Introduction and overview with Jake Kaminski | Recurve Tuning Series Episode 1 Basic Recurve Setup

You're watching the Jay Kominski YouTube channel. How you doing? I'm Jay Kominski, two-time Olympic silver medalist, and I'm going to give you a quick rundown as a prequel to the next series of tuning videos on how to set up and tune a recurve bow, how I would take my bow from fresh out of the box until going and shooting at world championships or the Olympic Games in front of millions of people, and basically showing you how I go from square one all the way to the finish. But before I do that, I want to kind of touch on a quick history as to my history in the sport of archery. I moved out to the Olympic Training Center in late 2006 and started training under Coach Lee full-time. I lived there for six years and then left and continued to shoot for several years after that on my own, but still training under Coach Lee. But while I was there at the training center, because we were the premier recurve group and there was a lot of us together at once, a lot of companies would come out to the training center and kind of explain to us their equipment, why their equipment was good or how to set up their equipment. And being the person that I am, I am a why person. I need to know why to do something or why somebody is suggesting to do something a certain particular way. And the reason is for me is if they can't explain it to me as to why or tell me a good reason, then I don't necessarily believe 100% that they know exactly what they're talking about. So I tend to do more research on my own and figure it out on my own. But anyway, these experts would come out to the training center, whether it be Doug Denton from Hoyt bringing out the latest, greatest Hoyt stuff, some people on the design team of the X10 to physiological stuff and mental stuff, all sorts of different stuff. Anyway, so we had all these experts out there and I always, you know, ask them, how do you set up your bow? Why do you align it that way? What process do you go through from top to bottom and in what order? What distance do you shoot bear shafts in? How do you select bear shafts? How do you fletch arrows? Like why and how arrows and bows work together in the way that they do in order to give you the most forgiving or most accurate setup. So with knowing that, you know, my background, I basically had no information or knowledge of tuning at all prior to moving out to the training center. Literally the way that I would tune my bow or my coaches would help me tune my bow because I really just didn't know. I was a young show ed kid basically and, you know, I was like, all right, shoot some arrows, we'll screw your plunger out or the plunger tension out and shoot some more arrows. If the group got tighter, great, we'll keep going. If not, we'll go the other direction. Like there really wasn't any sort of method to the madness at all. And so once I started to learn it, I'm a very mechanical minded person and I really enjoy those type of things. So anyway, if you're a beginner or an advanced person out there and just looking for a great resource to refresh your memory on how to do things or order of operations or what effect makes what, I hope this video will be a great resource to you or this video series rather. So if you wouldn't mind, hit that subscribe button and the notification bell to get notified anytime a new video of this series and other series are uploaded as well as give me a thumbs up if you would and share this video because I've been out of the game for a little bit and, you know, this would really help get the word back out there that I am getting more involved back in the sport of archery. So anyway, so with tuning, so we're going to be talking about tuning Olympic style recurves. This will apply to a lot of barebow shooters as well, especially a lot of the stuff in the beginning on how to align your bow and things along that line. So anyway, with tuning, we're going to, I'm going to talk to basically my order of operations and give a kind of a quick rundown as to why you should do it in that order. And then as I expand on the videos, I'll basically break down each section into a video and expand on that and continue moving forward. So with tuning, you want to basically set your rough bow weight first that you would expect to shoot. And now again, like I said, this is taking a bow fresh out of the box and going and competing with it. So you may not know your bow weight that you're set at or, or what you want yet, and that's okay. So anyway, we're going to try to get our rough bow weight set and with that a rough tiller. And rough means just get it close. Tiller is roughly an eighth to a quarter, you know, split. So anyway, after tiller, we talk about limb alignment, how to set the limbs in plane to each other, and then how to set the limbs in plane to the center of the riser. Next would be center shot, then stabilization setup, set the final tiller after you set your stabilizers, and we'll explain that more later in the video series. Then we want to set our rough bear shaft tune. Now what is rough bear shaft tune? Rough bear shaft tune is for you and what you feel comfortable with. For me, it was all six arrows, three fletch, three bear in a 80 centimeter face, and the gold at 30 meters, and that's when I would call a rough bear shaft tune. Next, I would probably set my brace height, but I use a very specific manner to select and find my brace height, and we'll explain that in a little bit as well. Then the walk back tune would be next, then the final bear shaft tune, and after that would be fine tuning. So there's a very particular order that I do things in. For a quick example, would be if your limbs are not aligned correctly, it's going to change where your center shot will be, and then it just ends up changing everything. It changes your dynamic tune in the bow and the setup, and so you're going to be compensating for one thing to adjust another thing instead of having everything squared from zero and moving forward, and you won't be chasing your tail later on as you're really trying to finalize and set up your tune to get the most consistent and forgiving setup possible. Also within this series, we'll talk about arrow building and arrow selection. So you can see I've got a spine checker here, and I've got a whole bit different assortment of arrows here that I've used over the years, and basically I'm going to show you how to build arrows properly as well, how to size them for you, what type vanes to use, knock fit, all sorts of things. We'll end up talking about string building, knock tying, all sorts of stuff, and basically everything from top to bottom. So anything from your plunger to you name it, strand count, whatever. You know what's best is if you guys are really super interested in listening and learning about something, comment below, let me know exactly what you're looking for, and I'll make sure I touch on that subject. But other than that, you know a couple things that you may need just preemptively before these videos come out would be stuff that I like to use. Definitely a bow scale. It doesn't have to be anything fancy. This is just an X-Spot, which is basically a luggage scale, nothing fancy. I like using a bow vise, and I'll show you why we use a bow vise later. If you don't have that, a top tube clamp for a bike, if you're into cycling, that works really good as a bow vise. You need fighter blocks for sure. These are going to help us align our limbs, and you don't need a spine checker. This is just something that I'm going to use to show you some some really cool things about arrows and how they select the spine, or how they rate the spine rather, and some things like that. And then some other basic stuff like a level. If you have the ability to have a clamp on level, that'll help, especially when we're setting up our site. And yeah, that's about it as far as basic tools outside of allen wrenches and pliers. And I like using my phone. Some people will go out and spend money on a laser to set up their stuff. I don't think that you need that by any means. I typically try to simplify things as much as possible. 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 jakominski.com or click on the link below. And yeah, I appreciate you guys watching. If you would, please share this video. It really helps get the word back out that I am back out there. Thanks again. Take care.