Akusta Power Riser Review ｜ The Cheapest ILF Riser I Could Find!

Got another review for you here today on the channel and what we're going to be taking a look at is the Acousta Power Recurve Riser. So what I'll do in this video is I'm going to unbox it and show you the riser close up, set it up, go outside, tune it, shoot it, and let you know what I think about it. Full disclosure like I always do in all these videos, I just want to let you know I did actually purchase this riser with my own money for the sake of a review. That way I can be truly unbiased in my feedback about what this product actually feels like and what I actually think about it. The way that I actually am able to purchase this gear is if you click those links down in the description below because if you're interested in one of these or any of the products that you'll see me use on today's video, I do have links down in the description below. Those are affiliate links. Some of those I do have discount codes, some of those I don't. But either way, when you click those links before you shop there, it doesn't make your price any more expensive and it helps afford me to purchase more gear like this. And plus, by the time I'm done with this review, I will have this riser, this actual riser, available for sale on my website, jakominski.com, and you can actually head there and check it out. It is available only in the USA store, so if you're interested in this, be sure to click USA and check it out. It'll be also available down in the actual scroller thing down below for the shopping attached to YouTube and also apparel. We've launched apparel officially on the USA shop. We're doing a soft launch here. We've got a few different designs. We're working on adding more t-shirts and hoodies. And then we are working on pressing designs and getting them over to Europe, so that way they'll be available on the EU shop as well. We will send out an email blast when that is available over in Europe, but we are shipping worldwide currently from the USA shop in case you're interested in that. So be sure to check out those as well at jakominski.com. So with all that out of the way, let's open this thing up and take a look at it. It was available at Lancaster Archery Supply. It's currently out of stock, probably because they ran out of stock and now they're unable to get stuff in at a reasonable price point due to the tariffs. Just guessing. I don't know. But it was $120. I don't know if it is still. It's the cheapest ILF 25-inch riser that I could find at Lancaster Archery Supply. And that's why I ordered it, because a lot of people are interested in budget gear. And I want to check it out too as well, because I know there's a lot of recreational shooters out there. First thing in the box, got a wristband shoe cover that you can put on your shoelaces. That's cool. You can loop this through your laces, and then when you set your limb tip on your shoe, you won't put a hole in it. I don't personally put my bow there, but I know a lot of people do. Their manual, some hardware, and a wristband. Let me check out the manual really quick. Limb alignment, limb adjustment, how to tighten down the tiller bolts through the various different risers that they've got, as well as their adjustments on many different bows. However, I'm noticing that the Power POWR riser, that's what this one is, isn't listed in their manual. This could be an older manual. I'm not sure. But we've got a riser sleeve that it comes with, which I'm actually, frankly, surprised to see at such a good price point, because some of the other risers that I've seen at this price point, actually a little bit more, don't come with a riser sleeve. And the sleeve is nice and padded, nice and thick, and it looks mighty familiar to a few other bigger brands as well. So the riser itself, I believe it is cast aluminum. So there should be some sort of draw weight limitation as far as the max draw weight you can use, but it doesn't say that anywhere. So I'm just going to shoot it with my standard 45, 46 plus pounds draw weight and just see what happens. But the first look of the riser is it looks quite solid. It looks like an ILF, looks like a solid piece for $120. I can see a lot of orange peel on what appears to be powder coat. I'll show you that really quick up close here. You can see, based on the reflection, the actual orange peel. You can see it there really well. So it's not perfect, but what do you want for $120? I don't see any bare spots. I don't really see anything necessarily wrong. Two plunger holes, sight mounting holes, two clicker holes, one, two, three bushings in the front, one bushing in the back, left to right limb adjustments. I see one little flaw I'm going to show you here in a second, but I mean, check it out. The limb adjustments, kind of your standard looking thing. So it seems to be quite solid. So what I see as one problem is if you look really, really close at that hex, you'll see that somebody who was installing that didn't put the Allen key all the way down in the bottom and partially rounded the head, but it looks like they caught themselves before they went too far and went in a little deeper possibly. So yeah, I mean, it's not 100% perfect. The