Our New Setups

Learning Archery Part 3

The first two seasons of our journey to learn archery and bowhunting left us searching for answers to a few gear questions. Time to buy new setups!

My brother J and I had both run into tuning issues, loud setups, sight concerns, and peep rotation. While a few of these problems were not inherently the equipment’s fault, our confidence in our gear was pretty low. Couple that with a gear nerd mentality and we jumped down the rabbit hole of new gear right after our 2nd season ended.

We let some of our previous gear purchasing mistakes teach us some valuable lessons and we began researching as much as we could. We sorted through forum posts, YouTube reviews, and friends experiences with different equipment brands and types to try to narrow down our search. We wanted our new setups to be perfect and last years.

The biggest part of our new setups is, of course, the bow itself. Looking into the different brands and availability at the time locally (keyword locally), we decided to narrow our research to BowTech and Hoyt. These two brands had the most users on the forums and nearby Jim Bows Archery was a dealer for both. 

On a work trip to Arizona, I was able to stop into a local archery pro shop and try out a few bows on my day off. I shot the 2017 PSE Evolve and Carbon Air (at the PSE factory in Tucson), 2017 BowTech BTX, 2017 Hoyt Pro Defiant 34, and the 2016 Hoyt Carbon Defiant turbo. I found the PSE bows to be jumpy and noticed a fair amount of vibration in my hand. The Bowtech BTX was a smooth drawing bow and I had no real complaints. In comparing the Defiant turbo to the Pro Defiant 34 it was clear that the turbo wanted to GO! The wall was shallow and the shorter brace height was noticeable, any creep and the bow wanted to fire.

With being fairly new to archery the thought of an unforgiving shot in a hunting situation made the turbo a non-option for me personally. The Pro Defiant 34 was a comfortable draw, the string angle felt great and with the limb stops, the back wall was quite solid and felt good in the hand. I found it to be very quiet and did not feel much for vibration. I did not look at the Carbon Defiant 34 as I felt the cost benefit was not there for me personally.

With my experiences shooting the group of bows it was between the Bowtech BTX and the Hoyt Pro Defiant 34 with 70lb limbs. Given that a lot of the archery information that I found readily available and informative was through John Dudley and Aron Snyder, who both were shooting Hoyt at that time, I chose to order the Pro Defiant 34 with the DFX 2.1 cam, so that my 29” draw length was the max setting on the cam for efficiency. Jim Bows was great in getting the order together.

For accessories, I went with Hoyt FUSE 4 arrow quiver and a FUSE 6” Stabilizer. These two accessories were the items I spent the least amount of time with. To me a quiver was a quiver and I did not know much about stabilizers. These have been on my bow now for the last two seasons but I will be looking to change out my quiver this off-season, which may lead to me researching and trying out a few different stabilizer options for better balance.

The big accessories that I purchased were the QAD Ultra Rest and the Black Gold Pure 75, 3 pin slider sight. This is where I leaned on Joey at Jim Bows Archery for recommendations. I had explained my concerns with the 7 pin IQ sight while wanting to shoot longer distances for practice. The 3 pin sight helps with a clearer sight picture and is far less confusing, but with the slider it allows you to shoot distances out to around 100yds. 

These sights use a pre-printed or calculated sight tape that is stuck to the housing. The bottom pin is your “sliding pin” and as you turn a knob the housing itself moves up and down using the bottom pin as the aiming pin for that distance. See picture below for reference,

The QAD Ultra Rest was Joey’s recommendation for a good drop away rest. It is a cable driven rest, meaning that it is tied to your cables and as the bow is drawn back it engages the drop mechanism and falls away as the bow fires. The other style of fall away rest is a limb driven rest where the flexing of the limb is what drives the rest. 

Once my new bow arrived, the guys at Jim Bows Archery got everything all adjusted, mounted all the accessories for me, and timed the drop away rest. Timing the rest is important so you get full clearance with your fletchings. They then helped with getting the bow all sighted in at 20 yards.

Overall, the purchase experience at Jim Bows was fantastic – highly recommend them!

Now that we had our new setups, I started looking at different arrow setups and what a rabbit hole that turned out to be!

Keep following along in my journey. Next up, what arrows to shoot the next season.

Thanks for reading, don’t hesitate to reach out with any questions about our new setups. – R