Bow Setup for Hunting Season | Budget & Moderate Options

Hunting season is open. We're getting our setups ready. We're getting our bows set up, our arrows tuned in, broadheads ordered, everybody's excited. So we wanted to do a video kind of showing you how to get set up for hunting. We're going to simplify this. We're not going to make it too complicated. If you're new to archery and you don't really have the money for a high end bow, that doesn't mean you can't hunt. Here we have a samick sage. They're not a super fast bow. They're not super quiet either. But if it gets you out into the field and it gets you in a tree stand and that's your budget, go for it. This bow has a quickie quiver on it. Now, the quickie quiver, it was very, very popular 15, 20 years ago. It's actually still a great quiver. So this quiver detaches by just pulling it off. Then there's a little bracket that is mounted to the bow. It just takes two inserts. The cement stage comes with the inserts. At Great Plains, we can put those inserts on any bow. If you're not into drilling into your bow, you'll have to choose a different quiver. When you're putting your quiver on your bow, you always want to have the fletchings down. You want to have the hood that holds your broad heads and your judo points or whatever that needs to be up. And the reason for that is if you're sitting in a stand and a deer comes along, you want to be able to pull an arrow. Now when you pull an arrow out of a quiver and you're trying to be quiet, you don't just yank it out. You're going to put your thumb on the rubber portion here and you're going to slowly remove that to be real quiet. That even kind of popped, but you want to be real quiet. I could do it even quieter. There you go. Just like that. Remove this one up here. Real quiet like that. But the reason you have that quiver for the fletchings down is then you just rotate that and you're ready. You knock that and you're ready to hunt. Now, when I'm in a tree stand, I have an arrow knocked. But if you need a second shot or maybe you just got in your stand, all of a sudden there's a deer and you don't have time to knock an arrow. You just want to be really careful when you're pulling it out and do it real slow. This is a little arrow Holder that came in with a bow that we did a weight reduction on, we had to take it off to refinish it. It doesn't have the adhesive on it. It just attaches right there. And then this will just clip onto your arrow right here. And then when you draw, of course, it just pulls that off. And it's rubber, so it's real quiet. These are actually really great. Now if you don't want to stick anything to your bow, you don't have to use them. I've hunted for years without them and it doesn't really matter. But if you get a gust of wind or bump your bow that you, your arrow could fall off your shelf, they do have their place. The other thing that we've done here is this. This broadhead is one of the broadheads that we tested. This is from Amazon and this was the winner of our broadhead test. It's a two blade. And you'll notice the ferrule has a real good attach point. It's very minimal. That's something you want to look for in a broadhead. You could buy a 12 pack of these for $20. So if you're on a budget, you can, you can really get into it for not much money. I'll talk a little bit about silencing your bow. So on this bow we've got puffballs as the silencers. They work. I prefer the rubber silencers, but they do work. Once again, yarn is cheap. You can put your own puffball silencers on and you've saved a little bit of money there. This is the soft side of velcro. Go to a craft store, hobby lobby, sewing department in Walmart, pick you up some adhesive backed velcro and use the soft side. It's a great arrow rest. It's really quiet for hunting. The last thing you want is when you draw an arrow across a bow and you have a slick rest on there or a hard one and it makes that scraping noise and the deer's gone so soft. Velcro on the arrow rest. Another way to silence a bow down is moleskin. And this particular pertains strictly to a recurve. You don't need to do this on a longbow. But if you'll put moleskin where the string contacts the limb, most of your noise or a lot of your noise on a recurve comes from string contacting the limb because of the physics and the profile of the limb. So you put that moleskin on there. When that string hits it, it's going to dampen that bow down even further. The other thing that you can do, get the moleskin, just like we talked about on the end of the recurve limb. Put that on the limb pad right up underneath there, right between the riser and the limb. Put a piece of moleskin there and that will also dampen that down. So this is your basic setup if you want to get into hunting. You got your samick sage, your quickie quiver, your moleskin silencers, your puffballs, your yarn silencers. You can put your that drop away arrow holder and your Amazon broadheads. At the very most, $200 and you could be out hunting deer. So we'll move on here. Since we're talking about recurves, we're going to talk about a high end recurve. This is the SR Swift recurve. This is the SR stands for short riser. This is a fantastic hunting bow. It is shorter and so it gets you in tighter places. So like if you're hunting out of tree stands, particularly ground blinds, if you're hunting out of a ground blind that doesn't have a super high top, you want a bow that's fairly short. I was hunting out of a ground blind once and I thought it was low enough. I was hunting with a 62 inch recurve and the deer came in. I shot the top of my limb, hit the top of the ground blind, tore about an 8, 8 inch hole in the top of the ground blind, and I missed the deer. So that's definitely a concern. You want to do a couple mock runs, a couple trial runs in your ground blind. But