bottom seems to have similar issues there too. But overall, I mean, it seems quite nice. It's got a little clicker plate that's bolted on. Maybe they'll have 55% more clicker feedback. Who knows? We'll find out. I guess a little funky here. This bushing, it looks like it's not installed all the way maybe. See how there's a gap there on the upper side and it's below surface on the below side. I think it's installed all the way. It's just not shouldered up against the actual base of the riser up in that one spot. And the angle of the bushing, it's definitely going to have a little bit of trouble with certain size weights. Actually it shouldn't be too bad. This is a eight ounce dampened barebow weight just to see if it would clear. With it tightened down with spacers on, it clears. If I get rid of the spacers, it literally touches the riser before it can shoulder up against the actual bushing. Just barely by about a hair. So yeah, it's not going to accept everything in the back. So if you're one of those people that run a lot of back weight, because I know some people do old school stuff, it may not clear your actual weight or damper. If you're using a rubber damper, not such a big deal because it'll kind of smoosh out of the way. You can quick weigh it out of curiosity. Yeah, it's 1160 grams. So it's 100 grams lighter than just about your standard high end recurve riser. So this would be great for more youth or women because it is a little bit on the lighter side. For us in the US, it's 41 ounces and just over two and a half pounds. So it's definitely on the lighter side just by a little bit, which is great because then younger people can get used to shooting a ILF riser that's metal and you can have your limb adjustments and get a little bit more into the sport with a little bit more familiar materials that you're going to see at the higher end when you start using a little bit higher equipment. As far as quality is concerned, I just want to check some hardware really quick. Yeah, I mean, it's not the smoothest adjustment ever. So it's not going to be one of those heirloom pieces you're going to hand down, but it'll get you into the sport. I mean, it's definitely as cheap as you're going to see and as cheap as you're going to find. And you're kind of getting what you pay for. So I'm not super impressed with like the accessory hardware that's on it. The quality is really lacking, but the price point really, in my opinion, the quality reflects the price point. It looks the part, and I assume it's going to adjust and be just fine. However, it's not going to really, really stand the test of time, if I had to guess, especially if you make frequent adjustments or you're a little rough on your equipment. It may not last forever, but it'll get you in the door with an ILF setup. And this is something that probably is set at the price point of people who aren't quite sure what they're going to get and aren't quite sure if they're going to like it. So especially if you're a parent out there and you know how kids can be, their interest changes every five seconds, it seems. And so this is a way to get in without spending too much and breaking the bank. And then if they decide they like it for longer periods of time, or if you like it for longer periods of time, you can always upgrade in the future. So I think that's kind of what this riser is set at price point wise. So what I'm going to do now is I'm going to get the bow set up preliminarily. I'm going to get limbs on it, sight on it, plunger, center shot, all the basic stuff set, get the limbs aligned. And if I find anything to note, I'll be sure to call that out and let you know what I see as I'm going along with this setup. But I guess really quick before I do that, I want to quick use my calipers to size up the tiller bolt just out of curiosity before we get too far into this. Let's see how close we are. Yeah, really undersized, 370 thousandths of an inch. I'd really like to see that north of 373 thousandths of an inch, 369 thousandths on the bottom. So it's very much so undersized for what an ILF standard spec is. But this is on the safe side in that every set of limbs that you got, it's going to fit into this bow without really having any issues. I don't expect high tolerances when it comes to super cheap stuff, but it is definitely one of those things that I like to see properly sized tiller bolts in all my bows. Not hard to keep that kind of tolerance if you know what you're looking for. I know this is an acoustic review and I'm really tempted to put these Metrix foam limbs on. Metrix foam limbs. Review coming soon. I'm not going to open it, but I'm tempted to put these on that bow and try them. So I think I'm just going to use some Wewiz NS limbs and I'm going to turn these in backwards just so you can see the size issue. So with a little bit of wiggling, it falls right out. That's kind of my standard test is, are the tiller bolts correctly sized to the limbs? And if they stick in when you turn it upside down, you're good. If they fall out, obviously it could be better. But it goes in just like it should without issue. All right, it didn't break. We're winning so far. All right. Just like that. It was easy. Done. No