I have a goodly number of Hill bows by Craig Ekin. Once in the past I had one by Tim Meigs, but i let it get away from me before the idea of actually building a meaningful collection of Hills came to me. I was discussing Hills and different features of different ones with Gene Mullane last week and he sent me a picture of a number of his, including one by Ted Cramer, who made bows for Hill Archery in the 1970's. I commented that I really wanted to get a Kramer and a Meigs for the collection, and Gene came right back saying that, heck, he wasn't shooting this one any more. Would I like to buy it? Took us no more than a few minutes to make a deal, we each put our end in the mail the next day and I got the bow today. Couldn't beat that for smoothness.
This is a very intersesting bow, with some neat features. At first I questioned whether it was a Kramer or a Meigs.. the markings are, to me, difficult to make a "T" or an "M" out of, and Gene got to wondering himself, it had been so long ago that he got it. Naturally, we went to the source and I sent a pic of the markings to Craig Ekin who identified it as, indeed, being a Ted Kramer.
Here are some pix and comments on the bow:
This bow has deep reflex, backset, string follow or whatever you want to call it. By far the deepest I have seen yet. It is 69" nock to nock direct, 70" if you measure along the reflex curve.
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Note the rounding, or bulge to the sides of the grip. This gives a ver nice feel. |
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Here are the markings. To me, that looks like "BM69578", but Craig assures us that he recognizes Ted Kramer's writing and that's Ted's. Marked 50# @ 28", it appears to have lost a hair. I got 48# @ 28", but it has an interesting power curve... still pretty stiff at a shorter draw. I would have expected 12# loss in going down to my 25" draw, but got 42#, only an 8# loss. I really wish I had a chrono here for these first shoots with new bows. Even drawn short, this one seemed to have sufficient speed with heavy wood arrows with deep fletching.
After posting this, a new member joined our Hill group, Don Jochem of the Netherlands. Don shoots a Kramer Hil Tembo and sent some pix, including this closeup of Kramer's initial. You can see how the "TK" on Don's bow, and how, on mine, with a slightly depressed upper line, started to look like an "M" and confused me.
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Note this very elongated tip on the upper limb. This makes it really easy to use a bow stringer on this bow. It leaves plenty of clearance to seat the string in the nock. This is a feature I really like, and wish was more emphasized on today's Hills. In future I'll ask for it.
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Here you have the bow strung, and a view of the dished grip. When I shot the bow, I got an interesting result. I thought my new wood arrows might be too stiff for it at 50+, but it loved them. I felt like I could keep shooting arrows into this group till my arm got tired. However, when I shot my 1916 alums, same spine, it went crazy... no group tendency at all. Arrows were all over the target box. I think it was the weight that made the difference. it really liked the heavier woods.
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:There you have it, an interesting older Hill from the pre-Craig Ekin era. Gene called this bow a sweetheart, and he's absolutely right.
Dick