a recurve bow will be a shorter bow that can accommodate longer draws for blinds and tree stands where you need a shorter system. Like I said, this is our SR Swift. This is the Blackhawk model. It's a very aggressive limb, very fast, very smooth, very quiet hunting bow. And what I've got on here is the Mini Boa quiver. Now, this quiver is my favorite hunting quiver. The Mini Boa only holds four arrows. I like to hunt with only four arrows because I like a minimalistic approach. I don't like a lot of arrows on my bow. On my hunting bow, some guys do. You can get bigger quivers of this design that will accommodate six arrows. Thunderhorn makes this quiver. You can buy it from Three Rivers for around $100. It's fairly cheap. It also looks really great. This one's a little bit weathered and faded, but it still looks good. The other thing I really like about this type of quiver, I prefer the Strap on type, you can see that straps on versus the kind that slides over the limb. Now why do I prefer this? Because I do not have to unstring my bow to take my quiver off. With the slide on type. Every single time you take your quiver off, it has to be unstrung. I don't want to unstring it. I don't want to change my brace height. And so I like the kind that strap on. Quick note on that. When you put a strap on, quiver on, put it up high on the limb. When you first attach it high on the limb or out toward the tip, put it clear out there, attach it snug and then slide it. And as the limb grows in width, it will tighten up and have a perfect fit. One thing about any slide on quiver or strap on quiver, it must be on the fade out or the wedge of your bow. Now you can see here, that's the end of my fade out out here on this three piece bow, you do not want your quiver out here on the working limb. That's going to affect your bow's performance. It could slow it down, it could do a lot of things and you just definitely do not want it past the fade out. So put it on out here, snug. Slide it all the way in up onto your wedge. This is called the wedge in a three piece or your fade out in a one piece. Slide it well onto there where the limb is actually not working and it will be stable, it will be quiet and it won't affect the performance of the bow. Believe it or not, a quiver actually does quiet your bow down. The kind that use some type of rubber to attach to your limb because they absorb a little bit of the the vibration. So that's a good thing about this type of quiver. Once again, you'll notice that the hood is up, the fletching is down, this one faces back and these three face to the side. I really like that. This is where I always put my first arrow with a broadhead. Now in my setup, I always have three broadheads and one judo point. So the first three arrows are going to be broadheads. This far end arrow will be a judo point. That's a small game head and I like to have one of those with me in the stand. If I have a squirrel that needs reprimanding, we can use this judo point. Or a rabbit. I like to hunt rabbits, porcupine, anything like that that comes along that you want to put in the crock pot. Judo point is awesome for that. Now if you're hunting quite a ways away from your vehicle or your camp. You may want to have just four broadheads if you're hunting with them with the four arrow option. So on this bow, I've got a rug rest here to quiet it down. And I've got a calfskin side plate. This is what our bows come standard with. This is a very quiet option. The reason I like the calfskin side plate is because it's really slick. It minimizes aero contact upon release. Anything that minimizes aero contact on a trad bow gives you more accuracy and a better shot. The rest that we have, after shooting them a while, they get a little depression in there. That's actually really nice to hold your arrow on. The silencers on this bow, we've got rubber cat whiskers. This is my favorite type of silencer. And you'll notice I don't have a huge amount of whiskers because you don't need a lot for sure. With our Swift model, it's super quiet right out of the form, even without silencing it down. This is all you need on this bow from Great Plains to make this thing whisper quiet. I don't even put the moleskin on the limbs here because it just simply doesn't need it. This isn't the exact bow, but I am gonna hunt with an SR Swift three piece. Now we'll move on to a longbow. This is a beautiful longbow. This is a great plainsman. This is actually Josh's bow, our filmographer. He's part of the Great Plains team. He's left handed, so you can see it's on the opposite side. He's also got the mini boa on. This is a new mini boa. They kind of changed the color. Mine was a little lighter even when I got it. But you can see this is a great looking quiver. For a hundred dollars, it's an awesome quiver. Once again, the hood is up, the fletchings are down on his bow. He's got the calf skin, he's got the rubber cat whiskers. And there's no string contact on a longbow. So you don't even have to worry about moleskin on the limbs. There's just no contact there at all and it's dead quiet. Of course, longbows tend to be a lot quieter than recurves anyway. A lot of longbows don't even require silencers. However, I would recommend putting silencers on for any hunting bow. This is our B model reflex deflex longbow from Great Plains. This bow is 68 inches. This is a two piece bow also. That's the three main bows to set up that we, you know, a longbow, a recurve and then a cheap option. So I'm gonna move on now to what kind of release you're gonna use or what kind of grip. A tab versus a glove. This is the American leathers big shot. I like these because I have slimmer fingers and after shooting a while I get tingling and numbness in my fingers. So I like the extra padding that the American leathers big shot has. This is my favorite