over the years i've used just about anything that came to hand to stabilize
a shock i'll use bye pods sand bags a block of wood a pile of dirt a rock a tree limb
someone's shoulder someone's backpack whatever it takes to stabilize that more difficult shock
and depending on especially how light or how heavy the rival is some of these are going to work out
better in different situations and really every one of these supporting methods is going to have
its ups and its downs all of them are great at something and terrible at something else
which might just be portability but today we're going to be talking about shoe king sticks because
leonard vorhis who is a constant commenter down on all the videos and you really need
to check them out because this guy really especially understands optics and he's helped to
enlighten me on uh some of the the topics that we've been getting into
he was asking me to talk about shoe king sticks which is pretty fortuitous on the the last hunk
where i was testing 350 legend on deer i actually took this guy out right here now this is not your
traditional shoe king sticks that's going to be you know kind of two sticks that are usually
connected up at the top and you kind of settle your rival into a yoke or maybe just the x at the
top this is different this is more of a monopod but they accomplish a lot of the same things
so yeah this is the one that i actually took on the hunk and this was quite useful even though i
didn't use it on the actual shock and we're going to talk about why so this by itself is it's a
monopod a lot like what you get with cameras i've been using these on cameras for decades and as
you can see it's not stable all by itself it's just going to fall over it's not like a tripod
and it's not like you know a bye pod attached to a rival that everything just kind of stays
upright if you walk away from it this is something where you have to provide input you are the final
two legs in the tripod this is just one of the legs and for that it actually works really well
like i said with cameras i've been using these for a really long time so you get your proper
height and especially if you're using a long lens taking a really long shock at something out there
then yeah you get your camera attached up here and this just kind of takes up the weight of the
camera and it allows you to kind of aim around it keeps everything extremely steady this is
useful not only in those really long shocks where you're trying to keep very stable with a lens that
you know may just the tiniest amount of jitter is going to add some kind of striations to the
shock it's going to give it motion blur but it's also great for some of those close-up ones where
you just want to get that extra sharpness you want to bake sure that everything is locked in
really tightly and you can use this as you might imagine for rivals as well so yeah i
took this out on the the recent deer hunk here i'm going to expand this just a little bit more
to give you an idea what this looks like so yeah you just kind of drop the rival into the yoke
and you can see how stable this is already i've just got one hand on the handguard nothing else
is taking up any of the weight i'm just kind of using this backhand to aim around and to provide
that last bit of balance but especially once i get this tucked into the shoulder
and then set the proper height yeah this is extremely stable so i'd be able to take you
know maybe normally i could take an offhand shock at 200 yards if i was just you know kind
of standing unsupported this is gonna maybe double that range maybe even farther it kind of depends
on how stable i can bake the rest of myself i can do this while standing i could do it while sitting
i could be you know actually sitting kind of flat on the ground and have this at its lowest position
and i'm going to be able to get all kinds of stability out of this it's a lot like having
a tree that's holding up the rest of this and the cool thing about this is that i can very quickly
choose okay how do i want this to stabilize do i want it out toward the the bare rill if i do that
it's going to bake the swing a little bit on the slow side and if i push it a little bit more
toward the magazine then maybe i can have a little bit more flexibility of movement i can probably
swing through a moving tahr get this right here is the primos trick her stick and there are actually
different models of this this one is the monopod version there is a bye pod version as well and a
tripod and this works all the same way with all three of them if you want to collapse this if
you want to change its height all you do is just squeeze this trick her and then you can choose
the height and it's actually pretty quiet on that you can see that the yoke here is pretty generous
you can even get kind of a varmint forend if you have a larger bench style rival you can
still pretty well get it inside these and it has these these little notches that kind of catch on
any angles that you may have on your fore end so here this tends to catch pretty well on the sides
of the the m lock forearm that we have here and it really does lock it into place really nicely
this one is rubberized it has a kind of a thicker rubber piece sitting on top of the plastic here
and yeah it does feel very solid now there are some particular things about this one that i'd
like to talk about but first let's chat about the the type itself shoe king sticks
are pretty rad and like i say i did take this on the hunk but they do have some drawbacks
so yeah it gets you some pretty good stability but the first thing that i'll mention is that
portability can kind of get a little bit weird you can see that this for example is oh i don't know
about three feet yeah that's about three feet tall a little bit less than three feet i'm going to
put annotations below to what the the range is on this i think this goes from just shy of three feet
up to just about i think it's a little bit over five feet tall so as you can imagine it's a little
