Testing a modern Korean bow at a flight archery tournament

Due to a change in rules, this year we had an opportunity to shoot an off-the-shelf, modern materials, Korean traditional bow. Because the new category was a surprise to some of us, we did not have the required bows and to compete, we relied on the generosity of Jaap Koppedrayer, who lent a Kaya bow to several archers.

As a result we have comparative distances of a single bow shot by several archers using multiple styles. Different length arrows were used as well as shooting with an arrow guide. There was another Korean bow present, twenty pounds lighter, but shot with longer arrows.

Fred Lueck, Justin Ma, Jie Tian and I shot the Kaya bow and Carla Lueck shot the lighter bow.

What we discovered was that with the same bow, draw length was the most important criterion. The longer the draw, the further the arrow went. Fred shot with three fingers at first and then changed to a thumb ring for his sixth shot. That shot went much farther than the previous five. Photos suggest that there was less oscillation in the arrows when shot with a thumb ring reducing the initial drag.

The bow was also shot with an arrow guide with fourteen inch arrows improvised from some arrows I had brought to practise with a regular flight bow. Two of the arrows were unfletched and had bulky plastic nocks. I did not anticipate the guide arrows would perform much better than regular arrows because of the potential for them to lose energy faster because of their low mass. I was wrong; the guide arrows performed much better than expected and the unfletched arrows performed best of all.

The weighing of the bow was accomplished with each competitor's longest arrow. Each person had the bow at a different weight ranging from 42 lb up to almost 50 lb. This put it into the 50 lb range. Those people with the longer draws and slightly higher poundage shot farther. Fred was outside this range because of his very long draw. The type of arrow seem not to be so important. Carbon, Hexshaft and bamboo were used. Without having weighed the arrows, I cannot say what the precise relationships were. However, carbon was probably the lightest, bamboo next, and then Hexshaft.

It is my conclusion that the length of draw is critical. The effect this has on available energy is important. When I look at the result with the arrow guide, the performance of the unfletched shafts suggest that arrows leave the guide much more in line with the direction of the string travel than I had previously thought.

The method of measuring flight distances, perpendicular to the flight line where the archers stand, is somewhat misleading in that two arrows may be only 30 cm apart in the perpendicular but may be several meters apart horizontally. However, on the whole most arrows from each archer fell reasonably close to each other despite the distances involved.