Beginners Guide: To Maintaining Bowstrings (all you need to know)

What's up everybody? Welcome back to the workshop, the cave, the place where you belong if you like traditional archery. Today we're talking about bowstring maintenance. Two of the three things we're gonna talk about relate to compound bows. The other one only relates to traditional bows. But if you're curious about archery or like archery, or if you're an archery fanatic like me, this video's for you. This is more of a beginner video. If you know a lot about bowstrings and if you've been shooting archery for a really long time, you might know everything in this video, but I might do things a little differently than you do, so you might be able to learn something or comment below and let me know if there's a different way that you think is better than what I do myself. Also, I was talking to a friend recently and they told me about this new social media platform. They call it like the Gram or something, and so I got one. So if you guys wanna follow me on Instagram, which is kind of weird to say since I haven't had an Instagram the past forever, but you can follow me there, Cramer Ammons, and you could be my first follower probably. There, it's just 100% archery, nothing else. I'm just posting snippets of what I'm working on, so if you wanna see sneak peeks to videos before they're done, you can follow me, and I'm gonna start doing lives on my YouTube channel really soon. I've been building bows behind the scenes, not on camera, because one of my goals is to be able to sell bows here in the near future, so I'm really trying to refine my craft and get high-quality material to make high-quality bows that I feel good about selling, because I never wanna sell something that I don't think is excellent. In saying that, I am doing YouTube lives coming up very soon, so if you wanna watch me building bows in progress and ask me questions or anything like that, hit that bell button, because when I go live, it'll notify you specifically, and also, I'll probably post on Instagram 30 minutes or an hour or a day, I don't know. I'll probably post there before I go live so that you can plan it if you wanna hang out with me. I'll probably leave those lives up for a day or two, and then I'll probably take them off YouTube, so you're probably gonna wanna be there if you want to see it, and on that note, let's jump right into the video on how to maintain your bowstring. Hey, guys, today we're talking about bowstring maintenance, because if we maintain our bowstrings, they'll last much, much longer, so we're gonna go over here. I've got a bunch of old bowstrings. I'm gonna pull one of those out, and we're gonna use that to talk about how to maintain a bowstring. Holy moly, let's take this over there. Look at that mess, all right. Oh, man, this brings me back to all the bad strings I made. This is the style where you string it all one way and then weave it back through. Doesn't work very well, in my opinion, or doesn't look very good. That one's the same. See how short that fade out is? That's what we fixed with the strings we sell now. That one's actually pretty good. I'm gonna pick one of these strings to work on, and I think this one will work for demonstration purposes. When maintaining bowstrings, there's three things to keep in mind. One is wax, two is the serving, three is the tag ends. That's pretty much all you need to know when you're maintaining your string. The first thing is wax. Wax comes in a bunch of different packages. This is probably the most common, what you'll see, but you could also get real beeswax, or also known as string maker's wax, which is gonna be much stickier, but that's only really used in the string making process. What you can use is just a normal thing of wax. Heat up the string, apply wax, heat it up, rub it in with your fingers. The more wax, the better. Bowax to your bowstring is like oil is to a car. It's absolutely a necessity, and if you don't reapply the engine, your bowstring is going to fail eventually. I would recommend to wax your bowstring every single time you shoot, and it's gonna last very long for you. The less you wax your bowstring, the less amount of time your bowstring will last. I would fully believe that if you waxed it every time you shot, you would have a lifelong string. After it's waxed, it's handy to go ahead and grab a little piece of serving, wrap it around the string, and then just pull it towards you. This takes off all the excess wax and makes your string very circular and even. Next is tag-ins. After a bunch of shots, a tag-in comes loose. Because there's no knots in the string and the string's just weaved together, after hundreds and hundreds of shots, you might see little strands sticking up where the fade-outs are on the ends of the loops. All you have to do is trim those down. I prefer to use a razor. I would not recommend to burn it, or I would not recommend using a dull knife. I would use an X-Acto knife or a razor or something extremely sharp. It makes it a lot easier not to cut the main string. When