Shooting & Going Over 26yr Old Bow

Hey, everybody. Nick with great plains traditional bow company. Today we've got a treat here. This is the very first recorded bow in our catalogs. This is serial number 3430. It's a takedown longbow great plainsman. It was built in 1996. It's made of tulip wood and linden phenolic. We're gonna shoot it today.

This is. Is that a 62? Yes, it's a 62. 60 pound.

It's still going.

There we go.

Built in 1996. Still shoots great.

So like Nick was saying, this is the first recorded in our record books. First log bow. The interesting story about this bow is I was doing some work for the fellow that had this on a different bow, and he said, hey, can you look up the. The serial number on a bow that I have. The other record books before these, we don't know where they're at. We. I've never had them. I don't know if Bill would have them somewhere. I'm not sure. I went all the way back, and sure enough, it was the first recorded entry. I said, man, I'd like to have that bow. And I said, because, you know, it's the first. First serial number. He said, I'm looking for another bow, another take down longbow. He said, I'll trade you. And this is. This is a lot of value to us at Great Plains. So we traded him because I wanted to get my hands on it. Now it. We looked at it, It's a lot different than the way we produce them. Now you can see where the limb bolts on. Back then, it was just beveled, and the limb bolt was actually sunk into the limb. Without the brass Benzel, we don't do that anymore. That is a little bit of a weaker way to do it just because of weight distribution. So, like the way they're built. Now we have that brass benzel there, and that distributes the weight a little bit better. But it is kind of neat. I like how it's streamlined, how that bolt just sinks into the limb. That's pretty cool. Another thing that we noticed right away is how the taper was done. Now you see that taper, it is super aggressive. Coming off that riser. You got the full width limb, and then just really aggressive taper in there down to a skinny limb. Now, in theory, that potentially could make a better shooting bow simply because you're reducing mass, reducing hand shock the way we do it. Now we have. We have changed the tapers. We've actually done a lot of R and D on our three piece longbow recently and we have changed the amount of taper that we put in the limb and we found the sweet spot from what they used to be. So, so we, we don't need to, to shave to, to trap that aggressively because the taper has taken care of all that. The latest ones actually even shoot better than these old ones with the new taper technology that we've put into them. It shoots amazing and it's in, it's in perfect condition. It needs a new leather buckskin grip, but it's, it's really cool to have our hands on it. We're really excited to have it. The first recorded log serial number Great Plains bow in the record books. And you could see it's like 3430. So there was a lot of bows built before this bow. We just don't have the record books for it. Oh, the other thing about it I wanted to show you is that's the original sealskin rest. All Great Plains bows had seal skin on the, the side plate. And this one doesn't have the seal skin on the shelf anymore. That's gone. But, but we would put them on the, the shelf in the side plate. That is illegal now in America. You can't use seal products or, you know, harvest the seals for their skin. But that seal skin is really awesome. If you do happen to have a bow that has seal skin on it, take real good care of it because this stuff is amazing for moisture and water, the way it sheds the water, the oil in the hair. And it's actually a really cool material if you have it on your bow. Let me shoot it and we'll, we'll see how it performs. For me, it's just amazing. It's, it's, it's still really smooth. Dead in the hand. Oh, it's a shooter. We'll never sell this bow. This is going to go in the archive. Whoops. That's a flyer. I wanted to point this out. This kind of throws me off because all of our longbows now are cut to center. You could see this isn't, this is cut about an eighth inch from center. So it throws that arrow. If you're not used to that, it can shoot a little wonky for you. But that's, that's one thing we do different now too. We cut them two center. We don't cut them past center. We cut them two center. One more shot. Oh, that's perfect there. Really like it. Excited to have it. I'm glad that we traded for, it wouldn't have been too bad. This bad boy here.