HuntingNet.com Forums - Chekmate Sabre Takedown Review.

Early last June, I ordered a Chekmate Sabre Takedown recurve from Chad at recurves.com. The long wait ended last Monday when she finally arrived at my door. After tearing into the box, I sat down and did and inspection of the riser and limbs. To say the least, I was impressed with the finish and workmanship. The fit of the limbs to the riser is very good and the flat matte finish is great. The pieces selected to assemble the riser are beautiful with really nice grain. The pictures don't really do the cocobolo justice. I ordered the riser cut with a high wrist grip and requested the throat of the grip be reduce as much as what Marc thought would be safe. The end result fits my hand perfectly.
After a few days of nasty weather, I was finally able to get out, get her tuned and do some serious shooting with my new bow. This past week, I've put a couple of hundred arrows through her. I also shot some different weight arrows through the chrono just to get a few numbers for the guys that have been asking. The stats on the bow are as follows. She's 66" in length, AMO. I ordered 45#@28" and Marc hit 46#. The bow is marked as such and it pulls that on my scales. The limbs are black walnut and the riser is cocobolo and bocote. The string is a D97 flemish twist with halo serving and sports a set of rubber cat whiskers. The bow is tillered for 3 under, my perfered shooting style. All shooting was done with a 3 under black widow tab. After tuning, the brace height ended up just a touch over 8.5". Getting into some serious shooting, the first thing I noticed is that this bow is REALLY smooth on the draw. Being 66" I would expect it to be, but this feels really nice. On release, handshock is non-existant and the bow is surprisingly quiet. Even before I put on the catwhiskers, I was pleased with how quiet the bow was. I'm also finding the sabre to be very forgiving. This could be due to the physical weight of the bow. The riser section on the sabre is fairly long. Combined with a heavy wood such as cocobolo it produces a bow with a fairly decent heft to it. I haven't physically weighed the bow yet, but I will say it's not a light weight. It's not massively heavy, but you know you have a bow in your hand. Pulling out the chronograph, I selected 3 different arrows to shoot for numbers. The first are my 3D arrows, Easton lightspeeds, that weigh in at 364 grains. Then a 2016 weighing in at 480 grains. And finally a long cut 2018 that weighs in at 536 grains. Each arrow was shot 10 times through the chrono and then an average was taken. The lightspeeds (7.9 gr/#) averaged a velocity of 196 fps. The 2016 (10.4 gr/#) averaged 174 fps. The 2018 (11.7 gr/#) averaged 161 fps.
Overall, I'm really impressed with the Sabre and wouldn't hesitate to recommend it. Thanks to Chad at recurves.com and to Marc and the fellas up at chekmate for a great bow.