Choosing a Traditional Bow for Beginners | Custom or Amazon? | Which is Right for you?

Hey guys, Shane, Great Plains Bow Company, and today I wanted to talk about Amazon bows versus high-end custom bows. A lot of times you're getting into archery, or you're getting into traditional archery especially, you're looking around and you're trying to decide what bow should I get. Should I get an Amazon bow and not spend very much money, or should I get a high-end custom bow made from maybe an American bowyer or even a bowyer Doesn't have to be American, but a bowyer from Europe or anywhere that you— that is reputable. And which bow should I get? A lot of times the, the money is a big factor because a lot of people don't have the budget to spend $2,000 on a high-end custom bow. But I'm gonna break it down for you here today and kind of go over the differences, the pros and the cons, and why it would make sense to get an Amazon bow or a cheap bow and why it would make sense to get a custom bow and what you should do for your own particular situation. Now, a cheaper bow, an economical bow, we'll just call them Amazon bows because they're available the most on Amazon. The, uh, there's pros and cons to everything. This here is a Black Hunter. I got this on a flash sale from Walmart. I got 5 of them. 5 of them. And they were really cheap. Normally a bow like this is going to run you about $100 to $150 off of Amazon. This is a 25-pound at 28-inch, and it doesn't say— I don't see the AMO on it anywhere. I don't know what everything— this one here is kind of weird. It's got all kinds of different writing on it that I'm not sure what it means. There's There's even some Chinese graphics on it, which is kind of cool. Anyway, so your Amazon bow, your pros of course is they're economical, they're cheap, you can get into archery really fast, easy. Buy one off of Amazon, less than a week later or a week later it shows up at your house, and most of them come with a full kit. Most of them don't come with arrows. You can get ones with that can come with a complete set of arrows, but they basically have everything to get you started. Now, so they're, so they're fast, fast to buy, fast to get into your house, and you're able to find out. You can go sling some arrows and, and you can decide, hey, do I like this? Do I want to pursue this? Do I want to do traditional archery? Do I want to do archery, period? And if you decide no, well then You're only out a couple hundred bucks including arrows if you buy arrows, um, and maybe only $100, $150 if the arrows come with the bow. So really, that's the biggest benefit of a cheap Amazon bow or an economical bow. Now let's move over to the cons of buying a cheap Amazon bow. A lot of them are fairly poorly made. Now, a lot of them, most of them I say will stay together. You will get delaminations. You will get Amazon bows that will blow up on you. It happens, and it happens quite a bit more. I mean, I guess we could say probably many, many percentages, many, many times more than it will with a custom bow. Um, a lot of times their grips aren't the best. The Black Hunter has a pretty good grip. It feels, it feels pretty good, but they don't always fit you perfectly. They've came a long ways with that in recent years. The grips are so much better even than when I started in traditional archery. They're so much better than they used to be. So that's not a huge con, but it definitely is there. The grips aren't that great. The fit and finish of them is usually pretty bad. If you don't know woodworking or haven't been into traditional archery, you probably wouldn't notice it at a quick glance. But if you start looking at it, you'll really start to see a lot of stuff. Just for instance, on this bow, the limb where they mated the limb to the riser, it's absolutely terrible. It's, it's got gaps everywhere, joints everywhere where the limb mounts to the riser, a very bad finish. But here again, if you're paying $100 for it, you don't really care about that, right? Because you're just trying to figure out if you love archery. So the fit and the finish on them is pretty bad. The finish in general, the clear coat, is usually pretty rough. It comes off pretty easy. You have to take care of it or it'll flake off. There again, they're coming a long ways. They're getting better at that kind of stuff. Another thing about them is the, the poundage, the draw weight on them, is rarely, rarely accurate. I've seen as much as 7 or 8 pounds off. Usually they're within a couple pounds, but it's fairly common for them to be 4 or 5 pounds off. This particular bow is marked at 25 and it's 26 pounds. That's really, really close, so that's not bad right there. But you can't always trust that weight on them. I don't know how many guys have called in here when they want to— when I used to do weight reductions and they wanted it reduced, and they said this thing just feels horribly heavy. And when I got it, if Sure enough, it