Topic: Kaya Kahn first impressions ::UPDATED! BROKEN!::
Hi!
::UPDATE::
It broke.
After a week shooting it, in the club indoor range, I was going to shoot my last arrows when the lamination between wood and carbon failed.
It happened when I was drawing the string, just before reaching my anchor point (fortunately, because I would have punched myself in the face...), the central part of the bow, from where the limbs bend, the bow splitted in two longitudinally across the union between the wood and the carbon.
I was very lucky because the leather grip held the two broken parts, avoiding them to completely crack at the center thus preventing the string to slip from the tips and the limbs to collapse upon me.
That afternoon ended only with a broken bow, but it could have ended with some serious injury... I was just lucky.
After examining the bow meticulously where it broke, I think that the failure could be due to poor quality and irregular gluing of the lamination.
Now I'm trying to get my money back, besides the seller and the distributor insists in replacing it by a new one I do not want it after that incident, given its severity.
My thoughts about the Kahn are now a bit contradictory, because it's still one of the best looking bows I've ever seen, and it shot really well, but I can't think about it as a reliable bow, I regret to say.
ORIGINAL POST:
Here are my 5 cents about the Kaya Kahn (Please forgive my english):
Why I chose this bow:
I'm principally an Olympic style archer, and the last 2 years I've been shooting some of the major tournaments here in Spain, but lately I haven't had time enough to train as much as I liked to keep my scores, so some months ago I bought a Kaya KTB to give me a breath from competition.
The KTB opened a new world of sensations to me! It was lighter and smaller than a longbow and fast and smooth as a recurve. And the"barebow" and instinctive shooting style made me forget about all the clicker and screws worries of the olympic.
The problem was that although its 35 pounds it was a pain in the… thumb to shoot it.
So I decided to get the Kahn, as it combines the best from the KTB with the good wooden appearance of a longbow and its invaluable shelf, indispensable to shoot with three fingers with precission.
Firsts impressions:
When you receive the box, your first though is: Are you sure that insides this there is a bow? It's so thin!
But there is! A bow, a string, and nothing else.
Well, maybe one can't expect to have a super wonderful presentation for a 120€ bow, but it would be nice to have, at least, an instructions sheet…
At first glance the string was well made, and the bow finish good enough.
I missed the string bridges, but thankfully, Bluelake confirmed in this post that the Kahn doesn't have them.
So I headed to the club indoor range to try it. The first difficulty I had was to string it.
It's not easy to string a 45# bow with the "crosslegs" techinque. And a 10cm wound in my left leg is good proof of this… So be careful!!!
After shooting for 2 hours I was completely exhausted but very pleased with the new bow.
Really fast and deadly accurate even for a noob like me in instinctive shooting.
But it had some problems that I didn't realized before:
- The limb tips were super sharp, and they cutted the string servings. In only 2 hours the string was rendered unusable!
- The arrow shelf was not protected so the friction within it and the arrows started to scratch the wood varnish.
So the next day, with my always handy Dremel I've sanded the tips a little bit to blunt the sharp edges and to balance a bit the two sides of the tips in order to correct a small dissalignment of the string.
Also went to the archery shop to buy a shelf protector and in a leather shop I bought a small piece of black leather to replace the grip cover, which albeit being good enough (And made of real leather I think) I found it to be really boring.
Furthermore, I stringed some turns of red thread in the ends of the limbs, just to cover the union between the limb and the wood ends (don't know its correct name), as the KTB has.
I have yet to make arrows for this bow, with proper spine and lenght, but as a preliminar review I can say that is a good bow given its price, very light and fun to shoot, although it needs a sanding of the tips before using it if you want to preserve the string more than one day.
Here some pics of it after my "tunning":
Bow by David.Peralta, on Flickr
grip by David.Peralta, on Flickr
Tip by David.Peralta, on Flickr
Cuerda by David.Peralta, on Flickr