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Archery has been practiced for a long time. Bows have been found from at least 2,500 years before Christ, so 4,500 years ago. It is also probable that archery goes back a couple of thousand years before that, but because most bows were made solely of wood, they have not lasted.

In the early days, bows were utilized for hunting and keeping raiders away. Nowadays, there are still some cultures that rely on hunting with bows and arrows to put meat on the table and there are also people who decide to do it that way for sport.

The equipment concerned with archery is essentially a bow and an arrow, but it goes deeper than that. If you genuinely want to get involved in archery, you may want to consider making your own bow, your own arrows and your own practice butts.

There are excellent kits for making your own bows, but there are too many types of bows for us to go into all of them in this article. However, be assured that if you do want to make your own bow, you will find a description of the resources and the methods on the Internet.

You can also make your own arrows and that is an easier topic to deal with. If you start with the shaft, it can be crafted of wood, aluminium alloy or carbon fibre, all of which can be bought easily. Then, at the sharp end, you can choose your tip or point.

The arrow head should match the task that the arrow is meant for. If it is meant to kill, then a broadhead, if it is meant to make a hole in a sheet of paper, then a simple brass tip.

The flights can be bought separately too. You can feathers or plastic and with a little experience, you can use feathers that you have acquired yourself. Goose feathers were traditionally the ones preferred.

Lastly there is the nock, which is the part of the arrow that connects with the string. The nock can be as simple as a ‘v’ or a ‘u’ cut in the arrow, or it can be a plastic or metal item that is slotted over the end of the arrow.

The bow string is too hard to make oneself, unless you really want to go into that technology. The bow string is more easily bought.

Archery targets, the round ones, you associate with target archery are a different kettle of fish, because you definitely can make them yourself. You first have to get hold of a load of straw and then grab handfuls of it. Bind these handfuls of straw into ‘ropes’ and make a circle like a Catherine Wheel out of them.

Stitch these together until they form the size target you require. Place this on an easel or nail it to a tree and then pin the traditional archery target to the front of it.

You can draw the conventional concentric circles on cloth, canvas or paper. It does not have to cost a lot to enjoy archery. Remember that 5,000 or 500 years ago, people did not have much, yet they still enjoyed their sport or hobby of archery.

Owen Jones, the author of this article writes on various topics, but is currently involved with archery bows for sale. If you would like to know more or for special offers, please go to our website at Kids Archery Set.

We are all being encouraged to get out more frequently, so many people are looking for a reason for doing it. You could choose a spectator sport like football, but that is not really going to do your body much good, you should be looking for a participation sport.

If you are younger, then play soccer by all means, but if you are getting on a bit, you will most likely be looking for a sport that is not quite so strenuous. Men like to aim and shoot things even if not kill them. Golf is an option, but I want to recommend that you give archery a try.

Archery has the edge over shooting a gun because it requires some physical strength. It is not just a question of pulling, sorry, squeezing a trigger. If you take up archery, you will probably want to develop some more upper-body strength, especially if the heaviest work you have done for the last twenty years is pick up a pen.

Archery is an rounded sport in many ways, depending on how much you get into it. Most novices will start out by going to an archery club and joining in for the day. People will lend them a bow and show them the safety aspects and the correct way to hold a bow and shoot an arrow. This should give you a good notion of which sort of bow you would like.

After a week or two, you might buy your own bow and you may move from indoor target archery to outdoor target archery or even field archery, which is virtual hunting. From there, you will almost certainly meet people who take archery a step further. You will meet competition archers, bow hunters and people who make their own equipment.

You might find one of these aspects of archery enthralling. You may take up bow hunting or even bow fishing. This will lead you off at a tangent, because you will have to learn about the animals that you hunt. You will have to learn where they live and what their lifestyles are. This means research.

Or you can take up the archery equivalent of clay pigeon shooting, which is called field archery. In field archery, the archers walk around a course and replica animals or standard targets will become visible at diverse distances. This is enjoyable.

You will also meet individuals who like to make their own arrows or even their own bows. This is another fascinating feature of archery. You can purchase the different components that go to make up an arrow and you can buy a kit to make a bow or you can start from scratch with an axe, a knife and a lathe. Again you will need to do a lot of research, in order to get your archery equipment just the way you want it.

This will lead you down yet another tangent to archery, but it will enhance your understanding of archery, increase your enjoyment of the sport and, as they say, add another string to your bow.

Owen Jones, the writer of this piece writes on several subjects, but is presently involved with longbows for sale. If you would like to know more or for special offers, please go to our website at Kids Archery Set.

