Stabilizer setup with Jake Kaminski |Recurve Archery Tuning Series Episode 6

Hey, I'm Jake Kaminsky and today I'm here to continue the tuning series with another episode, but this one we're going to be talking about stabilization setup. So before I get into that, I need to kind of explain the history of how stabilizers have been used in the past. And also, just so you guys know, this entire episode is not going to be just recurve specific. A lot of this will work with a compound as well. But first, I want to go over something really quick. I've had some people contact me saying that they feel guilty consuming this information for free. But the whole point is that I wanted to put this information for free out on YouTube because there's just not enough firsthand expert experience out there on the subject of archery. And I feel like this is filling that void. And so don't feel guilty watching these videos for free. If you do want to support me, the best way to support me is to share this video to get the word back out there that I am doing this stuff for you guys, as well as check out my website, jakekaminsky.com to sign up for any of the seminars that might be in your area. Purchase the books that are on the website as well. And, you know, from the ad revenue that comes in from the views on this, this helps pay the bills as well. So you are not consuming this for free and not taking advantage of the situation. And like I said, I'm doing this for you guys. So please consume this information and share it with everybody else. All right, let's get back into it. The history of stabilization prior to 2009. Basically, stabilizers were just used as a vibration dampening tool. They weren't really used to try to hold the bow still, because at that time, well, first, there really wasn't the theory about how to use stabilizers correctly. Blair Sandberg came along with Beestinger and really kind of changed the entire market. So, you know, basically prior to 2009, people just wanted the bow to be softer and have as much vibration reduction quality as possible when they were using stabilizers. But since Blair Sandberg came along, he said, all right, everybody's using really low modulus carbon stabilizers. They absorb vibration really well, but they're very heavy because of the low modulus carbon. In order to make it strong enough to basically withstand enough vibration and abuse, you had to make the walls very, very thick with a lot of carbon. But with modern high modulus carbon, higher ton carbon, and different weave patterns, he developed a system that used a very, very light rod and actually made the rod a little bit thicker in diameter, because then again, you could cut down that wall thickness and make the overall stabilizer even stiffer and lighter. More importantly, lighter, because instead of, say, if the rod itself weighed eight ounces and people were putting maybe two or three ounces of weight and another ounce or two of vibration dampener on the end, you know, you're looking at like a 10 to 13 ounce stabilizer, right? But if you make that rod itself only four ounces instead of eight ounces, you now can take those same four ounces that were in the rod itself and put it on the far end of the stabilizer, making the weight of the total stabilizer the same, but the effectiveness to help you hold still much more effective. The best way I can explain that principle is to imagine tightrope walker, people that walk on a tightrope, they are holding, I don't know how much weight they're actually holding, that big long bar, but it's, you know, I don't know, maybe we'll just say 20 pounds. If they had that same 20 pound as a dumbbell or a bowling ball or whatever and just held it like this and tried to walk on the tightrope, it's really not doing anything to help them hold more steady, not hold more steady, make them walk more steady and less likely to fall. But if they took that and put it on, put weights on the end of a very long rod or a pole like they do walk with, they hold onto that pole and because it wants to resist movement, rotational movement, they can walk like super easy and not worry about falling so much because they're using something to help them hold, to walk more still and to be more stable. So if you use that same principle in archery, instead of having your bow, your riser have all the weight on it, you put that weight on the end of a rod and that's going to want to hold the bow still in space for you and allow you to have to have less input into the bow itself in order to hold still. So a bit about stabilization dampening. There is a lot of different types of dampeners, right? Many are made with the same principle of having a rubber piece with two bolts, one for your stabilizer, one for your weights and then the rubber allows the weights to move independently of the stabilizer. There's another one that's like this but it's a little stiffer. There's another one that's even weaker with again the same deal and then there's some that there's a solid piece through the inside and then this ring on the outside moves independent of the actual stabilizer itself and then there's some that mount on the end of the stabilizer itself and then have the rubber on the end end. Same with this one here. So there's different ones that do different things and a lot of it comes down to personal preference, however from the science standpoint there is differences in performance. So it takes roughly a 60th of a second for a bow to push the arrow and for the arrow to decouple from the