I’ve been messing around with my bow the last week or so, trying to fit a rest. Since buying my new bow back in May I’ve been shooting it off the shelf using a Martin traditional rug rest. The bow came with the traditional rest fitted and since I’ve only ever shot from a rest I thought I’d give the shelf a go. After a few months getting used to the bow I couldn’t get the same level of accuracy off the shelf that I used to get from my old bow using a rest. So I finally decided to try and fit a rest to my new bow.
My old bow was fitted with a Bear rest, but I couldn’t seem to find one of those anywhere in the UK. The closest I could find was a Cartel Hunter rest. I also wasn’t sure quite where to fit the rest on the bow. It’s a lot easier if your bow is designed to take a pressure button, most of the arrow rests available have holes designed to line up with the pressure button so it’s easy to put them in the correct place on the riser. My bow doesn’t have a fitting for a pressure button and neither has it ever had a rest fitted. Time for a bit of guess work and some trial and error.
My first go wasn’t all that successful. I fitted the Cartel rest toward the rear of the riser and proceeded to test it on the boss in the back garden, a distance of about 12 yards. The results were, shall we say….interesting. The arrows were hitting about a foot to the right of where I was aiming. Not only that but they were coming out of the bow heading left, then whipping round to the right very noticably. It started to get dark at this point, so I decided to put the bow away and give it a go another evening.
Saturday came, and I decided to pay a trip to a couple of Archery shops in the area and pick up some different types of rests, and ask a couple of people for some advice. From what I was told, I had fitted the rest too far back towards the face of the bow. Armed with this new information and a few Petron A76 rests I returned home to have another go at fitting the rest.
The Petron rest is a lot thinner than the Cartel, the result of which is it keeps the arrow closer to centre. I fitted it as close to the centre of the riser as I could and went out to test it in the garden. The difference was unbelievable, I could pretty much put the arrow in a 2″ square from 12 yards. I tried it out for a few dozen arrows and was very happy with the results.
The only downside is that the Petron rest is bright blue. It doesn’t really look quite right on an all wood, one piece bow so I’ve order a couple of Cartel rests from Quicks. I’m not sure if they are the same thickness, or if they’ll give the same results, but they are black and will look better attached to my bow. If they aren’t as good as the Petron rest I’ll just have to figure out some way of colouring the Petron to make it less conspicuous on my bow.
Pics to follow…
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