Archery fishing is also called bow fishing and it is as ancient as the bow and arrow themselves. We in the West tend to think that only poorer tribesmen in Third World countries go bow fishing, but that is not quite true.

These days the hunting of mammals is strictly regulated and so some people who like to hunt with a bow will switch to bow fishing if the animals that they like to hunt, say deer, are out of season. Some other people, who would not hunt a deer or bear are very happy to kill fish in this way.

Bow fishing is a skillful sport, but the equipment need not necessarily be hi-tech. The fact is that you can use whatever bow you have or you can just make one. It does not have to be strong, because the quarry is seldom more than ten feet away. You categorically do not need a 100 lbf longbow to kill a trout.

Having said that, any bow used for fishing will need to be adapted slightly – you will need to attach a reel to it, but it does not have to be anything fancy. There are three principal types of reel for use in bow fishing: hand-wrap, spincast and retriever and the line is usually braided nylon of approximately eighty pounds although you might require six hundred pound breaking strain line for alligators or sharks.

It is worth checking out the laws with regard to bow fishing in your country or state, because sometimes bow fishermen have to be licensed and sometimes getting that license involves having been on a safety course.

Some regions will even have regulations concerning the kind of gear you can use in bow fishing and of course, some fish have seasonal restrictions.

Bow fishing is a mixture of fishing and hunting, so you could have to learn some new skills like tying knots for example. You will need to be able to tie the line to the reel and the arrow and those knots will need to be able to put up with the tremendous acceleration that an arrow leaving a bow goes through without failing.

The bow may not be different much from a standard bow, but the arrows certainly do. Arrows for bow fishing are usually a lot heavier that air-flight arrows. They also have barbed tips to stop the fish escaping or just slipping off when you reel it in. The arrows do not have fletching either because flights are apt to deflect the true course of the arrow in water – the reverse of in the air.

There are three main techniques used in bow fishing: 1] you can put down ground bait and lie in wait. – an over hanging tree or high rock is good for this; 2] you can float down stream in a boat while sitting or standing in the prow; 3] you can wander into the stream like a salmon fisherman.

Compensating for the refraction of the water is the most difficult ability to learn and that means knowing the water well too.

Owen Jones, the author of this article writes on several subjects, but is currently concerned with archery recurve bows. If you would like to know more or for special offers, please go to our website at Kids Archery Set.

Archery can be classified as a sport or a hobby and it has its own class at the Olympic Games. Archers either hunt wild game animals or aim at targets or both. If you shoot at targets in a competition, it is the collective score of all your arrows that is used to work out your rank in that competition. The nearer the centre of the target that the arrow hits, the higher the tally.

Target archery can also be sub-divided into two categories: field archery and target archery. In target archery, the archer stands in a preset spot. If there are a number of archers, they can stand in a row and all shoot together on command from the person in charge of enforcing the rules and safety. Any kind of bow can usually be used in target archery, although only compound bows may be used in the Olympic Games.

In field archery, the targets are of diverse sizes and are placed at different distances. The archer moves around the course, so there is no one fixed shooting spot. The targets may be the well-known round targets with concentric rings or they may be life-size models of wild animals like bears, moose and foxes.

The bows used in field archery are more often than not traditional style bows: longbows, flat bows and recurves, although archers may use any bow that they like. When stalking live animals, compound bows are usually used because they are smaller, so more manoeuvrable, yet they are still very powerful.

Archery targets are traditionally made from straw bundled and tied together to form ropes. These ropes of straw are then wrapped around themselves like a Catherine Wheel and stitched together. The cloth or paper target is pinned to the front of it.

The other word for these targets is ‘butts’ and many old towns and villages in Britain still have a recreational area known as ‘The Butts’. Nowadays they play football or cricket on it, but Henry VIII decreed that all males had to practice his archery skills every Sunday at the butts using a longbow, so that there would be a plentiful source of archers for his army.

In competition archery, every archer aims at his or her own target, but every archer is expected to have exclusively coloured flights, so that if there is a dispute an archer and the arrow can be identified. This is useful for retrieving arrows that have missed the target altogether.

There are usually six arrows shot by each competitor in a series and if they are to be shot from a variety of distances, it is usual to shoot from the furthest distance first. Men normally shoot from 90, 70, 50 and 30 metres, while women customarily shoot from 70, 60, 50 and 30 metres.

Archery as a sport seems to be increasing in popularity, especially as there is a trend in some countries, like the UK, to make it more arduous to get a gun license. They say that fashion goes around and comes back again, well British men are back at the butts practicing their archery skills again in greater numbers than there have been since perhaps the sixteenth century.

