Black Hunter Longbow Build..Part I // From Box to Woods // Traditional Bowhunting

Hey guys, so what I'm doing today is I got a super cheap bow online. This isn't a product review or anything. I don't, I'm not really into doing product review stuff, but it seems like everyone with a YouTube channel has done a product review on this bow already, so you can readily find it. It's the Black Hunter. I've never shot it before. I've never held one. I've never seen it. My goal is I want to go ahead and build this bow and take you through what I do, and maybe if it's something that interests you, this could be something that you do to go ahead and go into the woods and have fun stump shooting and stuff. So let's go ahead and open it up here and see what we got. Apparently people get mixed, allegedly people get mixed, a mixed bag here with these bows. Either they love them or they're duds and they got to return them. I know some companies will go ahead and like and bet them to make sure they're to spec before they sell them out and you pay a little bit more of a premium for that, but this is just from like Amazon because I'm not really interested in doing that. So let's see what we got. All right, so far so good. Nothing looks like it's, looks like it's packaged fine. Let's look at the limbs. All right, no damage. This is an interesting looking limb. It looks like the profile of a recurve limb, but it's a longbow limb, but it's like the cross section is like super thin like a recurve limb and it's wide like a recurve limb. I got 40 pounds at 28 inches, so this looks like the lower limb, I guess, look at the writing. So that one looks fine to me. No issue there. Let's look at the top limb. Top limb also looks like it's fine. I don't see any issues. String knots look fine. No nicks or anything. Looks like it might be like bamboo or something on the cores and some mystery wood in the middle. All right, so far so good. Let's look at the riser. All right, that looks pretty nice, actually. I like the way that looks. There's no shelf material. That's fine. It looks like it is cut to center, I guess. It's going to be a little bit past, a little bit before center. Once I put the shelf velcro and stuff on, it's got some felt on the limbs here. Anyway, this is the product review. It looks fine. It looks good enough, hopefully, to go out and just have fun stump shooting. So let's get started trying to do that here. All right, the first thing I want to do is get my strike plate and shelf. Let's see, it looks like they give me something. We'll see if it's suitable. Yeah, it looks like some sort of fake like calf hair deal. I'm not crazy about it. So I'm gonna trash that. I like to use the soft side of velcro. So what we can do first is get that peeled off. I'm going to get my scissors, which should be in their place, but they're not. All right, I'm just going to cut a little triangle type deal. That's what I like to do for this style. Maybe like a little half trapezoid sort of deal. Just something like that. That looks like it makes sense to me. Like it's pretty. Just something like that, right? I'm going to stick that on the, pretty much the pivot point where the arrow's going to sit, because this is like a radius shelf. So let me do that. I guess really you should hit it with some alcohol, but whatever. Where the highest point of the radius is where I want to get that. All right, that looks good to me. Now I'm just going to hit some velcro on the shelf. So really what we can do is get a pencil and make it the same rough shape like that. Cut that out. It doesn't need to be exact. Oh yeah, perfect. All right, let's put that in there. Again, really you should get some, you should hit that with some rubbing alcohol, but I really don't care. That's going to be, that's stuck on there. That's good. All right, could it be better? Probably. Is it fine? Yeah. So that's how I do that. Let's get an arrow real quick and just see. Oh yeah, super quiet, super soft. Nice. All right, that's the riser. Anything else with the riser? You know what? I haven't even held this in my hand yet. The grip is fine. I like a more flat grip and really you guys can modify your bows to make them work for you. Like I might just take like a orbital sander or something and just hit that right there and just get it real nice and flat because that's how I like to shoot my bow. Don't be afraid to modify your bows, like within reason, don't ruin it. But if you don't like something about the bow, that's kind of what's cool about traditional archery is that you can just kind of modify it. Like for instance, on my main bow, my Hoist the Torii, I like to run that push Accutune on it and stock out of the box. You don't get, like you probably don't need this much adjustment, but the body of the Accutune hits the riser before you can really get like super past center. Again, you really probably don't need to do that, but what I did is I threw