was 5 pounds over what it was marked. So you've got poorly marked bows, and like even on this one, I can't even find the bow length. It probably was on the listing or description when I bought this bow, and usually they are on Amazon, but they have a high— higher rate of failures. A lot of them have twists in the limbs, and this particular bow So sure enough, the bottom limb is twisted to that, to the right. The top limb is also twisted pretty significantly to the right. And so it's twisted. A bow like this that has black glass with it already having a twist in it, if you were to leave this in a hot car accidentally, it probably would go ahead and twist to the point of you would not be able to ever use it again because it already has twists in both limbs. If you take care of it and never goes in the hot sun or anything for any length of time, it probably isn't going to go beyond that. But with just a little bit of mismanagement and it would, it would twist into spaghetti. So that's another thing that is, um, you have to watch with that. Now the longbows, Amazon longbows, the twist isn't nearly as big as a thing because a longbow can be twisted and it probably will never twist any further because you've got You know, a narrow, thick limb versus a wide, thin limb on a recurve. Another thing that is quite often, very often wrong is the tiller. And the tiller is how strong your top limb is in relation to your bottom limb. So your top limb always needs to be a little bit weaker than your bottom limb, and that accounts for your finger placement. And so basically, your tiller is your tie. Is your Like a timing belt is for an engine, your tiller is your timing belt for your traditional bow. And that ensures that the limbs both reach the bottom of the string stroke when you let go of the string with an arrow on it. The limbs reach the bottom at exactly the same time so that you don't have an arrow that's porpoising. That's what tiller is. And on cheap Amazon bows, the tiller is almost always wrong. Not always, but a good percent of the time it's wrong. The little, the little higher-end Amazon bows, it's not wrong all the time, but you're gonna pay a little bit more money for that. But here's another little secret that most people don't know, and that's the fact that micro-tiler or small inconsistencies in tiller doesn't really matter. You can get by with a lot of that. If you have tiller that's, say, an 8th of an inch off, You're probably— it's probably going to be fine for sure for a new archer. But if you have tiller that's a half inch off, you're in big trouble. That bow will never shoot right for you. So the tiller is, is a problem that's not always correct. Here again, all this stuff is totally worth it if you're trying to figure out if you wanted to get into the archery, into archery or traditional archery, or if you just don't have the budget for a high-end custom bow. The Amazon bows most definitely have their place. I'm glad they're out there. I'm glad that people buy them because it's responsible for getting a lot of people into archery that otherwise wouldn't have. Most people aren't going to drop $1,500 on a custom bow just to find out if they like the sport. They're not going to do it. I wouldn't do it if I was starting out. So the Amazon bows do have their place. I'm glad they're out there and they fulfill their purpose very well. Yeah, I agree. Very, very well. Okay, so we're gonna move on to the custom bows a little bit. Now, your custom bows— this is one of my Houdinis. It's a hybrid longbow hunting bow, short little bow, wicked fast, really good in ground blinds. This is, of course, a hybrid longbow. It's not really a true— it's not a true recurve. It's not really a true longbow either. It's a hybrid longbow. So let's, let's get into the pros of the, of the custom bows. The pros of them is you got a high-quality build, you've got tight glue lines, the poundage is marked correctly. Whatever it says on here is what the bow is going to measure at 28 inches. You've got very high performance. Your grips are really good, they fit your hand. They're custom carved by the bowyer. Your custom bows are customizable. You can put, usually put your whatever wood species you want in there. You can put your antler tips on, your whatever tip material you'd like. You can talk to the bowyer and get it just perfectly. And they are, they will always have perfect tiller unless you have a bowyer that doesn't know what he's doing. On tiller, they're always going to be tillered correctly. So there's a few brief pros on that. Now, now the cons of a custom bow: super expensive, and a lot of times the very long wait times. So that's not good unless you, unless you get an in-stock bow from a bowyer that's on their website. If you custom order a bow, you could wait up to a year or 2 to get your bow. And so that's not great for sure if you're just getting into archery. You don't want to wait. You want to get in there right