https://matteocampagna.com/en/registry/equipment/bowstring-material-strands-arrow-speed Changes to this claim in Matteo Campagna's evidence registry: its status, its year-by-year history, revisions of the page. en-gb https://matteocampagna.com/en/registry/equipment/bowstring-material-strands-arrow-speedThe mechanism has been known since 1937: to calculate the speed, about a third of the string's mass is added to the arrow's, so a lighter string leaves a larger share of the bow's energy to the shaft; a 1969 model arrives at the same rule and notes that, with a string much lighter than the arrow, the term counts for little. On material the two measurements point the same way. In kyudo, ten university archers shooting fifty arrows per string transfer about 69 per cent of the energy to the arrow with Kevlar, Technora and Vectran against 67.7 with hemp: every synthetic beats hemp in a paired test, but the difference is smaller than the shot-to-shot variation, and among the three synthetics there is practically no gap. On a recurve in a rack, with a mechanical release, laboratory tests reported in a 2007 chapter send the same arrow off at 49.73 metres per second with Dacron and at 52.09 with Fast Flight, with Kevlar and Twaron in between: here there is a difference between synthetics too, and the author links it to Dacron's stretch. On the number of strands, however, the tests disagree. In the same laboratory, taking up to six strands out of a sixteen-strand Fast Flight string leaves the speed between 51.43 and 51.88 metres per second, with no trend, because the lighter string is also less stiff; on a shooting machine, going from twenty strands to twelve sends the arrow off faster in every set-up tested, by 0.3 to 1.1 feet per second out of about 215, that is half a percentage point at most. Nobody has measured this with archers on an Olympic recurve.claim:corda-materiale-velocita:revision:2026-06-17:3Wed, 17 Jun 2026 08:00:00 GMT https://matteocampagna.com/en/registry/equipment/bowstring-material-strands-arrow-speedclaim:corda-materiale-velocita:new_claim:2026-05-11:contestatoMon, 11 May 2026 08:00:00 GMT