string. So a 60th of a second from the point that the shot breaks or that you let go of the string that the bow is pushing on the arrow and then the hits brace height and the arrow decouples from the string and leaves the bow. It takes a 60th of a second. When a stabilizer has a rubber doinker, a rubber damper to allow the weights to move independent of the rod, the weight itself is only going to be holding the bow still the bow still in space when this weight stops moving. So when you shoot and the arrow is coming out of the bow the weight itself is doing this and moving back and forth like that okay and the time that the weight is doing anything to help hold the bow still is when the weight goes through one cycle and then stops moving and then and then when it slowly starts accelerating. So when it's once it stopped and it stopped and it's still in space that is when it holds the bow still in space then it wants to move again and then it's both still holding still in space. Basically the weight wants to stay still and then the stabilizer is moving independent of the weight. So the weight really only clamps the bow down when it's moved enough and it stopped moving and then moves back the other way and stops. So how long does that take? It takes about a sixth of a second for the weight to hit full maximum bend and stop before it goes back the other direction. So by that time the arrow is long gone and the weight isn't doing very much to actually clamp the bow down in space to resist its movement. That is important when you're making mistakes as the arrow is being delivered or if you're being inconsistent in the amount of pressure you're exerting on the bow. Basically the stabilization system should be used to try to clamp the bow down in space to resist its movement as the arrow is being delivered during the most important part of the entire shot. So you can adjust and do different things with your dampers. This stabilizer has weights built internally into the stabilizer plus there's weights inside of this stainless piece and then there's weights on the end. So I have very little weight on the end of the the damper compared to what I have on the stabilizer. I believe I have eight or ten ounces that is directly on the rod and only three ounces on the end of this damper. I have other systems like this where the weight is not internal in this stabilizer so I have four ounces against the rod and five ounces on the end of the damper. Now different amounts of weights in different places will feel different. There's some stabilizers like this one that I like less weight on the end of the damper compared to the end of the rod. So this one has five on the end of the rod and three under the end of the damper and that really just depends on the feel. What you're looking for but you know I feel that it feels best when the weights are all on the end of the rod or excuse me all on the end of the damper in between the rod and the weights but for performance it's not best. So I try to split that difference sometimes especially when I'm playing around with different setups. I'll put some weights against the stabilizer and some on the end of the damper and I'll use this as a tuning tool to try to figure out what I like best and it does make a big difference and you should notice immediate differences in sound and vibration quality when you change where the weights are in relation to the rod with using a rubber disconnect in the in the center. So some common questions that I get about stabilizers is how do different length stabilizers affect the way the shot feels, how much vibration it takes out, how steady does it make you hold, etc. And all those things are good questions. You know that really the difference between the different length stabilizers or different length v-bars really comes down to personal preference and what is comfortable for you. Now a really easy simple way to try that obviously is to get different length stabilizers but as we move further forward in this process I'm going to explain to you how to fix faults in your aiming pattern with your stabilizers instead of with your tiller which is a common thing that people do especially with Olympic style recurve. But basically like say if you had a 30 inch long rod with 10 ounces on it that would be if you did math and you said okay I have 10 ounces on the long rod it's 30 inches long that has 300 inch ounces of resistance to it. You can also reverse engineer how much weight you should run on a stabilizer that is a different length to still have the same aiming pattern especially after you've set your bow up to hold well. So what you can do is if you had a 33 inch long rod and you divided it by the 300 inch ounces that you have with the other stabilizer and you would end up with 9.1 ish ounces on that long rod to have the same balance. Another way to do that is or to set up the stabilizers if you just aren't going to do the math is to use a quick disconnect piece in between two stabilizers and then you can change your weights on the other stabilizer to match the aiming pattern that you already have. So I'm going to show you with a 30 inch long rod set up for one of my bows and then I'm going to set up a wind bar. So this is a much shorter rod as you can see it's maybe it's 16 or 17 inches long and I'm going to show you how to set these up so they will hold basically identical on the same bow. The reason that you would use this type of wind bar is if it's super windy coming across the field shooting with a shorter