Cold Weather Bow Care: The 5 Things That Actually Matter

I wrote a post last spring about what cold does to your bow's speed and point of impact. This one is different. This is about the stuff that breaks, gums up, rusts, or quietly shifts between the November opener and the last week of January, and what I do about it. Five things. Most guys handle one of them.

Quick story first. My buddy Kyle hunts the late muzzleloader-overlap week in Iowa every year with his bow. Two seasons ago he sat a morning at 4 degrees, climbed down, threw the bow across the back seat, drove forty minutes with the heat blasting, and carried it straight into the cabin. Next morning he pulled it out of the case and the sight housing had a film of rust freckles on every screw head and the cam axle screws had that orange bloom you get on a cheap fixed blade left in the sink. Nothing was ruined. But his peep had rotated a quarter turn from the string swelling and shrinking overnight, and he didn't find out until a doe stood broadside at 22 yards and he couldn't get a clean picture through the housing.

Every one of those problems was preventable in about four minutes.

1. Condensation is the real enemy, not the cold

Cold by itself doesn't hurt a bow. Aluminum, carbon, steel, the strings, none of it cares about 5 degrees. What hurts it is going from 5 degrees to 70 in the time it takes to walk from the truck to the kitchen. Every metal surface below the dew point sweats, and it sweats in the places you can't wipe: inside the sight housing, between the limb pocket and the limb, in the threads of every screw on the bow.

Fix is stupid simple. Leave the bow in the case. Leave the case in the garage, or the mudroom, or the coldest room you've got, for a couple hours before it comes into the heated house. If you don't have a case, at least don't lean it against the woodstove. Kyle now leaves his in the truck bed under the tonneau overnight, which is fine as long as the truck doesn't get broken into.

2. Wax the string. Then take most of it off.

Cold, dry air pulls the moisture out of a string and the fibers go from supple to crunchy. You can hear it if you pluck a dry string at 10 degrees. So yes, wax before the late season. But the mistake I see constantly is guys frosting the string like a cake. Excess wax collects every bit of grit and frozen dirt on the walk in, adds mass to the string, and pushes your speed around by a few fps you never asked for. And a heavy waxed string in the cold gets stiff enough that it changes how the serving seats on the cam.

Rub the wax in with your fingers until it goes clear, then burnish it with a scrap of leather or a paracord loop. If you can see white wax on the string, you've got too much. Don't wax the servings. Ever.

3. Check the peep after the first cold soak, not the last

Strings are a hygroscopic material wrapped around itself a few hundred times. When the humidity drops and the temperature drops, they tighten up a hair, and that little bit of twist is enough to walk a peep a few degrees. On a bow that was set up in August in an air-conditioned shop and then spent its first night in a 15-degree garage, the peep can rotate enough to matter. Not always. But often enough that I check it every year and about every third year it's moved.

Draw the bow in the cold, in your hunting layers, with the release you're going to hunt with. If the peep is even slightly off, don't fix it warm. Fix it cold, because cold is the condition you're going to shoot it in. If it's off by a lot, your string is settling and you've got other problems, which usually means it's time for a new string before you trust it on an animal. The Forge will tell you what a fresh string does to your speed and drop chart if you go that route.

4. Your rest cord and your release are the two parts that freeze

A drop-away rest is a mechanical device with a cord and a spring, and both of those hate cold more than the rest of the bow does. Cable-driven rests are mostly fine because the cable pulls hard enough to overpower a little stiffness. Limb-driven rests with a thin cord are the ones I've seen go slow in the cold, especially if somebody sprayed something on the pivot in the fall to "quiet it down." Most lubes thicken when the temperature drops. A rest that drops a hair late at 5 degrees will kick the fletching, and you will blame your form.

Pull the rest up with your finger at hunting temperature and let it go. It should snap. If it sags or hesitates, wipe every bit of lube off the pivot and run it dry. Almost every rest on the market is designed to run dry.

Same idea with the release. A hinge or thumb release with a sealed mechanism is fine. A cheap wrist strap with an open sear and a tube of oil from the shop will get gummy, and gummy means creep before the break, and creep before the break in January when your hands are already half numb is how you punch a shot into a shoulder. Keep the release in an inside pocket until you're on stand. Dudley has said basically the same thing for years, and he's right.

5. Batteries die. Have a plan.

Lighted nocks, sight lights, rangefinders. All of them lose most of their juice at 10 degrees. I've had a Nockturnal fail to light on a 20-yard shot in Kansas at -2 and only found the arrow because the deer piled up in sight. The rangefinder is the one that matters most. Keep it inside your jacket, not clipped to a strap outside it. Carry a spare CR2. Turn the sight light off, because you don't need it at legal light anyway and it's one more thing to fail.

What you can stop worrying about

Your riser shrinking. It does, measurably, and it changes your sight marks by an amount you could never shoot the difference on. Your carbon limbs cracking in the cold. They don't unless they were already cracked. Your arrows getting brittle. Carbon at 0 degrees is the same carbon it was at 70, and the bad shaft you're worried about was already bad.

The stuff that gets you in the late season is small and mechanical, not exotic. Rust on a screw. A peep a few degrees off. A rest cord that drops late. A dead battery. Four minutes with a rag, a block of wax and a flashlight, done in the cold, handles all of it.

Then go shoot the bow at the temperature you'll be hunting it, in the clothes you'll be hunting in, and log what it does at 20, 30 and 40 in the Range tab of The Forge. Compare it to your October numbers. If the drop chart moved more than a couple inches at 40, something above is the reason, and now you know where to look.