My daughter, 12 years old & average build, received this as a Christmas gift. She had taken a few archery day camps and wanted to keep practicing. We went to a large national chain store, geared more to adult hunters, and they outfitted her with a 62″ 30 lb.
bow that was simply too hard for her to repetitively pull. Let’s just say, after having spent all her energy on the first 3-4 arrows, it’s unnerving to be standing next to a shaky 12 year old with an arrow nocked, drawn 4/5 the way back, and unable to hold the pointy end steady.
Fortuitously an LLBean email highlighting this archery set hit my inbox. I bought her the 20# draw bow and 2 extra sets of arrows. This is perfect! Far more comfortable, she can now focus on form and accuracy and really enjoys having the extra arrows so that she can shoot more and easter-egg hunt arrows less.
The day camps run about 4 hours and she’s easily able to shoot the entire time with this 20# draw. Quality – for a starter set, this is excellent! Having spent a few hours in that large national chain store, I can attest that this set is the equal of their midrange equipment and appreciably less expensive (anecdotally about 25-30% less).
Function – except the quiver, all aspects of this set are excellent. The recurve bow is quite well made and its 3 parts are easily assembled. Stringing the bow is a bit tricky but after a few tries my daughter now is an expert.
At the last archery day camp she was helping the other archers string their bows. The case is especially nice, and provides the necessary storage for the set and makes traveling back-n-forth to camp quite easy.
The arrows are great practice arrows but with just 3 of them it quickly becomes tedious retrieving them. So I bought 2 additional sets (6 arrows per set). Improvements – as I alluded to, the quiver is lacking primarily due to its shortness.
The arrows easily topple out of it. NOT A BIG DEAL for sure, I just wanted to explain my earlier comment. Several reviewers indicate that their archer quickly outgrew this set. I too was worried about that until I learned a bit more about how recurve bows work.
Now I would argue that jumping from this set to one that has 50% greater draw (eg. 29lb) isn’t necessary for “tweens” or younger teens. With a recurve bow, as kids grow and their draw length increases (the distance from outstretched hand holding bow to fingers pulling the string), the draw weight naturally increases because the archer just simply pulls the string back further to accommodate their growing bodies.
This bow, although it says 20lb, simply will give / flex a little more to accommodate the increased draw length. The result is the archer will be able to pull to say 24-26 lbs on this same bow, because it’s a recurve bow, all the while maintaining excellent control in both form and accuracy.
Alternatively, if you like living on the edge, your archer could quickly jump to that heavier 29 lbs and spend more time making you nervous with that shaky pointy end. For those with mid teens or older, or younger kids that are particular strong, the 29 lb is probably the way to go all for the same reasons I mentioned above.
While your archer may only pull, say for example 26 lbs comfortably, then the larger bow would simply accommodate that by flexing less. If your archer stays within their draw weight comfort zone and doesn’t try to over pull, then they’ll still be able to focus on form and accuracy.
So why didn’t I leave my 12 year old archer with the 30 lb bow? She wasn’t able to get the bow to flex enough that the arrow would make it to the target (about 30′ away) with enough force to penetrate the target.
If you watch the video, which is in slow motion, please note how much the pointy end moves around as my archer focuses on the stationary target. She’s gotten much better with practice but consider how much more movement would result if I’d quickly jumped her up to the next size bow? My apologies for how long the video runs.