Bow Comparisons: Bowtech Liberty vs Champion Diablo. (SHOOT-OUT: ROUND#5)

THE MAIN EVENT: ROUND #5

BACKGROUND INFO: Strings play a pivotal role in transferring energy into your arrow. So shooting properly crafted quality strings is essential to your bow's total reliability and performance. Poor quality string wear quickly, add noise to the bow, slow your bow down, and could even be an eventual safety hazard. Of course, manufacturers generally don't warranty their strings, so keeping your strings in good condition is your responsibility. And strings don't last forever; your bow is sure to go through of number of strings in it's lifetime. However, that's no excuse for including poor strings from the factory. High-end bows certainly deserve better.

There are two major manufacturers of bowstring fibers, Brownell & Company and BCY Fibers Inc. Each manufacturer makes a variety of different fibers, each with their own unique qualities. We'll not make any effort to split hairs over which source material is best. We're much more concerned with the construction and durability of our factory strings on the Diablo and Liberty. The strings and cables test was conducted last, with all of our shooting concluded. Each bow has now been shot literally hundreds of times. So we're going to remove the strings, give them a close inspection, and see how they're holding-up. We'll also examine peep rotation and a few other attributes at the end.

As part of our strings and cables test, we had planned to measure each string for stretch. But in our haste to begin other tests, we did not take initial measurements of the factory string and cable lengths - so we can't fairly compare the changes due to stretching now. Sorry! Comparing against the factory specs won't do the trick either. Each manufacturer has a little different standard for their new strings. Some build strings a touch short to allow for stretch, others don't. And some measure by different methods, etc. So we'll just leave stretch out of this!

Diablo Strings	Liberty Strings
Source/Color The Diablo's string is a black/green 20 strand twist string made from BCY's 452 Fibers. Champion makes their own strings in-house at their Winnipeg production facility. The Diablo uses 2 additional cables; a split y-harness and a control cable. Both the harness and the control cable are made from the same source material, but both the harness and the control cable are solid black rather than a 2 color twist to match the Diablo's string.	Source/Color The Liberty's string is a tan/green 20 strand twist string made from BCY's 8125 Fibers. The Liberty's buss cable is the same color and material as the string and the set matches quite nicely. Most of Bowtech's strings are outsourced to Vapor Trail, a commercial string builder, but are marketed under the Bowtech name as "O² Strings". However, we understand that Bowtech is in the process of switching from BCY 8125 to the new Brownell TS1 fibers, which claim to have increased abrasion resistance.
End Loops The Diablo has 7 total end loops. Though they lack some uniformity on the split harness, you can see Champion does do a quality end-loop serving on the string and harness. However, we are greatly concerned about the condition of the control cable. The control cable's end loops are not served. This isn't particularly uncommon; several manufacturers do it this way. But this loop obviously needs the added protection, as it's being badly abraded and several strands have already failed.	End Loops The Liberty has 5 total end-loops. The 3 loops from the split harness are served neatly with 2D .016 matching green. The loops on the string are served, but with the 8125 string material instead of a braided cord type serving. This method will probably provide less protection to the actual string fibers, but it makes for a very small and neat loop. No perceptible wear is evident on any of the Liberty's end loops.
Serving Damage/Separation We carefully inspected ALL served areas of the Diablo's string and cables. Here are the 3 worst separations and/or evidence of wear. As you can see, the control cable serving (though apparently pre-treated with Serving Saver) has taken quite a beating already. The string (top) has a separation - but it isn't caused by use and wear, but rather by some careless technique on the part of the string builder when serving in his tails.	Serving Damage/Separation We carefully inspected ALL served areas of the string and harness. We intended to show the 3 worst separations and/or evidence of wear.....but the Liberty had only one small problem area. Where the string rolls into the post feed side of the cam, the string is discolored in 4 spots and a tiny separation is beginning (right side of the photo). Otherwise, all served string surfaces are still unblemished and have no perceptible separations.
TIME OUT: There's no point in continuing this category. Very disappointing string work on the Diablo!