problems at all. I was surprised that eighth inch Allen wrench hardware fit into the holes. I don't know if that translates really nicely to Metrix or not. I know there's a few crossover sizes, but it accepted eighth inch wrenches, which was great because I didn't have my Metrix wrenches handy for some reason. But the limbs aligned great. They were actually super close right out of the box as far as the riser is concerned. Center shot went on just fine. No issues. Everything bolted up great overall. Super simple to set up, and it is very adjustable, which I'm really happy to see. The only issue is there's no locks at all on the actual adjustment. So over time, they could loosen up. I do have a tendency to tighten things up quite a bit, so that way stuff doesn't move. However, it's important to note that it may over time. So you might want to, when you get this thing, put some blue thread locker, not red thread locker on the actual adjustment screws, the grub screws. The blue is not permanent where the red can be, so it'll definitely potentially stick if you went straight to the red. So with that being said, everything's set up, aligned great, and let's go outside and tune this thing. But really quick, if you are interested in learning how I do tune and set up my Olympic style recurves just like this, where I take it out of the box, I'm going to recommend this book here. It's called Tuning for Performance. It's a book I wrote to take you through a step-by-step process that I use of taking the bow straight out of the box, just like this, and all of the steps leading up to prepping and shooting the bow on the world's biggest stage, like the Olympic Games or World Championships. And so if you're interested in grabbing one of these, I'll have many different links down in the description below and the card at the top up there. So we're finally outside. I'm ready to go get my stabilizers on this Acousta Power Riser, and I forgot to mention about the grip itself. The grip is a very standard stock grip. It has a nice soft touch feel to it. Really lacking, as do basically every single stock grip and the interface of the hand on the riser, because this is my connection point to the bow, really, that and my fingers on the string. And it just, it lacks in just about every single way. It's fine. But you know, it is basically a grip, and most people will grab the bow like this and grip it, and it's really comfortable in that position. But if you're a seasoned archer, you know that you kind of cradle the bow and just push your hand into the grip itself. And when I do that correctly, there's huge gaps in certain parts of the actual bow, such as this area here, where it's just, there's nothing there supporting my hand. So what I'm hoping is that I have a grip here from Arcore. This is the IM recurve grip. This happens to fit the WNS Vantage. I'll actually put it on the lower third, telling you which grip this is. And I'm hoping it's going to fit on this riser, because it sure looks like it will, because I really dislike stock grips. My hand slides all over the place. I did also, now that I pulled the grip off, I don't see a serial number of any sort. There's not a single serial number on the bow in any location. And it's always a concern of mine, because how do they know when there's a factory defect if they start getting issues? They can't track it back to stock, a machine, a person, or anything. So not having any sort of serial number on a bow is always concerning for me. And it looks like this grip is going to line up just fine on both sides. So I'll be able to actually bolt this on. So if you're interested in checking out Arcore grips, some of the ones that I did design that Aris over there at Arcore has duplicated and has made work on several other risers. If you use the link down in the description below, and if you use code Kaminsky at checkout, you'll get 10% off any of their grips, not just the ones that I helped design. So now you'll see if I put my hand in the proper place of the grip, this filler piece here at the top fills that gap. And so now I've got that, the lifeline edge, and a little bit of grip section. So I'll have plenty of contact here on the riser, and I won't have my hand slipping around. Just checked my brace height. It's a little low. So I'm going to crank that up some. All right. Right at 8 7 8ths, or 22 and a half centimeters. So I'm here at 30 meters, and I will get tuned up here on an 80 centimeter face that's downrange. I have a camera down there, so you'll be able to see the impact points the whole time. And after I get tuned up, I'll take you back to 70 meters, and we'll shoot a few ends at 70, and I'll give you an idea as to how this bow feels and balances. First I'll get sighted in. Bow feels good though, right off the bat, for 120 bucks it's solid. Yeah, so as far as the riser and what it feels like, just initially right off the bat is basically no vibration at all. I'm not feeling any hum in the handle. It feels like, honestly it almost feels like a carbon riser. I don't know if that's because it's cast aluminum. I think cast... I know cast magnesium really takes out a lot of vibration, so I'm not sure if cast in general has that same property