YT bow reviews ... (Page 2 of 3)

Thanks for the link Geo.  I really hope there is someone in Turkey somewhere still making these bows.  I would love to get my hands on one of these little powerhouses.

Interesting link (to Nawalny bows), thank you. Think I heard this name already, and prices for real horn/sinew bows seem fair.
I had noticed that Eastern Europe (Slavian countries) have a fair share of Turkish style archery. Including Poland, and even Russia.
BTW I have seen a (pseudo ?) historian Russian movie recently, dealing with the Bathu Khan invasion. A Russian archer used a relatively short recurved bow (Scythian/Awar ?), and had an interesting way to hold arrows in his bow hand. He held them horizontally, clamped between the fingers.
Not sure if this is historically correct, but as a matter of fact, the Russian Empire had very good relations to the Ottomans for centuries. Russian museums display pieces of armour, ornated with islamic texts in kyrillic (Russian) letters.

To stay with this topic, I watched the movie "Rise of the Scythian" (Russian: "скиф") recently. It features some archery scenes, and even e few with revealing close-ups. Which left me confused, actually. There was no consistent style. Arrows on both sides of the bow, and one close-up even revealed an Avatar-style draw (mediterranean reversed, i.e. palm outward).
Seems Russian movie directors place as much value on historical accuracy as the Hollywood counterparts ...

As a side note, the Russian term "скиф" seems coincidentially  quite similar to the Kantonese "shifu". Well, like Scythia vs. Scotia, Albion vs. Albania, and Rome vs. Romania ...

They could have used leather, which works fine for me. Or do it "Armin Hirmer style" - with bare thumb. I used to shoot my weak (25")  Alibow Qinghai mostly without protection.
But that is speculation.  I believe the construction parameters of bow artifacts could give an indication of  the used style.

And bridging back to said bow reviews - I am recently having a problem with a bow favourably reviewed by Armin. The bow is Awar style, and well made. However, it doesn't stand heat very well. Above 20°C, it seems to lose torsional stiffness, and the string jumps off the tiny string brigdes while shooting. Shooting a bow for a few minutes in a well tempered room at 10 yard is not really a hard criterion.
Well, it will become my winter bow then ...

To put my words cautiously - the YT channel is a very good marketing platform for the "attached" bowmakers. The products are not tested in a too tough manner...
I'm into compound shooting as well, and I noticed the same in this niche. Only with much more money involved. I quickly learned to discern sales-pitches-by-proxy from real reviews.
At the end of the day, it depends on the "due diligence" of the potential customer.

I approached this issue from a mainly "energetical" view. Being famous as good archers, their arrows supposedly had a proper "punch", even against armour equivalent to medieval periods. This implies draw weights comparable to the Manchus and English, assuming similar stature and performance.
Deducing the approximate draw curve from preserved bow fragments (as done with other bows), it should be possible to conclude if it was used with a mediterranean style (26..28") of thumb draw (30"..34"), ignoring the short ottoman draw here for a moment.
Kinetic energy is proportional to draw length (actually, draw length minus brace height), which enabled me to shoot 400gn arrows with competitive performance on a "weak" 25" bow. And draw length beyond the chin would IMHO suppose thumb draw, at least in mounted archery.
The English used a 30..31" finger draw in war, but only for unprecise "arrow hails" and clout shooting.
Just my 2 cents...

Not really surprised about the probable Scythian draw weights. They wanted similar effects on animals and armour, so required similar draw weights.

This could well be. Besides the Kassai style, there are other finger draw styles suitable for horseback archery. Unfortunately it seems, archeologists are not very interested in such details.

I had been aware of the ATARN site, but not yet read all pages.
I think I continue after my holidays, which are planned to proceed (almost) without computer / electronic devices. Being a "professional keyboard warrior", I need a rest sometimes ...

Yes, I think it's becoming better.
However, I still miss a test on distances greater than 10 meters, and a kind of long-term test.
The first one would be easy, as he has videos from his outdoor range. And good mediterranean archers do blank shaft test at least at 10m and 20m, because it usually takes 20 to 30m for the arrow oscillations to settle.

