yoderjac
5 year old buck +
FYI my last crossbow I had for 4 years and I used rage expanding blades. These fixed blade heads did just as much damage from what I've seen. I'm only taking shots 35 yards and in.
Thanks. The issue I have with fixed blades is that with same size exit wound, the don't fly as accurately or consistently for me. As for crossbow choices, it has been years since I've had any experience with Excalibur. Here is my experience for what it is worth.
I'm a Hunter Ed instructor and the state had bi-annual instructor training where the instructors get together for a weekend and take advanced training classes. Back when they first legalized crossbows in Virginia without a medical exemption, several crossbow manufacturers sent representatives to our advanced training to demonstrate and provide safety training for their crossbow products to our instructors. We had an opportunity to fire each crossbow at the range.
Excalibur had two big selling points the emphasized, speed, and the ability to change strings in the field with the simple recurve limb design. When we used them at the range, all were louder than a compound, but the Excalibur sounded like a .22. It was extremely loud. During the training portion, one of the questions to the Excalibur representative was "What about string jumping?" He fumbled for a response and finally came up with "Our crossbows are so fast a deer won't have time to jump the string", at which point all the instructors in the class laughed and he kind of blushed knowing he was spouting the company talking point that was patently false.
Excalibur may well have changed their design since those days. I haven't looked at the latest crossbows. To my way of thinking, a quiet crossbow (or compound) is much more important than a fast one since bowhunting is limited to short range. My latest crossbow is a Mission which is a Mathews spinoff known to focus on quiet first and speed second.
Thanks,
Jack