across many material types. But it is really, really dead in the hand. Yeah, I'm just not feeling any vibration. Now I do have several year old, top of the line flagship limbs. That really helps. I think between the two, limbs and risers, I'd spend money on limbs for sure. Higher quality limbs really changes the feel of the bow compared to a lower quality riser. This is a clearly case in point here. Now the bear shaft. I'm suspecting it's going to hit a little bit on the weak side. At least that's what I'm hoping for, so I can go down and draw weight. I'd say so. Really, really weak. I may have even hit my camera down there and missed the bail to the right. So I'll get to go down and draw weight and possibly have to go to 410s. We'll see. So I'll go down and get them and make some adjustments. So the most bizarre thing happened apparently and I couldn't even tell. Luckily I didn't miss the bail. I do think the arrow hit my camera. I'd have to review the footage after I'm done editing or during editing. But I'm thinking, thinking I hit the camera. This is how I shot the arrow. It landed completely sideways in the bail. Let me dial this down a little bit here. So this is really weird because the point hit here, the arrow was laying flat across the bail and the nock is tucked inside the bail over here. Like I have never, not once, ever seen anything like this. This is ridiculous. So I think, I think what happened is this arrow might have hit the tripod or the camera that I always use to film and I always put it on like the very edge of the bail. It's kind of sitting over like in that perspective. So that way if I do hit it, yeah and there's actually, there's a mark right there on my phone. So I literally missed it by millimeters and this is, this is just super, super bizarre. I have literally never, ever seen this. Has anyone ever in their entire archery experience ever seen something so weird where the point impacted. I have just, this is so weird. It must have hit completely sideways for it to do this. I mean it made a really weird sound and I'm glad I got it on camera so I could share it with you. But this is hilarious. So definitely I need to make some adjustments. Clearly I'm on the weak side so I'm going to have to crank down the overall draw weight a considerable amount which is great because I'd like to shoot much less. So this is super weird. I just wanted to share it with you because it's just crazy. So that was literally the most bizarre thing I have ever witnessed in an arrow impacting a target. I'm still, still baffled. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to take this draw weight down as far as I can. I didn't see anywhere about turns in or out or any of that in the manual. So I'm just going to do my standard test to, alright so it looks like this is definitely not going to have much in the way of draw weight adjustment. So from contact I've got one, two, and a half turns in total. So this is really, really limited and probably one of the first major issues that I've seen with this bow so far because everything else so far has been great. So I'm thinking that the overall design of the bow didn't really have draw weight adjustment in mind because my tiller bolt loses contact with my limb only like two and a half ish turns out. That's really concerning. Not a big deal really because you can make things work in this scenario. You know I'm going to get as much draw weight out of it as I can. But really with ILF bows you're still hoping for four plus turns. So to only get three or less than three is a little ridiculous and kind of unfortunate. I got a lot more out of the bottom. So I can almost have four and a half turns out on the bottom. Which is really weird that it's uneven top to bottom and a little concerning. I mean you do get what you pay for so I'm not quite sure what's going on here as far as why it's so different between the two. And I do believe I just stripped out the lock on these bolts. Not rounded the head. Yeah the thread's literally stripped. These bolts are collet locks and I will have to explain that a little bit later in the summary of the video because I want to get this tuning done and get some shooting in. But basically the internal lock of the collet is now stripped out. So I cannot lock the bolt anymore and I highly doubt that you can buy spare tiller bolts from this company. So that's really really unfortunate. So to see not much of a range of adjustment in the draw weight and then now to not even make it my level of tight tight just what I thought was going to be snug because I knew I'd have to adjust my tiller again I stripped the threads so that's not good. So this thing had tons going for it and now unfortunately I can't really lock the draw weight adjustment. That sucks. And I would absolutely based on the threads on this bow not make any adjustments but maybe the smallest tiller adjustment with this bow strung up. So like I said I wouldn't do it but the smallest tiller adjustment strung up and I just wanted to sneak just a little bit more tiller out of it and the threads for sure will gall and lock themselves in so I would highly recommend not doing that with it strung up. They're flying a little better and