stabilizer cuts down on the amount that the wind is whipping your bow around. So on a tournament that's very very windy like SoCal Shootout I always brought a wind bar with me to throw on my system within reason. So it depends once you get started or you're shooting with super heavy stabilizers like this one had 14 or 15 ounces total on the end here whereas this one I think is 8 or 10. You start getting into that and you shorten the rod by half you're adding like almost two pounds of weight on the end of this rod and then it becomes a bit unruly and it's really hard to control. So sometimes wind bars are just not practical but I'm going to show you how to make this wind bar hold the same that this bar will. So in order to do that I use this quick disconnect peg or pin or whatever you want to call it and I screw it on the existing stabilizer part way and then I take the new rod that I want to balance out the same and I also screw it into there. Now what I want to do is when they tighten down and butt up against each other I want this to be equidistant from this stabilizer and this stabilizer so this one's pretty close and then all I'm going to do is I'm going to hold my finger in the center here and I'm going to balance it but I have so much weight on this end that I need a whole lot on this end so I'm going to put together a system and put it on that end and I'll show you how to do this. Okay so I've got this stabilizer this um this wind bar that's half the length of this bar roughly really close so you can see they both have weights on them just holding my finger in the center and I'm going to let go and I'm going to see what happens and you can see that the long rod still wants to go low compared to this wind bar but if I put one more ounce on the end of this rod and then I check my balance you'll see that the wind bar is too heavy so this is where different weights can come in handy this is a steel weight uh so are all these these are all steel weights these are one ounce each these are aluminum weights same exact dimensions you know same dimensions no difference they're just aluminum so they're a third of an ounce is what these are so I'm going to put on one of the one third ounces and then I'm going to check my balance again and see what I come up with finger in the center still a little heavy on this side so I'm going to put another third ounce on and see it might be too much but we're going to be close I believe that's pretty good as you can see you know one's a little lower than the other but we'll make them level so this should hold this should hold the the same that this one does with no change other than the length and then compensating with different weights so you can use this type of method to compare a 30 inch versus a 33 inch stabilizer and then you could do the math now that it balances the same it should hold the same you should say okay this is a 30 inch rod with 10 ounces this is a 15 inch rod with 24 ounces maybe or something it could be slightly different where those inch ounces of resistant to movement are more efficient or better with a different length stabilizer however one thing to consider and we'll talk about here as we get going further onto the system is you want to have a stabilization system that is going to hold the best for you generally more weight on the stabilizing rods means you can help the bow can be held more and more still and the same thing also can be said about the length of the rods the longer the rods you can make them with the weights on the end of them the more efficient those weights become without adding a whole lot more mass weight however both too much weight and too long of stabilizers you can have an unruly stabilizing system to where it just doesn't want to aim quite right it's random in its movement and you just overall cannot control it what that is generally is too long of rods and too heavy a weight or one or the other and then you can adjust your system uh to to control and fix that so i always recommend to use an adjustable adjustable v-bar bracket so this is double adjustable it's adjustable up and down and in and out whereas this style is solid you cannot adjust it at all it's one setting one width and you get what you bought whereas this one you can adjust an infinite amount of angles there is no internal teeth in this particular design this is the gripper by aae and it is a um there's a taper essentially that they both fit into and they jam down on onto each other so each one has a marked or graduated uh system here that you can duplicate right to left or different bows whereas some of the other ones like the easton one the bee stinger one and some of the others have teeth that you have to in you know in engage and you can only do one tooth at a time sometimes those and i've been guilty of this too on accident i'll tighten them down where the teeth are on top of each other and then it ruins the entire adjustment or you drop your bow and it shears the teeth off i found this one to be the best to design as far as those go now we've got a couple of the basics covered i want to show you how to fix aiming patterns like faults in aiming patterns so ideally you want your sight pin to just kind of be floating around in the middle randomly moving and being relatively consistent in its placement in the center of the target however if you have some sort of issue where you're aiming in the middle and you're aiming patterns doing this and all of a sudden you get a bob in it and then you have to force it back in