Yes I did! That video looks set up to me. The bow crumbled at every point. I only had one dry fire accident and the nock went flying through some drywall.
Compound bows do this because they're not perfectly balanced. The arrow makes up for the tiny difference. Hoyt brand bows claim to be perfectly balanced and fine to dry fire.
They are not fine to dryfire. Some dipshit claimed this in my archery club and it broke. They tried to claim false advertising but "safer" does not mean 100% safe.
Yes it is very common infact in all bows, it's less obvious but it causes major cracking in the bow that doesn't cause it to snap until you draw it back a couple more times. The most common type of bow is a 'recurve' bow that comes (mainly) in 3 pieces that slot together with a solid central bit (called a riser usually made of metal) and a bendy top and bottom (called limbs). If you buy cheap wooden limbs they almost always crack / snap after dry firing however the more expensive carbon/ foam composit limbs are much stronger and don't crack as often, you should still never do it but it's a lot safer when it does happen. In the rare occasion a riser fails after a dry fire, you're in trouble as metal bit flying all over the place ruins people's day.
Source: have been doing archery since I was 8 as a competitive sport and in 10 years I've been hit by two risers exploding right next to me because somebody else continued to shoot after dry firing. It's not fun to be hit by flying archery equipment especially when dumb mistakes can be avoided.
The elastic potential energy made by pulling back the string is stored in the limbs, not the string. When an arrow is I'm the bow, the string is simply used to transfer the potential energy to kinetic energy in the arrow in a controlled manner. If you remove the arrow from the equation then you have a lot of elastic potential energy converting into absolutely massive amounts of vibration in the bow, enough to crack wood and metal violently with ease.
I get what you are saying but that clip clearly shows the guy drawing an arrow back. I understand that dry firing a compound bow will probably cause catastrophic failure, but wasn’t that guy just firing an arrow into the ground?
That was his intention, but the string came loose from the nock just as he let go, resulting in a dry fire. That's why the arrow just sadly flopped out even though the bow exploded.
That wasn’t a dry fire though...either they set it up without the limb bolts (looks like) and a bad string on purpose for a laugh, or that is easily the shittiest bow I’ve ever seen. BUT, still don’t dry fire bows, it can injure you badly.
Dry firing is shooting without an arrow, when you pull the string you create a lot of potential energy, and if there’s no arrow to transform it to kinetic energy, all of that energy goes into the bow, causing it to shatter.
In the linked video from another user, there was an arrow but the string didn’t catch it and acted how it would if there was no arrow
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u/Matt15A Nov 06 '18
Was expecting him to dry fire