I really enjoy the lighter draw weight I just want to get a group down there I don't really care that it's slightly low I can always adjust my sight I'm really just interested in where the bear shaft hit compared to the split shaft. The bow sure feels great for the price point it feels amazing I just really wish those tiller bolts were a little more robust. Really disappointing because it had so much going for it. Alright still really weak I'm probably going to have to go get my 410s which is surprising just because I'm definitely now probably down to mid like 45 pounds mid 40s but the bow feels super happy as it is it's just definitely a lot on the weak side so I'm going to go get my 410 X10s see if I can get this thing tuned up. Alright now bear shaft yep so that was pretty much all I needed. Bow doesn't give much feedback not much of actual vibration like I said it has such little vibration that I'm just not getting much in the way of feedback from the bow itself you know I shot less than an ideal shot there didn't really sound much different either but maybe that will rear itself a little bit later. Alright last bear shaft and then I'm going to go down and check it and see how the tune is doing. Not a good shot either you have to shoot bear shafts good. I think just bumping my knocking point just a small amount it's going to be enough I really just think if I would have shot those better I'd have a little bit more of a definitive idea as to what the tune is but it's so close it's more than capable to out shoot my condition right now so probably could easily shoot into the 680s at 70 meters out of 720 without even breaking a sweat it would just come down to can I do it or not, not the bow. So I'm going to do this one more time before we step back to 70. I'm going to go down and check them because I can't see exactly from here it seems like maybe the knocking point is a little bit high but the tune stiff weak seems to be pretty much dialed in. Okay we're back here at 70 meters the tune is more than good enough it's actually slightly on the weak side which I actually prefer here for 70 meter shooting myself in competition so I'm guessing on my sight mark hoping I hit the bail. Not bad for the first end at 70 I'm going to go down and get them and make some adjustments on my sight and shoot a couple more ends here give you some final thoughts but overall the bow feels pretty stable aims really well jumps super straight it's not super hard jumping but it jumps nice and straight and like I said I'm just shocked at how little vibration there is post shot it's just crazy for 120 bucks it's amazing. I've plucked that one alright I'm going to go down and get them and shoot one more end then I'll get my final thoughts here on this Acoustipower riser these limbs stack a bit I'm just not in the shape to shoot them as good as I want to. Alright so pretty decent group down there it looks from here minus a couple errors here or there so it's definitely the bow shoots great it's just I need work as usual definitely not up to the shooting shape not at least the way I used to be I can still shoot some decent groups but not every single arrow. So the Acoustipower riser what do I think about it? I think as far as the good stuff it looks great for the actual piece itself it is not the best finish but that's okay the actual overall look of it looks like just about every other solid well built ILF riser very high quality relatively speaking for the price point like I said it was 120 bucks it's currently out of stock at Lancaster hopefully they get them back in stock and the prices don't go up too much because of the tariffs but if you place your order at the price point it's at now and they get them in I don't think they can raise the price on you so for 120 bucks it's super super solid. The geometry looks very familiar everything set up great the limb alignment was phenomenal it adjusted great plenty of bushings on the bow the actual mounts on the bow are all standard and all great there's literally nothing wrong for what you're getting as far as the actual appearance and bonus it came with a riser sleeve which basically every other riser at this price point does not come with so you can protect your riser and it won't chip when you put it in your backpack or in your case or something like that. Now as far as the things that I don't really like first and foremost the grip I really wish that stock grips were formed much better good thing an Arcore grip bolted up to that no problem the tiller bolts as I was adjusting them I was shocked to see only about two and three quarters turns of adjustment in the topper top upper pocket for whatever reason it's very small meaning I couldn't take it out any further from all the way in otherwise I would lose contact of the limb actually touching the tiller bolt and that's just not going to work it has to be touching and so I only found two and three quarter turns whereas other standard ILF risers depending on the thread pitch of course but the general standard amount of turns you can go out is six so you're not going to get the vast draw weight adjustment or the 10% draw weight adjustment that the rough rule of thumb is available on an ILF but then