[Elfsea] All Star Archery review

[Randy Shipp]

Greetings,

Having wasted a significant portion of my afternoon on a failed search
for help with my bow, I decided to salvage some usefulness from the
exercize and post about my experience.  Hopefully, this will help
someone else who might find themselves in a similar situation.

I took my American style longbow into All Star Archery (and Marine
Electronics) in Lewisville this afternoon.  I also brought four cedar
shafts, randomly selected from a box of shafts my dad had laying
around.  When I walked in, I said, “I’m hoping you can help me.  I
have this bow, but no arrows.  I want to be sure of a few things
before I spend a bunch of money on supplies.”  Before we could get to
what information I wanted, the guy said, “We don’t see many longbows
here,” (which is understandable), “and we won’t have any supplies for
it.”  Okay, I get that.  “Well,” I said, “I mainly need to figure out
the true weight of the bow at my draw length in order to get the right
shafts.”  At this point, I expected to get help measuring my draw
length, then we’d string my bow, put it on a bow scale, and off we’d
go.  Instead, I got, “Well, it says 50 pounds on the bow.”  “Right,” I
said, “but it doesn’t say at what draw length.”  “Well,” he said, “if
you draw it to, you know, about the right amount, it’ll be around 50
pounds.  If you draw it more or less, that’ll change, so there’s no
way for me to know.  I guess if you want to string it, I can draw it
and tell you about what it is...”  This is the point at which I should
have just said thanks and left.  As it is, I talked for another minute
or so, just to confirm that this was as helpful as it was going to
get.

Either this guy did not understand what I was asking, or they did not
have a bow scale (otherwise, why wouldn’t he offer that instead of
some guesstimate?).  Either way, this is not archery expertise.
Having heard all that, I didn’t even proceed to my next question,
which was whether they had a spine tester for verifying what the
shafts I have are.  The entire experience was very much like buying a
computer or camera at a big box store.  They’re fine for reciting
specs from the side of the box, and they probably have an OK
selection, but as soon as you start asking about video chipsets or
f-stops, they have no clue.

Save yourself the trip and avoid All Star Archery for traditional
archery questions.

Yours,
--Antoine