Well it's taken me a week but I finally got everything here and got her set up. It was more involved than a typical new bow setup. I bareshaft tuned it the day I got it out of the box with both a drop away (NAP 4000) and a shoot thru (NAP QuikTune) both rests had the same result of being so far out from centershot that there was no more runout left in my sight. After looking things over and consulting the Elite forum I decided to tear the entire bow down. I swapped the limbs top to bottom. (Seems that others have had similar issues that this fixed.) I then found that the upper cam had a .060" shim where it should have (according to the factory spec.'s) had a .040 shim and the lower cam's .040 shim left some slop in the fit. I was able to fit another .020 shim in the bottom cam to tighten things up and even them out. Then I set about timing the cams so that they were firing at the same point rather than resting at the same point. After all this horsing around I went out and got the bareshafts and fletched shafts to impact to the same point at 30 yards. Yesterday the QAD that I want on it finally arrived after being backordered. Retuning with the new rest was very straightforward this time. She is now dialed to 60 yards and holding tight groups in the same spot with fp's and bh's without further issue. (See next post for update on this.) The bare bow shot very quietly but adding accessories has made it rather noisy. I'm going to try a few steps yet to quiet that back down. The finish is on par with the best I have come across. It's a sharp looking bow with no mars or defects from the factory. The feel in the hand isn't my favorite the throat is a bit too flat vertically which allows one to shoot either a high or low wrist position comfortably BUT it also allows you to shoot that position from a couple of different vertical points. I have to work to be sure that my hand settles to the same position each time I address the bow. The grip is also a little more rounded than I like but that is just personal preference. The strings and cables are of 452X material and the quality seems pretty good for factory strings. They took about 50 shots to settle in but appear stable now without any serving separation. If not for the tuning issues I faced with it I'd say that this was a very exceptional bow especially considering that they are going for a couple hundred dollars less than the BowTechs and Mathews that I have to compare it to. However, I can't recommend it to anyone that isn't a tuning guru or doesn't have one at their immediate disposal. I'm sure they aren't all like this but for a company whose motto is "Perfected Excellence", none of them should be like this.
I had emailed my dealer rep with my concerns on this bow and he stated that he had passed them on to the tech guys so that they knew. I got a call from them today seeking some clarification on the issues that I had with this bow. They stated that they were aware of some limb issues that they had been having with their supplier (Barnsdale?) and that they were remedying them for the 2010 line by possibly doing their own in-house limb machining. The nice thing is that they fully admitted that although extremely rare, they have had the necessity to flip lims before, they realized their was an issue and they were seeking to remedy it; no CYA BS like I ran into with BowTech on their cam lean and defective limb issues which were so bad, and their techs so condesending and ass covering that I refused to sell, recommmend or buy another BowTech again. I will however give Elite another go at it since they are a start-up company showing some serious promise in their developement and customer service. Kudos to Dave and Dennis at Elite! I've had it out some more and this Z28 really is a great shooting bow now that I have it tuned; actually one of the best hunting bows that I've come across in my 25 years of archery.
