One thing that our conversation happened across was carbon spars (charmer that I am). She informed me how the latest arrow shafts' main advantage is that they can be had in very closely matched sets so that each arrow in a quiver is the same. Consistency, see ?
I wondered about our little part of the world was being treated in terms of carbon. I used to regard this as a pretty good guide to things but armed with an accurate to 0.01g balance I set off to check on the (few) spars I had in my spares collection.
Here's what I found:-
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3PT II 13,28g +/- 1%
5PT II 16,53g +/- 9%
Nitro 15,01g +/- 3%
P400 Camo. 19,27g +/- 3%
P100 12,96g +/- 3%
G-Force UL 13,61g +/- 3%
G-Force SUL 14,77g +/- 5%
In other words... our stuff is crap. A set of Easton X10sare guaranteed to be within 0.5 grains of each other. That's 32 milligrammes or 0.03 grammes. Even the cheap end of the scale are +/- 0.3 grammes and only the 3PTs came in under that.
As I don't have any spare AeroStuff (and I'm not taking my kite apart either) I can't say how much better/less crap these are. If anyone wants to send me some for research purposes.....
I'm frankly shocked . I went back and re-checked everything to be sure, to be sure. It is often said that the original carbon used for kites were rejected arrow shafts but, dear goddess, this is beyond a joke.
It's obvious that the manufacturing method exists to create in quite large numbers accurately matched carbon tubes. It's just that we ain't getting them.
I might pull a few more spars out to check these too.
Mike.