away. And figure out if you like the sport or you don't like the sport. One thing I wanted to touch on with your custom bows is that you've got customer service. If you have a question or if you need help or if you have a problem with your bow from a custom bowyer, he's an email away, a phone call away. Sometimes some of us bowyers are hard to get a hold of, but it's— In my case, it's not because I'm avoiding you. It's usually because I'm too busy or I can't take the call. A lot of times what happens is when I get a phone call or a text and I got my hands completely full of glue, I make a mental note to call that person back and I forget sometimes because I'm so busy, because I'm answering so many other customers, and we don't get back to you always. But by and large, you're going to be able to talk to somebody. Your customer service is going to be great. Versus your Amazon bows, you're basically not having— you're not going to have customer service. It's going to be nearly impossible to talk to somebody if you have a failure on your bow or something. But there again, if your bow fails, you can go spend another $100 and get another one. This particular bow, just looking at it, it's actually kind of a pretty little bow. And from as far away as the camera is, I'm sure you can't see the inconsistencies. But But, you know, I can see glue lines on the fade-outs here. There's voids in there. There's actually a big crack right there in the riser. This is a laminated riser, an engineered wood riser, so it's probably— you could probably shoot this bow like that for a long time without a failure. Those are a few pros and cons between the two, and I'm going to just briefly show you kind of what you get in an Amazon bow. versus a custom bow, and then we're going to talk about what's right for you and what a person should do. So this is another one of those Black Hunters that I got right here. This is one— is how you get it. I'm not going to do really an unboxing, but you've got your limbs here. Here's your riser. This is your string silencing material. This is some kind of, I would imagine, synthetic fur. Almost looks real. Um, And they're wanting you to use this for a sight insert. This is not great because essentially what they want you to do is sort of wrap it into the bowstring like this. It works, but it's not really ideal. It's hard to put on and kind of a mess. Here's your string. The string is absolutely terrible on these Amazon bows. If you buy an Amazon bow, the very first thing you need to do is get you a custom string. There's a ton of custom string makers. In the US and just hit one of those up and get you a custom string. It'll make night and day difference on your Amazon bow. So that's the string, and you can see it's not woven together, it's just a whole bunch of strands stuck together. Horrible string. Oh, terrible bowstring. Here's your side plate and rest material. This actually looks like calfskin. It's not bad, um, it would work in a pinch. Then you get your wrench and then your bow stringer. There again, Really cheap bow stringer, not an easy one to use either. The way that this one works is this here side, if I can get this. Also no instructions. So this goes over it, this goes over your limb, and it's really easy for this to slip off, whereas the stringers we send, it's nearly impossible for that to happen. They actually have like a rubber grommet thing that holds them on. So really bad bow stringer. And on a lot of these bows, they don't even come with instructions. A lot of them don't. So you're kind of in the dark. Some of them they do, but a lot of them you're just kind of in the dark on what to do. So here's a custom bow, and this is what it looks like from Great Plains if you got a Great Plains bow. This is my SR Swift model, and you can see the beautiful wood in there. And the riser right there. The limbs are in here. I don't even know if I— I'll just show them to you here. So here you've got beautiful limbs, Eastern red cedar on these. They've got ram's horn tips, and you've got your brass, uh, benzels for your limb bolts. The strings Our custom Flemish twist strings. These have your rubber silencers on them, which the rubber whiskers are the best, most efficient silencer you can buy for strings. I know a lot of guys like beaver balls or yarn or wool. They do look cool, not nearly as efficient as your rubber cat whiskers. It's just your most efficient silencer that you can use. Here's an American-made stringer. This stringer is made by Selway. Very, very good stringer. You can see this little rubber grommet thing or block that goes on your limb. This thing will not move. You put that on your limb and it's really tacky and you go to string it, that thing is not moving. You're not going to have an accident. It's going to stay on your limb. So good stringers. And got your limb bolts here and of course your wrench also. So that's kind of what it looks like. Now what should a person do? If