But perhaps I'm too harsh, because testing is an important part of my day job. And a good tester tries to "break" the product without exceeding it's limits.

1 step forward 2 steps back?  Actually, if that were a true Alibow unboxing, it would feature a bent box with a very unhappy customer taking the bow out and realizing that the next step would entail straightening out the ridiculous twist-bend in one's newly purchased bow.  And the eventual realization of fissure(s) running vertical along with the fiber glass layer.  Fun times.

His relationship with Alibow seems very different compared to other bowyers.  He even notes that he was invited to shoot with the owner's niece in China towards the end of this video and it looks like in another fairly recent video he was gifted the commemorative Alibow tea.  At the end of that video, he proclaims the tea 'amazing' just like all the rest of Alibow's products.  Given my experience plus many others with Alibow, I'd be very hesitant to drink that tea.

Can't say much about the foam layer though.  Never had experience with that type of material.  Even though I have had my eye on this model since it is an asymmetric and have been wanting something Hun/Sassanid like for a while, given my experience with this company as well as other's testimonials, I will have to politely decline and let perhaps a more adventurous consumer purchase and test the model out for longevity and all that.

As my one conservative vendor says: Let someone else be the beta tester.

Future.  But of course point being, you'd think in some regards you'd leave info like that out of a video review as presenting a chummy-chum relationship with a manufacturer in the beginning like that can do much to discredit the assessment.  Presents a conflict of interest.

Bigger companies have more money with which to "buy" reviews. A lot of reviewers can also get away with this somehow. TwangNBang is not specific to compound bows, but is one such example of this type of channel. He actually had the nerve to come out and say that he does not give negative reviews in a video. I went looking and it appears in the years since he has deleted the video, but I was someone who followed his channel from its early days until I realized he only offered utterly shill reviews. For him though it worked, and appears to continue to work, very well as a means to grow because manufacturers feel very comfortable sending products if they know it'll have a good outcome.

I bring this up as an example because I think you put  your finger on why I don't see Armin as one of said shill reviewers. He is polite and nice and friendly, certainly, but he genuinely doesn't seem to be shilling or selling for a company. When bows break, he does share and show it, albeit usually that is posted on one of his other social media fronts. And he runs a range, which shouldn't be discounted, as his bows probably actually get a pretty darn good arrow count. You see these bows he reviews out on the range posted in pictures pretty much daily.

I think there might be a compounding factor here working in his favor, which is that he shoots very low poundage bows. The lower the poundage, the less likely the bow is to break generally speaking.

Think about that from an engineering perspective. Shoot a 30 pound and a 60 pound bow at the same GPP and the same efficiency (lets say 70%) That means in both cases the bow has to reabsorb 30% of the total energy, but that'd be half as much total energy for the 30# bow.... and the glass/carbon laminations are identical as are the glue lines, they just use thinner wood cores to achieve the lower poundages.

Just to be explicit, I do not think there is money flowing for this reviews in the background.

Trying to think in the shoes of both sides:
As a bowyer, I would double or triple-check a bow before sending him to a independant reviewer. A (more or less) open platform like YT reaches hundreds or thousands of potential customers, so mistakes quickly damage your reputation.
And as a reviewer, you are tempted to be nice, or else the bowyer might drop you for his next bows. So don't dig too deep, and don't be too meticulous.

More than a decade ago, I had subscibed to a computer magazine that did quite comprehensive reviews. They bought the stuff anonymous, and called things as they are. As one might guess, they were not really loved accross that industry. But all watered down through the years, and they are doing the ubiquitous "Word and Excel tricks" now.

I brought compounds up, as an obvious and extreme example. Many distributors/shops who do YT reviews have written contracts with manufacturers. And as I heard, some (compound bow) manufacturers even forbid dealers to put certain other brands in their shop. A healthy competition, it seems ...