the middle and then you have another bob what this is doing and what this is telling you is it's a simple adjustment a simple way to fix this type of issue or the opposite if it were to go too high right if it were to want to float up on you and you got to constantly push it down in the center very very simple it's just a basic balance game if you're aiming aiming aiming and then all of a sudden it just dips down and pulls you downwards don't you think that maybe you have too much weight on the long rod that's wanting to pull you down and you're fighting to keep it up or there's not enough weight on the back of the v bars or the back of the long back of the short rods so you use it as a balance as a fulcrum basically if it's pulling you down add more weight to the back or reduce weight in the front to help hold up more same thing if it wants to rise you don't have enough weight on the front rod or too much weight on the long or side rods now the same thing if you're aiming in the middle and it just drifts to the right and you have to keep fighting it and wants to just keep drifting to the right you have too much weight on the right not enough on the left you can you can do all sorts of adjustments to move this to make it a better aiming pattern so if you think of something as just as simple as this the reason that i use v bars adjustable v bars is so i can tune the way my stabilizers are the length of the stabilizers essentially if you had a side rod if the front of the bow was facing that way and this was a side rod sticking straight out the back you could effectively shorten the length of this rod because if you the the front to back balance is purely where the centralized location of the weights are that distance to its mounting point on the on the bow itself so if i take the same exact rod and i angle it downwards what is it doing to the weight from the center of the weights to the front of where the mounting point is on the bow angled down you know compared to here angled down what does it do you can see that this weight is right here and this weight's far back that way so it's effectively shortening the lever arm in this on this plane as you uh angle the v bar down further and further when you do that it shortens the length of the rod on this plane so if you have an aiming pattern where you're constantly dipping down all the time you could if your v bars were angled down you could raise them up some and as you raise them it adds more weight to the back effectively and helps hold the bow up more so if you do that with the left to right typically even with my recurve i had maybe an ounce maybe two-thirds of an ounce more on the left side than the right side it would depend on each individual setup and depend a lot on the grip that i was using on my bow but like i said an ounce to two-thirds of an ounce more on the left than the right but also my v bars i had them angled down but i had them angled out too as well right but i had my right run angled in less excuse me angled out less angled in more and what does that do in this plane the left and right plane if i angle one in more i'm shortening this side effectively and that's going to make more weight shift towards this side so you can do the same with your left and right aiming by adjusting the angles of your v bars now again if you have kind of an unruly aiming pattern where it just kind of wanders there's no real pattern that you're seeing you're not seeing one direction consistently uh a movement one consistent direction generally you're out of whack somewhere you got too long of rods uh they're at crazy angles there's too much weight one of those factors it's kind of hard to uh hard to say without being there in person and without me holding the bow um but you know i can tell you that in my opinion it is not optimal to set your bow up as if i had a stabilizer on here and i set my bow up to where i put my finger on this point of the grip that the bow would hang straight down old school korean style setup is i want my bow to balance when i'm putting my finger on the grip here to go straight down and to me it's kind of crazy i don't quite get it i understand that they're wanting the bow to react a certain way they want to feel that bow jump out of their hand and then want to fall forward i personally don't care what the bow does after the shot the arrow's long gone by the time the bow is vibrating and jumping out of my hand so why do i care what it does after the shot the arrow's gone i want the bow to help me hold the bow steadier so i can shoot the bow and the bow can shoot the arrow correctly you know that makes sense like why would i be fighting a stabilizer that's so heavy on the long rod that i have to hold up um instead of just adjusting the stabilizing system to help me hold the bow still most of those type of people that have this type of balance that have so much weight on the long rod and almost none on the v bars or very short v bars or an extremely long extension and short v bars i believe they are while they're not really aiming as much or are definitely unable to shoot as well in the wind especially when it's very windy and they adjust their tiller to help them hold steady as they're pulling back there's a different style of aiming for them they pick up the bow they put the sight in the center of the target and then they pull back and keep it there and then they're just continually moving and then shoot before they know it whereas what i do just like a compound does you pull the bow back first