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Carbon are either straight or broken. I also shoot a very stiff spine, unlike recurve. I’d love to learn more about shooting a recurve.

I wouldn't say anything is the "only" way to go. If you like carbons, great, then stick with them.

Well….

I’m about to name my newest bow “Destroyer”. I’m shooting it rather well (if I do say so!), but when I get off into something hard, it’s been Ugly. I guess the up-side is that now I’ll never run short of footings again… LOL

Fortunately, a GT Trad 500 spine is exactly the right diameter to have the front end reinforced with a bit of 2117; on a lot of my arrows I use the 2117 inserts and on a hard enough hit I’ll wreck the aluminum but the carbon will remain intact and I can reuse the arrow. Too bad the 400s are too fat, but I guess I’m lucky because I now have my daily driver tuned with 400 spine + a 200 gr point AND/OR a 500 with 125-150, so I have basically a target arrow and a hunting arrow for a bow which doesn’t usually exact too great a penalty for the misses.

Destroyer is far less forgiving, but at about #60, she’s not a bow you take out on the course and take 5-10 shots/target…..

I was pretty pleased by this bunch…

Kinda comical though, to be criticized for practicing at longer range than I expect to shoot while hunting.

And interesting, too, that nobody rags on a compound shooter for practicing at 40…

Or for shooting 45 yards down into a shady hole, 25 minutes after sunset…. Because legal light runs ‘til half past in most places….

“I was wondering what a line of arrows were for??? ”

Being able to shoot the line is what separates Archery from Spray and Pray. And if you can shoot the line with bare shafts, then you know you’re Tuned.

So when I’m tuning, I make no effort to judge the distance — actually make it a point to NOT try to keep the elevation consistent any more than strictly necessary, lest I get into a fixed sight picture unknowingly— and I worry only about whether my arrows are grouping Right to Left.

So basically on that 40-yard target, I’m shooting a couple inches wide, with bare shafts impacting a shade to the right, indicating a slightly weak spine. As they SHOULD, so the correct way to interpret that group is not as one group of 11 consecutive shots, but 3 groups of 3 and one of 2.

I recall getting more lateral spread in my groups at 40 yards with a compound, pins, peep, trigger, etc. So I’m feeling very well Tuned and shooting better than I really have any right to….

Pretty sure that there aren’t a lot of guys who are shooting much better than that with sights at “around” 40 yards without a marked or lasered range to work with.

And this weekend I’m going to shoot a 3D course I’ve never seen before, so we’ll keep everything to Playing For Keeps distances, because it’s that time of year….

But you have to remember that I grew up at 5300 feet and started my bowhunting career at twice that. My first deer was a 1.5 YO mulie buck at 28 yards… and that’s not a long shot in thin air. The cover is different, the terrain is different, the animals are different, and God knows the animal population density is From Another Planet. If you want a buck-only tag, good luck in the lottery, but at least Elk are OTC…. So I train all the time as if I have plans to hunt Elk “this weekend”….

I don’t much care for people treating bows as a 50-yard weapon even out West, because in the hands of most, it simply ISN’T, but the whole “instinctive” business of treating 8” at 20 yards (and let’s face it, it’s really more like 17-18) as some kind of gold standard has worn very thin with me.

I bought a used Contraption — a quite good one — a couple years before Sandy hit, but honestly… yes, itty-bitty groups at KNOWN distances, but as far as solid, killing hits are concerned — or 3D scores, for that matter— it didn’t do anything for me that a recurve didn’t do. I actually scored higher with the recurve, but only because I could have the occasional release glitch and still score a 5 or a raggedy 8. Pick the wrong pin and it’s hard to not get a zero.

And once the range started to look like maybe I should go to that second pin, that was when the quiver got light. Quickly. So I ended up trading the Contraption for this little longbow. We get along pretty well.

(I have no real idea what the range was on the Squatch; I’d say closer to 50 than 40 or 60, but closer to 60 than 40…)

Best guess on range would be 80-90.

And the relevance to the OP here is that I could never afford to take shots like this with aluminum… Breakage would kill me!

And because carbons are just SOOO much tougher to break around the club (thank God) that I would expect a substantially lower breakage rate unless you lodge the arrow in the off shoulder. I’m one for one with carbon breaking in a deer — the arrow passed between spinous processes at a a steep, downward angle and topped the off lung before poking through; the shaft was a Beman Hunter and it snapped cleanly against one of the processes. I didn’t see any sign of carbon dust or splinters in the wound channel but I did trim out some just as a common sense thing.

But the point on tuning— everybody says carbons outpenetrate aluminum or wood, but they won’t do nearby as well if they’re not Tuned. Hence the Shooting The Line digression.

Overall, I kinda have to assume that if carbons breaking off in the animals and contaminating a lot of meat were a big problem, we’d be back to aluminum by now (just as the longitudinal fiber carbons have been replaced by the current standard). And even though I had originally planned on hunting with 2117s this year, I’ll be shooting carbons, because that’s what tuned for me at the weight & length I wanted.

I may come up with a 2117 “deer load” yet, but for now I’m putting the mass in the head as steel instead of in the shaft as aluminum….

I grew up shooting wooden arrows from a recurve bow. I miss the aesthetics of a wooden arrow with natural fletching. It felt a lot more like "archery". Just like how I enjoy coffee from a pater cup much more than a plastic travel mug. Same drink, but it feels better in my hand and is more enjoyable to me. I would switch back to a recurve with wooden arrows in a minute if I had more time to practice.