you add in the fact that it was two and a half two and three quarter turns on the top and I can get four turns on the bottom don't know why that is obviously I can't go further out on the bottom than the top because then my tiller split would be really weird although this would work out for bare bow because then you'd be in the negative tiller range and then the biggest problem of all which really kills this thing because there's literally everything going right for it for the price point except that I didn't even take it Jake tight meaning the lower bolt the lower limb bolt when I went to tighten it up I stripped the tiller bolt out on the actual locking mechanism so I said I was going to show you this later in the video and explain it to you but these are call it style locks but if you look at this here this is the actual tiller bolt this piece going into the inside the inside threads stripped so the actual head of the bolt is fine I didn't round the head of the bolt most people when they say they stripped a screw that's what they mean is that they rounded the hexes out so you can't actually get torque on the fastener but what I did was I actually tightened it down and I did not round the head the actual threads were spinning inside of the actual threads themselves and it just appears that the tolerances of what their threading is is just not super solid the male thread the male portion looks pretty decent relatively speaking I don't see a huge amount of issues there it just the maybe maybe the collet itself opened up too much and it allowed it to spin I'm really not sure and frankly it just kind of kills the whole deal because inside there the female threads inside of that I think are what the problem is and so it's just the tiller bolt tolerance so it's really sad to see that something so solid something that I actually like a lot could be limited by the just about the cheapest component on the riser the cheapest actual component is probably the stabilizer bushings but the tiller bolts they're not extremely expensive and I'm just really sad to say that I stripped mine out now this doesn't mean that all of them will strip out and you know if you tighten it with a little bit more care than I do it probably would have been fine but even now and especially now because it's been actually stripped already I'm holding the bolt to get this thing to lock once I get there it's starting to put pressure and then I'm going to take it to what I just started to slip let's see it's mostly locked still can turn it it's not going to vibrate loose and as I shot it after I tightened it to the point of where it was just about to start slipping you know spinning and stripping the hardware itself stayed in place and I didn't hear any audible vibration or audible rattle so I'm glad to see that but it still is such a shame because something like that just really shouldn't happen and as far as the warranty is concerned and the customer service I don't have anything to say about that I'm not sure hopefully they would take care of someone out there that had the same issue and ship them a replacement tiller bolt because that's really all it is it's not like the tiller bolt stripped the riser it's the locking mechanism stripped the tiller bolt so luckily the riser is not junk it just needs a new tiller bolt so I'll probably reach out to Acousta and get a replacement bolt and then when I do get that I will put this riser up for sale on my website jakominski.com because you know I don't plan on keeping this stuff I buy these things do the review put them up on my website and I've got a bunch of different stuff available on the US shop that is kind of scratch and dent yard sale items and it's mostly a lot of stuff that I've reviewed and I put up for sale to help fund me to continue to buying equipment to doing these unbiased unfiltered reviews so that way I can share with you what I think about these products and I'm probably not sponsored I specifically keep it this way that way I can keep giving you unbiased feedback because I'm not a professional shooter not in the sense that I'm paid to shoot and represent a company the people who are are telling you the things that the company wants you to hear about the equipment whereas what I'm telling you here is the actual truth it's the actual thing that I found that is a problem on this riser such as this tiller bolt and I'm genuinely disappointed that this happened because like I said everything else especially for the price point this was a solid buy lack of vibration was amazing the tunability was great it shot fine and for an entry-level riser with the exception of the tiller bolt problem you can't go wrong with this one so like I said in the intro if you are interested in this riser or any of the other gear that I've used on the channel today I will have links down in the description below including affiliate links for the push archery for quivers discount code Kaminsky at checkout 10% off same thing for Arcor grips and then if you click those links at Lancaster or any of the other ones down there before you shop there genuinely helps this channel out and it affords me to buy this equipment so I can review it for you to check out on the channel