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Bulbous Nocks - A Mike Loades Project (part 2)

Silent Thunder Ordnance

Our MikeL Bulbous Nocks on carbon shaft inserts, seen here with one of our Ottoman rings and a complete Ottoman arrow. 

Our MikeL Bulbous Nocks on carbon shaft inserts, seen here with one of our Ottoman rings and a complete Ottoman arrow. 

So lets start this off with a big thank you to Mike Loades for supplying images, dimensions, arrows, and ultimately the impetus for this entire project. To that end, we've been working on Mughal style bulbous nocks, but made for modern arrows and strings. Mike's stated goals for this project were to create a modern interpretation of a Mughal bulbous nock to aid in mounted archery speed shooting. 

To be clear, before someone nitpicks historical inaccuracies of this project, no these nocks are not nor were meant to be perfect replicas. Furthermore, we've been modifying dimensions and tuning the design for Mike Loades' specific application, rather than aiming at the general public. As the project evolved, to achieve functionality and its ultimate ends, we've drifted further and further from the design's historical roots. 

So last we left off the project was a success, why the update? Well credit where it is due, another archery historian, Alexander Stover approached us to purchase some of these nocks for experimentation. He wanted them for carbon arrows though, and offered a simple solution: aluminum inserts which offer a conversion to standard 11 degree taper. It wasn't until we'd finished manufacturing them it occurred to anyone that he had just inadvertently solved a problem we'd wrestled with months earlier. Who would have guessed that such inserts are commercially available and fairly reasonably priced?