Friday, August 28, 2009
Bow mechanic madness
As the archery season draws near, the workload booms at archery shops
Mark Taylor
Mark Taylor's Outdoors column and notebook appears regularly in The Roanoke Times.
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Hanging together on a row of hooks, the old compound bows could be part of a museum display.
They're not.
They're part of the workload for Lane Hoskins and his crew in the archery shop at Gander Mountain.
"We get some great old bows in here this time of year," said Hoskins, who has been working on bows for about 20 years.
And along with receiving plenty of borderline antiques for work, archery shops are slammed in late summer as hunters pull out their gear and realize they need work done to be ready for the fast-approaching season, which opens the first Saturday in October.
Repair work is just part of the deal.
Shops also have to set up new bows for customers, install new accessories, and work on arrows.
"It can be hectic," Hoskins said with a grin that indicated "hectic" was putting it mildly.
For shops in the Roanoke Valley, things may be even busier than usual leading into this season.
Hoskins said he suspects that some hunters may be holding on to their older gear longer because of the tough economy.
"People are bringing bows out of the closet that they may have wanted to replace for a couple of years, but they just haven't been able to do it," Hoskins said.
Also, the area now has two fewer archery shops after Sportsman's Warehouse and a Roanoke County location of Evans Archery closed earlier this year.
"It's been crazy," said Bill Schaffer, a part-timer who is the lead bow mechanic at Bryansteens Gun and Archery in Roanoke.
And it's probably going to get worse, says Fred Hodges, one of the owners of R&D Sporting Goods in Rocky Mount.
"It's not so much this month that's bad," he said with a laugh. "It's more like the last week before opening day, when everybody is bringing in 200 arrows to be re-fletched."
Hodges said the Friday before last year's opener was a zoo at his shop.
Customers waiting in line found a new use for archery targets, pulling the square foam blocks out to use them as stools as they waited their turn.
The shop stayed open late. Finally, Hodges got to go home, but not before he stopped at Walmart to pick up some groceries.
There he saw a line of customers waiting to buy their archery licenses.
"They begged me to open back up to sell them licenses," said Hodges, who obliged. "It looked like a funeral procession following me back through town."
Schaffer admits he's a procrastinator. He just wishes his customers weren't.
"Most of it could be avoided if they got their bows out in the spring," Schaffer said of the pre-season stress of dealing with last-minute archery gear problems. "It would be a lot easier on them, and on us, too."
Customers who are just now taking their bows in for maintenance, or ordering new gear, are missing valuable practice time but will probably have their equipment back in time for the season.
The later they wait, the dicier things get.
At Gander Mountain, a typed sign behind the counter notes that mechanics should tell customers that the turnaround time for most work is "10-14 days." But that has been crossed out, and "14-21 days" has been scribbled in its place.
The shop's attitude is that it's better to finish earlier than promised, rather than later.
"It can be difficult, once we get within a month, to get a bow turned around," Hoskins said. "Especially if it takes major work."
Even simple repair and maintenance jobs can take a while, for a couple of reasons.
For one thing, to be fair, most shops tackle jobs in the order in which they were received. For another, it can take a while to get parts.
For example, few shops stock large quantities of bowstrings and cable sets, simply because there are so many different sizes and styles.
"If we kept every bowstring in stock, you couldn't move back here," Schaffer said of his work area.
For some bows, parts are difficult to find.
"Some of them, you just can't get parts for," Hoskins said. "Pretty much, once an old bow breaks, it's the end of its life."
But many of those old bows were built like tanks, so they don't break. With a little work they can serve a hunter reasonably well.
Gander Mountain bow mechanic Kyle Bowyer saw one such bow Wednesday.
"A guy came in this morning with a Bear Whitetail, which was pretty ragged," Bowyer said. "He said, 'I just bought this yesterday and wanted to see if I could put a string on it.'
"We sold him a string."
Some bargain bow shoppers are surprised to find out that the cost of getting an old bow into good shooting shape can far out-pace the cost of the bow itself.
Replacing a string and cables, and outfitting a bare bow with accessories such sight, arrow rest and quiver, can easily top $100.
If the shopper takes time to try out a new bow, even an entry-level model, they'll often decide to go the new route.
But that doesn't make things any easier for the bow technicians.
It just means that instead of fixing an old bow, they'll spend time setting up and adjusting a new bow.
