Len in Maryland

Todd:

One of the guys who attended my seminars this weekend had a X-Force. He worked for a local manufacturer of archery equipment.

The draw cycle on his bow set at 70# was better than what I experienced at the ATA Show and I think I know why. The one at the ATA Show was a much heavier poundage and I think the limbs on that one may have been turned down to compress the rubber dampener between the limb and the riser. It is still a unique draw cycle to gain that speed, but I have to admit that the one he brought too the seminar was not like the one I experienced previously.

One thing that did disturb me, however, was the draw length. His actually measured 31 1/2" on what he said was the 30" module (#10 setting).

Black Frog

Len,

I finally got my smaller mods to get to my 27" draw. Feels good now for fit.

The rubber cushions under the limb pockets are not supposed to be compressed much, if any- They say optimumspace is .200".

And I got my new bow press to be able to work on this bow. I put on my smaller mods and moved my string to the long drawlength peg on the cam. My bow came from PSE at around 62+ pounds. When moving the string to the long peg- I was surprised at the poundage jump. Around 3.5 pounds! So now my bow is about 66 pounds. I don't mind thata bit. At first when ordering the bow I was a little scared of having a "speed bow" with a possible harsh draw. But after shooting it at 62# for a while I was thinking maybe I should've ordered a 70# instead and just turned it down a little. Mid-60's is now just perfect for what I wanted.

Now, if someone had ordered a 70# bow and then needed to be on the long drawlength peg they could be in for a bit of a surprise. From the X-Forces I've seen, they all seem to be coming in a couple of pounds heavy in the factory "0" position. So that means someone's ordered 70# bow could be 75-76# in the long peg! weeeee!!!! just something for people to be aware of.....

I also took my bow completely apart to check it out a little closer. Those limbs are completely straight when they are let down! Kinda freaky. All the limb pocket cushions and pivot points were nicely lubricated from the factory.

What I did find that I wasn't crazy about was that the limb bolts going into the riser seemed to have a lot of crap on the threads. To me it looks like they didn't clean out the threaded holes very well before lubing and assembling the bow. I suppose it wouldn't be a big deal if you never intended to turn you limb bolts very much, but still I felt much better cleaning the bolts and threaded holes and reapplying grease.

Now with the correct drawlength- I don't thinkthe bowis overly harsh to draw at all. Very pleasant for the incredible speeds this thing achieves. And I added a homemade string suppressor which removed any resonance of the bow on the shot. It now feels very dead in the hand. Not that it was bad to begin with, but now it is really dead.

Still in the process of replacing strings and cables. Haven't had time to do any speed testing with them on yet. I've been impressed at the ease of getting really nice arrow flight with some Carbon Express 3D Selects 300's I had laying around.

Some of my groupings out to 60yds were veryencouraging. This bow does not shoot like a low brace height bow from what I've seen so far. I'm still quite impressed with this bow.

Black Frog

I finally got to tinkering with new strings and cables that I made up.

The stock calbes from the factory were starting to have serving separation within 100 shots. Not so hot. So I made up some green/brown twist 452X string/cables that look really nice. The 452X may not be quite as fast as 8125 or some of the Brownell products, but I like the stability of it. I took off the speed nocks of the stock string and played around with placement on my new string to get the most out of their effect.

PSE must have done their homework on placement because right where they had them is where I found the greatest speed gains. I found the speed nocks to be worth about 3fps. I tried moving them up and down the string a bit, and also more and less speed nocks. PSE uses 5 speednocks near the top and bottom cam. I reapplied some heat shrink tubing once I found the optimum position. PSE told me that the best position is to measure up exactly 3" from the lobe tip of the cam and put the center speednock there. Put two more on both sides of that center speednock. Those werevery accurate directions from what I've found. I'm not sure how longer drawlengths would change that optimum position. I only have so much time to experiment!

Getting out to the range with my Carbon Select 300's was fun. I'm trying the newer, tougher Quickspin 2" ST's this year. They are much more durable than the older version, and so far they haven't shown any signs of wrinkle or bend with multiple arrow slams and scraping hits.

I'm starting out using my trusty old Bodoodle Pro500 on this bow. Getting holes in paper was very simple with the X-Force. But as we all know, paper tuning can just be the start of fine-tuning.

Some people don't give much credit to bareshaft tuning a compound with a release. I'm one that does. I apply some wraps of electrical tape to the rear of the bareshaft to simulate the FOC of my fletched arrows. I think that if you can get a bareshaft impacting with (or near) fletched shafts at distance, that is telling me that my fletching is having to do little or no work for steering correction. From my experience it makes for very nice fixed blade broadhead flight that matches (or damn close to) field tip impact.

I was getting nice bullet holes with an even 90 degree nocking point at 4-5ft from the bow. Once I got out to the range I was getting nice groupings but decided to throw my bareshaft into the mix to see what that did. At 10 yds my bareshaft was impacting near my fletched shafts, but with a severe nock-down orientation into the target. At 20yds with the same setting the bareshaft was porpoising badly.

I first go for level bareshaft entry into a shoulder-high 10yd target, and not too concerned with left/right tail orientation just yet. The nock point position will change the up/down bareshaft tail position. Once I have the bareshaft impacting level into the target, then I start to address the lefts/rights of the bareshaft. And generally, the spine and windage will change the left/right orientation.

So I slightly raised my nock point and started over at 10yds. It was a little better. I raised it a little more. Better yet. I raised it one more time and the bareshaft was impacting straight into the 10yd target. I moved back to 20yds and there was no more porpoising, but it still had a slightly nock-down orientation in the target. I tweaked the nock point up a tad more and moved back to 30yds. Looked decent, and impacted veryclosely to my fletched shafts.

Moved back to 40yds- impacted near fleltched shafts, within 10" or so. I played with my windage setting a bit and moved back to 50yds. Now I was happy. At 50yds I got my bareshaft impacting within a foot or so of a fletched shaft grouping. A little wind or a slight form change can move that bareshaft impact point around quite a bit at that range, so I don't get too worried about it at that distance. This was the quickest amount of time I've ever done this process. At times it can be apretty tough tuning process- tweaking poundage, arrow spine, windage, nock point, etc.. It can involve a LOT of range time and tinker time. This one all fell together really fast (and easy).

I had my chrono out at the range, and if I plan to use these arrows for hunting, they are sailing along at 289fps with my bow set at 27-1/4" AMO draw. I haven't weighed them, but I'm very impressed with the speed for my shorty draw, it smokes arrows along.So were others at my club range that were watching me tinker. I let some guys shoot my bow with a very surprised "wow" reaction, and a bigger WOW when they see how fast it is- and that speed with being that quiet and shock free. I have a string supressor that I mounted on the bow, and that makes it completey dead in the hand. Some commented that they weren't used to the draw cycle, but could get used to it quickly. Their bows tend to ramp up slower to peak poundage vs the fairly quick ramp up of the X-Force. I don't even notice anything about the draw cycle after having it several weeks now.

So things are progressing well so far. I was surprised that I needed to raise the nocking point as much as I did past 90 degrees to achieve great bareshaft flight. But the results have been very positive. I'm really looking forward to hunting with this bow this year.