I was getting into traditional archery, let's say I simply did not know what I— if I didn't know if I was going to like it, I was curious about it, and I thought, man, this looks really cool, it looks fun, I'd like to try it, but I'm not sure if I would like it. I don't have a lot of money. I think I would buy an Amazon bow. I would. I really would. I'd buy an Amazon bow. And I'd do a little bit of research. There's a lot of bowyers that have reviews on them. The Black Hunter is a fantastic bow to start with if you're not sure if you like traditional archery. Both the longbow and the recurve in the Black Hunter are good places to start, and I think that's what I would do. I would start with that to see if I liked it. Then if I did like it, let's say, let's say you bought an Amazon bow and And you started shooting with it and you actually loved it. Then the next question is, should I buy more Amazon bows or should I save my money for a custom bow? Well, of course I'm a bowyer, I'm a custom bowyer, and I think that it will take your experience to absolutely a whole nother level if you would buy a custom bow. Doesn't have to be from me, but if you would buy a high-end custom bow, it really is incredible the difference. One of the big differences you'll notice is just the way that they feel and the way that they draw. A custom-built recurve like this SR Swift, I can promise you, is going to draw a whole lot smoother than a Black Hunter, even though the Black Hunter is not a bad bow. It's going to draw a lot smoother. But there's the issue of the money. How are you going to be able to afford something like that? That is a problem, and unfortunately, because of the expense of our materials and because these are all hand-built, we do have to charge quite a bit for them. There is— if you just don't have the funds, one thing that you can do is you can use PayPal to finance you. And that might seem kind of crazy to use to finance a custom bow, something that's under $2,000 or $2,000, but a lot of people don't have that kind of cash. Um, I have a lot of customers that use the PayPal Finance method, and the way it works is, is you could buy a bow from me off my website and you could choose the payment option from PayPal, and you just pay $50 or $100 a month till it's paid for and you're good to go. You don't have to pay the initial lump sum right out. And pretty much anybody can then afford a custom bow if they do it that way. So that's one way you can get around the high cost of a custom bow. Now the question is, well, maybe I could just stick with Amazon bows. I could try a bunch of different ones. And you could, that'd be fine, and you'd never have to buy anything expensive. Um, there is a lot of different options on the cheap Amazon bows. That, that you could, you could just keep trying and buying them, and over enough time you would probably buy enough of these where you would have paid for a couple custom bows. And that's fine, that's great. You could continue to do that, um, and you would probably enjoy it. But there again, you don't have the customer service that you do with the high-end custom bow. And I could promise you this, when Once you get into buying custom bows from bowyers that are building these things by hand, you will suddenly— you will begin to learn so much more about traditional archery because the customer support and the service that you'll have from these bowyers is going to be invaluable. And you'll learn how they're made and what they can shoot and how you can customize them and how you can customize the grip in the woods. And You will actually have a better experience. I firmly believe this, that eventually it will take your traditional archery experience to a whole nother level if you decide to go with the custom bow. So that's kind of the breakdown, the difference between an Amazon bow or a custom bow from a bowyer. One, you know, you've got your more expensive, longer lead times, but a But overall, way more satisfying experience, and you'll learn a lot more. Plus, a lot of these custom bows, um, they're just going to perform better. There's no question about it. They're gonna, they're gonna shoot faster, they're gonna be smoother, they're gonna be quieter, um, and they're gonna be a lot more fun. Plus, you get to put crazy looking woods in and beautiful woods. You get to personalize it. You can put writings and sayings on the limbs, and you can make them really, really beautiful. So that's kind of a breakdown between what I would do or what you should do in the situation of the Amazon versus high-end custom bows and the pros and cons of each one and where their value lies. And if you're not— if you don't have either one and you want to, you want to try archery and you don't have a lot of money, by all means get you an Amazon bow to start with. If you like it, you can consider buying a custom bow from a bowyer. And And take your archery game to a whole new level. Thanks for watching.