Owen Jones, the writer of this piece writes on several topics, but is presently involved with archery bows for sale. If you would like to know more or for special offers, please go to our website at Kids Archery Set.

There are two main points that an archer has to do well to ensure the best chance of regularly hitting the target. The first is to hold the string steady at full draw until the archer is ready to shoot and secondly, releasing the string in the right manner every time. Most suggestions for novices should help the beginner to achieve these two goals.

‘Creep’ is the first issue that a novice should guard against. Creep is the phenomenon of the arrow, string and hand creeping forward as the archer takes aim. It is vital to hold the arrow at full draw for consistency. If the archer permits the hand to creep forward, the shot will not be consistent. Creep is caused by lack of concentration and strain.

The strain comes from trying to shoot a bow that the archer is not yet strong enough to control. People, especially men often attempt to shoot a bow that is too powerful for them. If an archer is experiencing creep, the bow is probably too powerful for him or her at the moment. The archer should use a weaker bow and exercise more until they are stronger.

The effects of creep on the shot are that the archer will not learn how to judge the fall of the arrow over distance and so will probably undershoot, that is, the arrow will possibly fall short. The only way to learn how to use the bow correctly is to always shoot at full draw.

Weariness can also lead to creep, but the archer can regulate this by resting well before a competition, staying fit and not using a bow that takes so much muscle that it cannot be shot for the period of the competition.

The novice archer has to learn how to let go of the arrow too. It is much more difficult to hit the target if the release is not right. The novice should get an skilled archer to demonstrate the release so that he or she does not develop bad habits. The correct way to release the string is to relax the muscles in the tips of the fingers used to draw the string.

Novices often hurt their fingers after a couple of releases, so they try to release the string too quickly which can lead to pulling the string to the side a little. This little shake can send the arrow off course.

The release should be clean and to the rear of the arrow, not to the side. If the release is to the rear, the arrow will fly accurately to where the archer pointed it. If the archer is having a great deal of trouble toughening up the finger tips, it is possible to use a string release device, which will take the strain off the finger tips until they can be toughened up.

An archer could try the karate methods of hardening the skin and the hand. One of these is to plunge the straight fingers into sand. An archer could also try a guitarists’ method, that of daubing the finger tips with methylated spirits on a regular basis.

Owen Jones, the author of this article writes on various topics, but is currently involved with longbows for sale. If you would like to know more or for special offers, please go to our website at Kids Archery Set.

Do you have a leisure pursuit that you like to carry out out of doors or are you eternally glued to the chair in front of your PC? If you never get out, then that is a shame and you ought to take that common piece of guidance and get out more often .

And do what? – you may ask. Yes, well that is your concern, is it not? But there are hundreds if not thousands of things that you can do in the open air and they are all better than sitting down in front of your PC no matter what you are doing with your computer.

I will confess that I spend too much time at my desk, although, in my defense, I will say that that is how I make my living. However, I do like to get out-of-doors sometimes too. I live in a country where foreigners, such as myself, are not permitted to own or carry anything that might be construed as a weapon. This includes penknives as well.

When I venture out into the beautiful countryside it is only to walk with my wife and look for animals – mostly snakes and birds.. However, I have had a lifelong fascination for archery.

Something within me desires to be able to hit a target from a long distance. I do not want to kill anything, but I am alright with people who do so long as it is for a good reason.

It would be fantastic to manufacture a bow and the arrows to accompany it. I am Welsh and have always wanted a Welsh longbow, although it takes a lot of strength to pull a longbow. The minimum draw weight in medieval days used to be 160 lbs for a war bow, for hunting it was 100 lbs, but these days it is more like 60 lbs.

However, this is still pretty heavy for modern man, who does not usually pick up anything heavier than a pint of beer.

There are some great archery dealers, but if you do not live near one, you ought to go on line and either order from there or get a catalogue sent to you. Two good places to start are ‘Footed Shaft’ and ‘Three Rivers’ archery suppliers.

Both of these companies will send you your desired items through the post and they have any kind of archery supplies that you may need. For example, they have finished goods such as bows and arrows, but they also supply nocks, feathers, arrow shafts and points so that you can make your own arrows.

Do you want to make your own bow too? No problem. You can either buy a kit with all the bits and instructions or you can buy a book or DVD and buy the parts yourself.

These and other on line archery equipment dealers provide good value for money and have very comprehensive stocks of archery products. Their catalogues and web sites are easy to navigate and use as well.

Owen Jones, the writer of this article writes on various subjects, but is presently concerned with archery recurve bows. If you would like to know more or for special offers, please go to our website at Kids Archery Set.