you come in on a tag-in like this, it's important with your sharp blade to always lift up and cut away so you don't nick the string and cause a fault, and it's integrity. This is not necessarily something you wanna fix for functionality. Just makes it look a little better if a tag-in comes loose. But if a tag-in does come loose, it doesn't affect your bow's performance whatsoever, and there's still no danger of your bowstring failing if you do see tag-ins on it. This is something that's common and expected to happen with any Flemish twist bowstring. And the last thing you need to know to maintain your string is the serving, how to re-serve your bow. The serving may get loose or go bad after 3,000 to 5,000 shots, depending on how nice of serving you have on your bow. And at that point, you're definitely going to want to re-serve the bow. That way, your string can maintain its integrity, and it'll be protected at the knocking points and where there's possible wrist slap below the knocking point. All right, I've got a new string right here for a customer. I'm gonna show you how I like to serve the string. I think this is the best way and the only way you should do it. It's the knotless method. So I'll take about an inch and run it in the direction of where I'm going to serve. And I'll wrap over top the serving I just laid across the bowstring. I'll do the first 15 twists tightly over the serving, pinching that serving in place so it can't come loose. Okay, so that should be plenty. At this point, I'll go ahead and cut off this tag end. And then we're good to use the serving jig on the rest of the string. If you've never used a serving jig, it makes this process so much faster than hand winding it. If you're just doing one or just a couple bowstrings hand winding, it's not a bad idea. You can get a $15 serving jig. But honestly, I don't think it's worth the money. I think if you're gonna get a serving jig, you need to go ahead and spend 30, $35 on a nice one like this. And boy, it makes a huge, huge difference. So I'll go ahead and get this serving jig on and start serving it. You can see how much faster that is than hand serving it. The problem with the cheap serving jigs is the tension is really hard to get. But on a nice one like this, it's really easy to get the tension correct. I do a 10 inch serving section. The goal is to have your knocking point and then about two or three inches above your knocking point served. And then you want it to go down below your knocking point enough to where, if there's any wrist slap where that would occur, that area of the string is protected as well by the serving. For the most satisfying part, I'm at the end here. Now we're gonna back serve. You wanna take your serving jig or your spool of serving and go under the string. If you go over the string, this will not work. Go under the string and then you're gonna back serve through this loop you've created. And you'll wanna back serve here 15 times. This is where we create our knotless knot and it gives a really clean finish on the serving and it's practically impossible for it to come undone. After that, we want to pull the serving out. And now as we wrap around and continue our original serving, it's gonna unwind this side here. At the same time, we're wrapping over the serving we just pulled over. So I'm wrapping on top of this main line of serving. In the meantime, unwrapping our back serve. All right, so we've got our loop here. We've got the main spool of serving now underneath the serving. And so if we pull this string, it's gonna make this loop smaller, just like so. And it's gonna tighten it all the way up for us. You may need to wrap a tool or something around your serving to be able to pull it tight. But you can watch how this gap will close perfectly. Now that serving is never coming undone because the main string's underneath the last 15 or 20. Take your razor, boom. Perfect serving every time, just like that. Hopefully that content was beneficial to you guys from the 10 years of experience I have in making bow strings and traditional archery. If you're not subscribed, you could do that. If you need a bow string, head over to crameramonds.com. I've got B50 Flemish Twist Bow Strings, which are for maybe more like wooden bows. It's a really soft shooting bow string, which are for traditional bows. If you have a faster bow with reinforced tips and you want a fast flight string, check the website, because I'll probably have those up now, some fast flight strings. I'm continuing to test with hybrids and testing how far they stretch and the noise. I'm gonna post a video here or on my website comprehensively showing you all my test results. So stay tuned for that. If you're wanting to support, that is the best way you can support me is to go buy a bow string and subscribe. Thank you for everyone who has. You allow me to do this and make videos. I really do appreciate it. All of you guys are awesome. Remember to shoot straight, have a good day, smile and do all the good things that you always do. We'll see you guys on the next video.