you get set into form and then you aim and then you start executing um you can really see a big difference in shooting styles especially when it's windy most koreans can't even pull the bow back when it's super windy because they can't acquire the target the wind's blowing and their sights doing this so they're scared to pull the bow back they are taught put the sight pin in the middle hold it there and then pull the bow back and then shoot as opposed to us who cares what the wind's doing pull the bow back get into position acquire the target and bang get the shot off so i believe use your stabilizers to help you hold the bow still not your tiller to me that doesn't make sense i adjust my tiller so it feels best on my fingers so i'm not fighting to keep my fingers on the string and i can execute the shot accurately without having outside influence and stressors on my system like having difficulty keeping my top finger on the string or the bottom finger on the string depending on if i have too extreme of a tiller setup that is why i have said in the other videos do not set your tiller to help you hold the bow still we set the tiller for optimal finger pressure so the same thing can be said about the bow balance with holding there is a something out there i think it's perfect balance or something like that it's something that grabs your bow and it has bearings and it allows your bow to just kind of do what it does in space i don't believe you should set up your bow to be balanced like this i think it's going to be very individual especially depending on how much weight you have on your bow draw weight the style that you're shooting with and etc um i do believe though that you can use that perfect balance balancer to take one bow and another bow and basically be perfect as far as how it holds as long as the draw weight and lead off and that type of stuff is consistent you know for me i would grab my bow and my stabilizer made like maybe a 30 degree downward angle give or take and i could just grab it on my grip and go like this and adjust the weights and know that with this type of angle on the string or the stabilizer that this bow is going to hold just about perfect for me so let's talk about extensions should you use an extension should you not compounds nobody uses an extension most people in fact put the v-bar mount in a different location than the stabilizer and i'll explain to you why in a second so don't leave yet but anyway what's the difference between shooting an extension and not personal preference it changes the way the bow feels it changes the way the bow tunes and it changes your aiming pattern so i'll talk about the aiming pattern first because that's fairly easy so if this one is uh no extension and then this is extension okay no extension my sight pin tends to float much slower and slightly larger so it's real slow movement kind of randomized it's centrally located but it's very slow with an extension it's a little bit tighter but the movement is a lot more rapid and it really wiggles around back and forth much faster but again it's slightly tighter than no extension it depends on the type of shot that you like to shoot i've used both and both successfully um i i've lately or later in my career i was using an extension however i was only using a three inch extension i think that as you start using too long of an extension you start kind of losing the efficiency of the way the bow is holding so you start needing a lot more longer side rods or a lot more weight on the back a lot less weight on the front to help you hold your bow still like i suggest if you're old school korean the rule is 30 inch long rod 10 inch side rods 45 degree angle straight out six inch extension two ounces on each v-bar four ounces on the front period that's the setup that's what everybody uses and that's just what they expect everybody to use but this method is much better i i can show you how to hold a lot more still and have a lot more still aiming pattern why is that important if your sight pins in the 10 ring as you're aiming don't you think it'd be a lot more confident as you're trying to execute the shot as opposed to your sight drifting into the eight ring i mean i would say all right and the last couple things about stabilizers that absolutely still do apply to compound this first one a little bit less than the second one but the first one is we're going to talk about v-bar angles do you want a v-bar that's perfectly straight out or do you want v-bars that angle the v-bars downward so if i am standing here and i have two v-bars that are parallel to each other and the same length and the same width as i can't my bow one direction or the other if you look at where the weights would be and draw them and measure the length to the center line of the bow exclusive you know in this plane as i can't my bow one way what is it doing to this one it's shortening it and what is it doing to that one it's shortening it so both are being shortened as i'm canting does that make sense right so that's not doing anything to stop me from canting but if i drop my v-bars down in a downward angle and i do the same can't where i can't my bow one direction what's it doing to this side that i'm the direction that i'm canting towards it's shortening this side and it's lengthening this side so what do you think that's doing if it's lengthening one side and shortening the other it's going to give this one more leverage so it's going to want to it's going to get heavier and want to pull you back