glove. Now when I'm hunting, I'll just use my hunting gloves because I'm only going to shoot a couple times and I don't need that extra protection. Plus I can feel my string and I don't have to worry about like a glove like this. If it's a really cold day, you've got an exposed hand and you can buy gloves, extra gloves. Cut these fingers off, which is what I've done. Leave these fingers on. That does work. Another way of shooting a trad bow is with a tab. Now I don't use a tab. I just got comfortable with a glove, so it's not really my style. However, a tab is actually a great release because the physics of it and just the way that they work. So it just goes on your finger like that and you can adjust the tightness of it by moving that. The great thing about it for a hunting situation is you can wear this tab over top. Your hunting gloves, that's an awesome thing. You can buy your gloves, you can stay warm and you can put your tab on top of that and you've got a good release that isn't in your way. That is probably a little better option when it comes to shooting glove versus tab for hunting. But if you're not used to shooting the tab, then I definitely wouldn't recommend picking one up right before hunting season. Next we'll talk about the arm guard. A lot of guys don't hit their arm arm when they're shooting. However, when you're hunting, an arm guard is critical. You need to have one. And the reason for that is most of the time when you're hunting, it's in fall, late fall, even early start of winter, and it's cold, you're going to have big bulky hunting clothes on. So the arm guard smashes this sleeve down and relieves that material from hitting your string. The worst thing that can happen is a nice big buck steps out, you shoot the String hits your hunting clothes, you miss the buck. So arm guards, they just go on with their smaller side towards your wrist. Adjust them so that they mat those hunting clothes down so it doesn't get in the way of your string. I'll show you. On my camo, I've got a different feature that works. Moving on to the camo. When I started hunting, I used this pattern here. A lot of the big producers of camo, like the, the real tree camo that is terrible camo, do not buy it because it's got a really tight close pattern. You actually end up looking like a blob to deer. To humans, you could say, well, that blends in really nice. But you got to think like the deer when it comes to camo. This is asat camo. It's got a nice big pattern, it's got nice big breakup and it's pretty striking. If you see somebody in the woods with it, you'll be tempted to say, well, that doesn't blend in well. Not to a human it doesn't. But remember, deer do not see colors. So to them this just looks like a big broken up pattern and you blend right in. I've moved on to a pattern that I feel like is even better. This pattern is called window camo. This is made by a company called day one out of Sheridan, Colorado. Great, great company. Awesome customer service. If you want great camo contact, Day One camo out in Sheridan, Colorado. Now, it's made out of a water shedding suede. It's not waterproof, but it sheds water extremely well. Actually, make a spray for this camo and you can spray it on and it will shed water even better. Now if you're in a downpour for 20 minutes, you're going to get wet, but you're not going to be hunting anyway. This camo has a ton of features. It's got pockets everywhere. It's got neat pockets. These pockets even have double button pockets. If you really want to fill it up with stuff, then you button it clear out here and that pocket will accommodate a lot of stuff. The feature that I like the most about this camo is it's got a built in arm guard right here. So you can layer up with your goose down or your thermal underwear or your merino wool. If it's cold out, pull these straps. You do not have to wear an arm guard. You just pull these. I can do this with an aw. Yep, there you go. Can't do it right now, but you tuck that tail back into there. It tightens that arm up. And for a guy like me, I don't have problems with the string hitting my arm. I don't have to wear an arm guard. So you tighten that up and immediately match your hunting layers down. And you don't have a string hitting your clothes problem. And it eliminates you having to bring an arm guard along or forgetting your arm guard. That's a great feature of this day one camo. Once again, this is the window camo pattern. Another thing I really like about it. It's got this high, high collar. So on a cold day, you put that collar up, you put your stocking cap or your beanie down. Tight, man, this will keep you super, super warm. The zippers on it are really big. They're really nice. They're basically infallible on this camo. And the pattern is just superb. You got these big dark spots, black spots, huge breakup. So I think I've pretty much covered your basic setup. We've got the recurves, the longbows, the arm guard, the shooting gloves, the tabs, the camo. Oh, one more thing I wanted to talk about, and that is lighted knocks. How a lighted knock works is there's a little button inside that knocking point there. When it makes contact after the shot, it lights up and it stays on. So you can also see if your arrow made a pass through. You can see how good a shot it was on your animal, if it hit the vitals, if it was high or low or gut shot. It's actually a pretty good, valuable asset to your hunting setup. Just make sure that none of them are on while you're sitting in the stand, because that will definitely give your position away. You just use your hunting knife. There's a little hole right here. You stick the point of your hunting knife in there and just push up, and it turns that light back off. That pretty much covers the basic hunting setup to get you out in the field and to have a successful hunt.