[ELI5] why is dry firing a bow so bad for it? Does the arrow really make that much of a difference in that regard?
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Absolutely. You know the power behind an arrow? Imagine that power going into your bow instead. It’s essentially the same thing as shooting your bow with an arrow (as in you take two similar bows and have one of them shoot an arrow at the other bow).
Firing a bow means setting it alight, just as firing gunpowder does, and firing pottery means putting it in the fire.
Releasing a drawn bow with no arrow to loose means all of the force is put upon the bow itself and can damage and break it.
A buddy gave me an awesome fucking wooden bow from the 80s in high school. I never knew this. Cue me drawing it in a college dorm (never bought any arrows) to show off for a girl and letting that strong snap.
The wooden arms splintered and a cable broke, whipping me in the forearm and cutting it open.
I was fine, but the bow was ruined, and I never got to shoot it once. Dumb high school kid. Still bummed I never got to fire it.
I hear the same applies to air rifles. If you dry fire one, the piston slams forward too hard since there’s no projectile in the barrel.
Think of a pan and oil. Without any meat to cook, the oil will be the one to burn. The energy/heat from the pan is transferred to the oil and without any meat, it’ll start smelling bad soon enough.
Same logic with the bow. Without any arrow to pass or transfer the energy to, the bow will suffer from the energy transfer.
All the energy that goes into the arrow has to go somewhere. If it doesn’t get transferred into the arrow, it’ll become a shockwave going through the bow. This can tear the bow apart.
We don’t ‘fire’ bows at all, that would involve gunpowder. Instead we ‘loose’ an arrow, we let it go. The bow is a simple mechanism to store and release energy. When we have an arrow knocked on the bow, the energy generated by the bow has somewhere to go. It is transferred into the arrow, which self-releases from the bowstring by overcoming the force keeping it there. When we have no arrow knocked and we twang the bow (not dry fire, same reasoning) the energy does not have an opportunity to escape the system. The shock is kept within the limbs and riser, which depending on the age, condition, and type of bow, could damage it.
Potential energy. You draw the string increasing the energy held in the bow. With an arrow there somewhere for that energy to go, without it all feeds back into the limbs of the bow and then what’s left into your arms. Basically equal and opposite reactions doesn’t have somewhere to equalize so it’s just sent back into the bow itself.
It’s the physical equivalent of transmitting on a radio without an antenna. All of the energy is reflected back into itself.
Have dry fired a compound from being too worried about the release I was using and forgot to knock arrow. It makes a horrible sound. It stings like hell. String comes off, plastic n shit flew everywhere, and worst of all, everyone at the range knew exactly what the sound was and came running(concerned and laughing), while I tried to figure out what on earth just happened. Dry firing a bow hurts the bow, hurts your pride, and potentially hurts you physically.
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