my riser into my drill press and I cut using a Forstner bit. I made like a little hole here. I'll just show you real quick. Using a Forstner bit, I basically recessed the hole so I can get full adjustment out of my Accutune. Doesn't look great, but I'm more of a function guy. I don't really care about looks. But anyway, that's my Satori. I think some bows come stock with that sort of recessed hole, but the Satori doesn't, so that's why I made that modification. All right, so the riser should be done, right? We have our strike plate and our shelf material. Let's go ahead and bolt this guy up. Did they give us a bolt or an Allen wrench rather? Yeah, they did. That looks pretty clean. All right, of course, you really don't have to weave down on this. Just get it nice and snug here. I like that it has that little locator pin. Get it nice and straight on there. You're not going to get limb alignment or anything like that or even tiller adjustment like an ILF rig, which is what I like to shoot because I just like to tanker. But for a guy that wants to spend $100 and get in the woods, we'll see. All right, just snug it up. Perfect. Yeah, it looks good. That looks nice. All right, so that's the riser, right? That's a bow built rather. Looks good. All right, actually, one more note. This is the string that it came with, and honestly, it's junk. Just don't even put it on your bow. I would just order a custom string. I'm sure a ton of people make them. I'm going to make my own just because I know how to and I have the jig and the materials and stuff. But if you get this bow, just order a string right off the bat. The reason is because you can shoot this string. That's fine. But in a few months, if you find out you really like this and you actually want to take it into the woods hunting, this string could just easily get out of whack with your brace height and stuff. And if your brace height gets changed, like even an eighth of a quarter of an inch, you're just going to throw your tune off. So it's just one of those things up front, you're better off just upgrading it right away so you don't have to deal with the headache later. But anyway, yeah, that's trash. So maybe I will build a string for this now and we'll get going on that. By the way, the string that came with this bow is it looks like a 56 and a half inch string. The AMO standard is three inches less than your total bow length. So this is a 60 inch bow. So I guess normally you'd make a 57 inch string. I'm going to go ahead and just make a 56 inch string because it. Like I said, I made a 56 inch string and I'm actually very glad that I did because at 56 inches, as soon as I strung it up, the bow was at like six and a quarter brace height, which is way too low. So yeah, if I made it like 57 AMO length, it would have been way too long. So now I'm going to clean up the tapered ends on my string. I'm going to serve it up with some center serving, and then I'm going to put on some string silencers. And when I get to the silencers, I will show you what I do for that to get a super quiet bow, regardless of what material. Okay. I just want to quickly talk about how I install my string silencers because I think that this is the best way after just experimenting with a bunch of stuff. So what I do is I take the total length of the bow string and I divide it by four. And that number in inches is where I install the top bow string. Then I do the same thing, but divided by three. And that's where I put the bottom silencer. So what that does, I'm pretty sure it's called heterodyning, but I'm pretty sure what that does is it's kind of hard to explain, but it really deadens the bow. Like when, when the shot goes off, basically the string deadens on like even frequencies from the top silencer. And then it deadens on the odd frequencies from the bottom sound. And it really does make a difference. Like I found that you, you really don't even, it doesn't even matter what kind of material you use for your silencers. I'm going to use cat whiskers right now, which I don't have a ton of experience with, but I just wanted to experiment with them. So I will get back to you after I'm done. Okay. I scrapped the cat whisker idea because I put them on and they were just absolutely hideous. So I had some beaver tail or I'm sorry, beaver puff, beaver for puff silencers. And I threw those on and I can tell it's going to be a really quiet bow. So, all right, I'm going to tie my top knock set like five high and just start from there. And then we'll adjust it as we get shooting. Also the string needs to break in. So I'm not going crazy right now. All right. This is my first group with the bow. I'm just breaking in the string and I can already tell that it's going to be a shooter. So these arrows aren't tuned at all to the bow, but they're flying a little weak. So I just want to break in the string right now. And then I will get a set of arrows tuned up to it.