vertical automatically it's acting like a plumb bob there's a reason that this end is heavier than this end and as i'm holding it that end goes perfectly straight down it doesn't want to stay upright it wants to pull itself downward same thing like this if i'm canting it acts as a plumb bob and it wants to pull the bow vertical for you it really helps on field archery i find it to be awesome that's why i always drop my v bars slightly also now this next part oh before i get into that with the compound thing the opposite is totally awful so if i had them angled up hard to hold them this way if i had them angled up and i canted this direction what's that doing it's lengthening this side and shortening this side so it's going to want to make you can't even more so just don't angle your v bars up i would prefer to angle them down a lot of people have them straight out but i like angled down because of the plumb bob effect not only do i like it because of the plumb bob effect but there's also this reason as well if you take and you can do this at home if you take two arrows and you hold them like this in the center if this is my long rod and that's my v bar and what you want to do is you want to take it and you want to try to wobble and shake the end of the stabilizer left and right all right it's going to move fairly easy but then if you take your v bar and you drop your v bar at a downward angle and you still hold this tight like this so now i have my long rod and then my v bar is angled downwards now try to wobble your stabilizer left and right it's a whole lot more difficult to make this movement compared to this movement this is really easy it's just like it whips back and forth it's got this wobble that's induced but as soon as you drop your v bar down and now you wobble the long rod there's offsetting forces that exert on the bow so when you're at full draw if you've got a bit of a shake going on or whatever these other forces that are exerted on the bow in a different manner cancel out this movement a lot quicker so what that does is it actually decreases the amount of lag time that you have when you come to full draw for you to acquire the target to start executing because this movement this wobble that is induced or the the influencing the outside influences of a shake or the wind blowing or whatever this offset forces cancels out that movement a lot quicker so you can acquire the target faster so you can execute quicker burn less energy shoot better in the wind etc and then when you take it to the next step and you like a compound does typically they take their v bar bracket like this type of bracket and then they mount it on the bottom of the riser and then have they can adjust their v bar more so it totally amplifies that canceling effect because it is not even mounted in the same place anymore now it's disconnected the mounting and it's lowering it even further so it really exaggerates that positive benefit of the downward angle v bar so a couple other quick things to think about before we move on in this series and before this video ends is how do does stabilizers affect your tune and do they in my experience i found the more weight you have in the back the longer the long the longer the v bars the shorter your extension you end up needing a much higher knocking point and you end up having a weaker arrow it's a weird thing i don't know how to explain it but i can tell you for sure if you if i just went from extension to no extension but still had the same aiming pattern so not just taking the extension off still having the same balance my tune would be wrong i would need a higher knocking point and i'd have to take some weight off of my bow the bow weight to keep the tune the same but dynamically it totally changes the way the bow reacts so if you're going to play with extension versus no extension i found when i went from no extension to a three inch extension i needed to take about four ounces maybe five ounces off my long rod or add five or so on the back um that would is an approximation that's about roughly what i knew i needed when i changed extensions so just keep in mind that it will affect your tune and that's why i suggest getting your stabilizers set before we do a whole lot of other tuning because it's really going to be critical how your stabilizers are working with the bow before we finalize our tune so that about wraps it up for stabilizing and how to adjust and set your stabilization system for not just recurve but also compound um sorry barebow this doesn't really guys apply to you guys you just got to fit your bow through a ring and call it a day i'm sure there's a science to that as well and i'd love to learn so uh if you got any great resources for that suggest it below if i didn't cover stuff that you wish i would have covered in regards to stabilizers i'm sure i forgot about it um just comment below let me know what you want me to talk about in the future if you have any suggestions or ideas or whatever for a different video please do comment below i'll read the comment and and try to come up with something for you guys and respond if you have a question about stabilizers thanks for watching be sure to subscribe and hit that notification bell so you get notified every time a new video is uploaded for seminar and book info head to jakiminski.com or click on the link below and uh yeah i appreciate you guys watching if you would please share this video it really helped get the word back out that i am back out there thanks again take care