Custom Flemish Strings made for Recurve Crossbows

Hello, my name is Don Katsumi and my intent is to make you a better Flemish recurve crossbow string. The strings are primarily made for Excalibur recurve crossbows, but I have also made them for Ten Point recurve crossbows as well as traditional bows. My strings have been sold into the US, Canada, Norway, Greece, England, Australia, Sweden, Italy, South Africa, Germany, Russia, Malaysia, Vietnam, Japan, Slovenia, Guam, Holland, Argentina, France and Estonia.

My first crossbow was a 165 carved tipped Excalibur Exocet in early 1996 and presently own several Excaliburs, one Scorpyd and one Ten Point. I first picked up a crossbow because I was not happy when I was hunting with my compound bows wearing bulky clothing in the winter. After shooting the Excalibur a few times I was hooked! In my opinion, they are absolutely the best crossbow in the business!

Being an "A" type I looked at the string of my first Exocet and decided that I wanted to make a better one. After months of investigating and experimenting I made a decent Flemish crossbow string using Dacron string material. Years later I bought an Excalibur with mag tips and of course you can use a Fast Flight string with the more modern limbs. I made a string for the newer bow that was an improvement over the one made by Excalibur. The improvement in both cases was orienting all of the strands together as well as serving the center in a manner that preventing serving separation.

When Excalibur brought out the Exomax, complaints of serving separation became pretty common and complaints from Exocet 200s were almost as common. Although Excaliburs are great bows, on the higher poundage bows the cocked string angle is so acute that center servings have a tough life. In actual fact if you read many forums you will find that serving life is an issue with many crossbows! That being said I took an interest to improve serving life. I tried different serving materials, different serving tools and tried putting much more tension on the string while serving. Now I have to say that although the factory strings may not have been perfect, they are reasonably priced.

In the spring of 2007 I was approached by a gentleman by the name of Matthias from Italy. He was shooting at targets at 100 meters. His groups were 3" at 100 meters and he wanted to improve that! After Matthias and I worked together on a custom Flemish string for him his groups shrunk to 1 1/2"! Wow what a shooter and what a bow! Pretty cool!

At the Hunting Show in Toronto in 2007 Bill Troubridge approached me to assist his string maker (none other than Danny Miller) improve their strings. There were two issues. Danny was in Ohio and I am in Toronto. The other problem was that Danny and I make strings pretty differently. My way takes much longer and Danny cannot spend the time that I do on his strings and still sell at a reasonable price. I worked over the phone with Danny and Scott Sumner (the person testing Danny's strings over thousands of shots with an Exomax) tossing ideas back and forth for quite a while. Eventually Danny came up with a solution!

Danny was the US warranty representative for Excalibur Crossbows in the US. He is simply the most amazingly knowledgeable person I've ever met in the crossbow world! Not only is he knowledgeable about crossbows but he is honest, fair and just a great person to deal with. If you are in the US and you need something or an Excalibur crossbow call Danny Miller. His business is called Horizontal Archery in Sardis Ohio, 740 483 2312. You just cannot go wrong dealing with Danny!

In October 2009 I was contacted by Kenny Barr. Kenny Barr won the 2009 prestigious World 3D Championships. He has won first place twice and achieved 2nd three times! Kenny will be using my strings in the 2010 World 3D Championships. He presently uses an old 175lb Excalibur Exocet (yr 2000 vintage). Says volumes about the bow and the shooter doesn't it? Go Kenny! Go!

Listening to bow hunters about what they wanted and what they liked about my strings helped me get to where I am now.

I want to give thanks to Bill Troubridge, Peter Balfour, Danny Miller, Scott Sumner and many others for helping me.

• Don Katsumi

• 4635 Concession Rd 1

• Newcastle, ON, L1B 0E3

• Canada

• Flemishstrings@gmail.com

• Cell # 416 566 7966 Feel free to call or send a text

• Boo Custom Strings is operated by 1615170 Ontario Limited