Month: August 2008

New toys!

So the stuff I ordered earlier has all arrived, and I can finally stop keeping my bow in a torn cardboard box held together with twine!

Stuff bought from Altservices

So that’s a dozen new arrows (albiet in kit form, but I’ve borrowed the club’s fletching jig so I should have them all made up by the weekend); a new rest, button and clicker; a t-gauge; a bowstand and arrowpuller; and a new backpack to put them all in.

Cycled from TCD to the flat with the backpack on, so it does work for that, even if the arrowtube blocks visibility slightly. Now to spend tomorrow evening and chunks of saturday putting all this together, then sunday lunchtime most of the Wilkinstown archers will be going to Wilkinstown to let a few pointy sticks fly for an hour or three, and we’ll see if any of this stuff actually works! 🙂

New archery range in WTSC

One little bit of news from WTSC is that we’ve been given permission to use a neighbouring field to our own for outdoor archery practise. Our current setup can cope with a few people at up to about 30m:

It’s perfect for training and tuning and for beginners shooting, though perhaps it is time we did a bit of renovation on the backstop netting…

The new field has a lot more potential in terms of distance; we’re pretty sure we can run a full FITA round in it (30m, 50m, 60/70m, 70/90m for women/men). It does, however, need a little work before it’s ready… Continue reading “New archery range in WTSC” →

Dublin Archers scouting trip

So went last night to the Dublin Archers field to see how a “real” archery club does it 😀 It was interesting and instructive in a few ways. Met up with Suzanne O’Hare who was running the session. She’s also the international secretary for the IAAA, so she’s about at where I’ve wound up in the sport/admin spectrum over the years. She’s also quite young, they all are, she’s mid-20s and half the folks there were younger. The other half were not much older. Oldest I saw was maybe in his 40s at the outside, and he was the senior coach who turned up near the end. Rather a change from the usual target shooting club.

Archers doing a walkback tuning session

Some things learnt, in no particular order:
Continue reading “Dublin Archers scouting trip” →

Beijing Aftermath

Oh, and to the Irish Times – if you’re going to compare the performance of the Olympic athletes to that of Padraig Harrington, would you do a fuller comparison? Like, say, pointing out that he earned more money from his first British Open win than the Department of Sport had for its entire Sports Capital grant fund in an olympic year? Or that his most recent win, valued at about €200 million, exceeds the entire budget allocated to sport in this country at all levels for the past four years?
The most lavishly supported Olympic athlete in Ireland might clear a hundred grand in a year if they’re very, very lucky. Harrington could spend that on a weekend away without breaking a sweat. Or, more to the point, he could spend it on hiring a professional coach to work with him 24/7 for a year. Find me an Olympic athlete who can afford to do that and you’ll have a reasonable comparison.

Beijing

Next person who says shooting is boring is being forced to watch coverage of the finals from this year. Between an Emmons making the news for all the right reasons at the beginning and an Emmons making the news for all the wrong reasons at the end; Bindhra taking India’s first ever individual Gold medal despite someone fiddling his sights before the finals; the disgrace of the first Olympic shooter being stripped of two medals for doping (miserable cheater); the heartbreak of watching Burnett come in so far beneath his current form; the Olympic spirit being demonstrated by the Russian and Georgian women embracing on the air pistol podium; and Du’s fall from grace in 10m Air Rifle and redemption in 50m 3P – how can anyone say it’s a boring sport?

Ah yes, the lack of bikinis. Right so, in that case the next person to complain that shooting is boring gets forced to watch the Irish 50m Nationals with all the competitors forced to wear speedos. If that won’t stop their complaining, nothing will…

Form videos and why UnderArmour is just mean

Okay, so recurve archery seems to be about doing a set of movements correctly, which means video is far more useful for diagnostics than still images – sort of the way that video is more useful for analysis of shot routines and deviations from them. So I got two minutes of video of shooting a few arrows, edited it to lose the colour and sound (to cut down on the size of the file) and uploaded them to youtube to ask Ewan (who’s basicly on the other side of the planet) to see if he could see glaring form errors, and sure enough there are some (lousy followthrough and insufficient elbow work going on). You have to love technology sometimes 🙂

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=74er__yCdeQ

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ek2IfxqCfl0

Continue reading “Form videos and why UnderArmour is just mean” →

Further Retail Archery

It’s like buying your way to… well, slightly less basic kit so that it looks very obvious that you’re the problem in the system 😀

Bought a bowscales a few days ago and it finally arrived, so I was finally able to get measurements of draw weight; I’d already taken measurements of the nock-rest draw length earlier. 29lbs @ 28″ is what it works out to, +/- a few percent. So with that sorted, there was a flurry of stuff ordered today:

  • A dozen 29.5″ Easton X7 1914 arrow shafts
  • Nibb points, hotglue, Beiter nocks and Kurly Vanes for fun (and their various tapes and such)
  • KAP Magnetic Rest (just a rebadged W&W rest really)
  • Cartel Triple Cushion Pressure Button
  • Cavalier Magnetic Clicker
  • Spigarelli Clicker (for herself)
  • Cartel RX-104 Bow Stand
  • 2 Cartel Arrow Pullers (his’n’hers)
  • Cavalier Finger Sling (for herself)
  • SF Elite Backpack
  • Cartel Sight (also for herself)
  • Cartel T-Guage

And a few new target faces for the club.And I ordered a new tab yesterday. I was looking at the soma saker I and II models, then noticed they had cheaper versions for a third of the price, so I ordered one because the tab I’m using now looks like someone attacked it with curling tongs.

Hopefully, that should be all the kit I get this year. Come spring, a heavier bow might be in order, but I feel… sated, at least for now 🙂

Retail Archery

So the archery side of things is continuing to improve.

The new Easton 1816 Jazz arrows Geoff got in give a more consistent grouping, and this weekend’s results were tighter still (and herself got into it as well with one of the new lighter bows we got, and disasterously has started to improve faster than I did in the beginning, getting 4/7 or so on the target at 30m on her first day). However, it’s time to start tuning really, and so there’s a list of kit forming to be bought:

  • Arrows
  • Tab
  • Rest
  • Button
  • Clicker
  • Stand
  • Arrow puller
  • Boonie hat

Of course, it’s never quite that simple. Continue reading “Retail Archery” →

FrankenRifle

Okay, so after the Snappy Disaster in May, the air rifle has lain dormant in the safe in DURC while I tried to sort out a replacement part from Anschutz. I’m sorry to say that the fabulous after-sales experience I had described to me by those who praised Anschutz to the roof wasn’t quite as evident as I thought it should have been – as far as I was concerned, it was an Anschutz bag, which broke and then didn’t protect the rifle; the impact was not significant enough to my mind to cause the amount of damage it did without there being some design or implementation flaw at work in the Anschutz stock; and I bought the rifle and the bag directly from Uwe Anschutz himself personally.

The inital response from Anschutz was that a replacement stock was available (good, since it’s not been made for a few years) for only €500. Continue reading “FrankenRifle” →