new Carter release flinging his new Carbon Express " Linejammer" arrows for the IB0 Worlds this year, while myself?...........You know, feeling that things have gotten a bit out of hand with bow technology and changes year to year , I decided to dust off my trust Bear Whitetail Hunter w/ steel pins and one of those COOL 4" solid chunk metal stabilizers.......(no peep of course) and A few left over trusty 2117 Gamegetter arrows and have at it.............

Somehow not translating into the world of archery.

Matt,




Atlasman,

Sorry, I missed your post earlier. My comment about " phoo phoo" arrows was sort of a " private" joke between myself and some hunting buddies. One of them insisted for years that they were called " phoo-phoo" arrows no matter what evidence we presented to the contrary. So whenever I hear mention of them it makes me think of that situation.

I vote for BowTech!!! What other company has 18 different bows available for 2003? The Dually cams are super performers and for those who can' t handle the draw[] there is the Infinity cam that is super accurate as well. You can' t go wrong with BowTech!!!

Matt

Keep thinking, it (the moral of the story) will come to you....maybe

You just (partially) hit on my point.

Also, I take it that your buddy stands on a range, mostly on a sunny days, shooting foam animals that never move or flich, and will stand stone-still until your buddy is sure of the shot. If he is a serious competitive shooter, he may also have a backup setup.

Heh..Ruger. Gosh I’ve always loved the lines of a Ruger but I never owned on or sold one that would shoot worth a crap. Number 1s, Number 3’s, M77’s…Never tried one of their shotguns. Oh yeah I could kill a deer with one, but I never could get one to shoot better than a 3” group at 100 off a bench, even with friends hot-rodding ammo for me. Yet, I could take a stock M700, M70, or Browning and find some off the shelf ammo that would shoot 1.5” groups or less.

But I digress, back to the subject at hand.

As far as I’m, concerned the major players this year are Hoyt and Bowtech. Archery Research is very hot with some dealers, and many PSE dealers are pissed off over the line, as well as PSE putting some of the better bows in their catalog line rather than the Pro-shop line this year (Primos STL for starters). I don’t think they will do as well as they hoped. Probably better than PSE ahs done with thier top end bows in recent years, but no matter how nice they are built or feel, Mathews clones are a dying breed. They will need to adapt and design new cams and risers.

Mathews: Well, I don’t ever underestimate Matt McPherson. I still believe he can pull something out of his sleeve. Unfortunately his marketing department is cutting off his arms before he can. The blatant cut downs in the catalog and advertising are hurting the company’s rep, and also by going even farther with a symmetrical cam and idler (The Icon from last year, and this years XP cam) he’s helping to prove everyone’s point that there’s some serious advantages to a hybrid or dual cam system. The LX is a neat shooting bow though. It feels like a Legacy with another 8-10 FPS tacked on. The draw stop ala Bowtech’s I-cam (and the old Jennings supercam) is a nice touch. But they still need some refinement. The machining I’ve seen is “sharp” in that it’s starting to cut into strings and cables. They’ll fix that though. The Black Max II with its sub 6” brace is really a design that’s way past it’s prime, and will those really nice new pockets be THAT much better on the C3? Seems like they keep trying to reinvent a design that doesn’t need to be reinvented: the original Conquest Pro was the best incarnation yet.

There are some other interesting things out there: Merlin’s hybrid for one, but the company has little impact overall in the US market (so far), despite the extreme high quality.

Martin seems to be doing very well with the near complete re-vamp of the product line. I know I’ve been very impressed with line compared to the last 3 or 4 years. The new Cougar III and Scepter III in their various configurations are some nice shooting bows.

So my vote goes to Hoyt with their excellent C.5 and tweaks to the Tec risers, and Bowtech’s complete slim down of risers and grips, new cam designs, and increased speed with increased brace heights. Martin’s revamped line would be my third choice.

That is a 6pt voting quietly from my freezer for Fred Bear as his " King of the hill" . Fred' s TRX put such a quiet and fast end to his days in the woods that he thought he should thank him..............with all his heart.

Hard to pick a clearcut winner. Different folks desire different qualities in their rigs.

My pick would be the new cam.5 rigs from Hoyt. If this means anything...Hoyt is 3,800 UltraTec`s behind as of 4/03/03. That`s just UltraTecs!

Usually by this time of year, Hoyt is caught up on all models.


Bowfanatic, I hope the dealer was misinformed about the royalties. Darton was not the first for this design either. I will check into that.

I guess you could say that both cams are similar, but one sure is superior!

JeffB, you must have had really bad luck with your Rugers. I' ve never seen one that would shoot out of 1.5 inches. My .338 will shoot under one inch at 100 for as long as you want to sit there and take the pounding. My son had a 25-06 Varmint that would shoot anything you could buy under 1/2 inch. Maybe it was your scope I' ve owned around 15 of them in the last 25 years.

WWAG,

I used to sell Rugers (as well as just about everything else) for a living working at a large independent firearms/hunting/archery/fishing store back home. The accuracy problems were a major complaint from far more people than myself. This included not only customers/collectors/techs/gunsmiths but many of the distributors we also worked with and bought these weapons from. Ruger rifles generally needed custom work (glass bedding for the M77' s etc) out the box to get them to shoot as accurately as the other major brands we sold, though there were always exceptions. The general concensus was that for a span of about 10-12 years Ruger rifle barrels were very suspect in quality. Older guns from the 60' s and 70' s were of much higher quality (And posessed better out of the box accuracy) than guns of the 80' s and at the least until the mid-90' s (when I stopped working in the industry). I' m unaware these days of quality one way or the other for newer guns. Weatherby aslo suffered form these same problems when they were being made in Japan (as opposed to europe before that, and more current guns from the States)

That' s just my experience though, it certainly doesn' t invalidate yours. I' ve seen some very accurate Ruger rifles. Someday if I were to ever buy another firearm, I' d still be looking at a #1 or #3, as I find them elegant and handy hunting weapons.