9-Time World Champion archer, Joella Bates talks about arrow failure and how the protection she’s discovered with the Shooting Edge ProTx Kevlar Hand Guard helps to keep her safe whether on the competition course or in the woods.
“You know, we all automatically think about an arrow fracturing from damage but the other thing that can happen is we’re attaching the nock of an arrow to the string and that nock snaps onto the string – or should. A lot of us shoot string loops [D loops] so, the nock is going to snap onto the string in the jaws of that loop, the release is going to hook onto the loop – we’re going to draw the bow back and when we draw the bow back, we’ve got ‘potential energy’ – when we engage the release and fire the bow we’ve got ‘kinetic energy’, energy in motion. And if you’ve got a nock that is slightly damaged then the transfer of potential energy to kinetic energy can be a collision of potentially harmful forces and that fracture could dry fire the bow. It’s easy if the jaws of the loop are too close together and you’ve got a torquing happening for it to actually pick the arrow up off the rest or jam it into the rest and create a of collision of forces that could break an arrow or dry fire a bow and where it goes, who knows? We certainly don’t want that arrow going through our hand, so we need to protect our hand.”
“Another scenario is the ‘traditional’ archer that’s got one nocking point. They’ve got one nock locator above the arrow, nothing below the arrow. Many of the traditional archers have very loose-fitting nocks and they draw it back, put a little too much pressure on the finger that touches the bottom of the nock, it makes the arrow come off the rest and BAM. If the arrow’s just a little short it could come back too far, the archer panics and I don’t care how much experience you have, when you get yourself in a precarious situation like this, we tend to panic. A panic could cause you to let go of the string and the arrow to go through your hand and impale you – unless you’ve got on a ProTx Glove – a hand guard. Lots of things happen, you just don’t want bad things happening to you!”