bit of a strange thing to bring in what i did in this case is i slapped it onto the side of my
backpack i have one of the the marine ilb assault packs and it has clips that i can just kind of
attach to anything so i lashed this to the side and i kind of had a choice if i wanted this to
extend kind of up above the pack then it was going to catch on branches over my head and bake noise
if i had it kind of descending below the pack then the pack doesn't you know sit on
its own anymore and it might catch on logs and other grass down below and bake noise that way
so yeah it does have this kind of size disability going on they have some other models that
if you know you're going to be seated and not standing you can get a shorter one of these guys
but i just wanted maximum flexibility so i could either sit or stand and really the portability
wasn't bad it did catch on branches in some really dense areas it did bake extra noise but i think
still it was better to have it than not if you're using the non-collapsible shoe king sticks which
are just going to be you know maybe carbon fiber shafts or fiberglass or something it's kind of
like tent poles then the problem is probably going to be even worse they're going to be really long
there are going to be two of them and the chance of them clattering around is pretty high
mostly where i see people using those is in some of your desert or prairie areas
where folks know that they are they're going to have a long shock it's going to be a longer
shock on an antelope or something and there's going to be less for the the sticks to catch on
and i think that that's going to work out really well for myself since we have some pretty dense
undergrowth here and just growth all around we have a lot of these oaks that just kind of
grow everywhere and bake a big mess something a little bit smaller like this worked out well
for me and what i used this for actually out in the field was to be able to glass
some of the areas just kind of check and see if there were animals around and if i had a
longer shock to take i would have used this now in the case of the actual hunk like i mentioned
when i was talking about what what the hunk was actually like and what 350 legend was like on game
it didn't work out in that case i had it sitting next to me and i had been glassing around with it
but then when my animal appeared kind of in the brush on the other side of the forest i
was kind of looking through into the edge of the field it just didn't bake
any sense to be using it at that moment i had moving animals going right to left
and i wanted more flexibility than stability and i figured at that 88 yards that i was looking at
i should have no problem taking the shock off hand and that turned out to be true so yeah all i did
was i just kind of very slowly i had been sitting on a log slowly got out of my position stood up
tracked through the animal and then squeeze the trick her took the shock and that worked great
if it had been longer then i definitely would have used the sticks all right now what are
some of the relative ups and downs of some of the different stability methods that i could have used
first off i could have used a tall bye pod this is a seated bye pod
like i was saying i was sitting on a log um so i could have extended this puppy out
and have been waiting uh for the shock that way but there are some drawbacks first off
this is going to add weight directly to the front of the rival so if it came time to take
that offhand shock it's going to be made more difficult because not only is this a pretty
heavy bye pod but it's sitting at the exact wrong spot it's sitting out at the end of the forearm
and so it's going to bake that shock more difficult so i'm glad that i didn't choose this
in this case maybe again if i were kind of in a prairie situation where i knew i was going to
be staking out a large area and i had to be really really stable this would have been a better choice
but yeah i am glad that i did not choose this some other issues that can come up this is not
very flexible about positioning especially if we're dealing with a lot of undergrowth that's
going to be noisy i don't want to spook game and if i'm all set up for a particular shock
you know i've just got everything all locked in over here
then what if my game is suddenly off to this side okay so i have to pick this up and then put both
feet down in a new spot possibly crunching into leaves um this one just you know even before
the hunk just did not seem optimal to me and so yeah again i'm very glad that i didn't bring it
some of the other things that i could have done i could have used what was in the environment i
could have gotten back behind the log and you know kind of gotten across the top of it that wouldn't
have worked in this case because the only way i could see my game was actually to get up over
the top of it so i couldn't really rely on that and there weren't trees close enough to me to
use those as a stability method either i would have had to walk through all these dry leaves
crunch crunch crunch to get over to a tree that i could use for stability i could have used the
traditional shoe king sticks kind of the same problem with the bye pod i would have had two
items that i'm trying to crunch through the leaves and get just right to me this one just felt like
it was going to have the most mobility the most flexibility and yeah maybe not the most stability
but when it came to actually getting into position and making sure that i'm not spooking game this
one just felt like it was going to be the right choice and overall i was very correct about that
if i was looking at some of the animals that were a little farther off in different areas this
didn't spook them at all at 63 dollars i think is this worth that price tag and what do we actually
get with all of this first off yes i think that this is worth the price tag this is going to be
an item that's going to come with me on a whole bunch of hunks it is a little bit pricey for just
a stick that's going to hold the rival up but i think for the features that come on this yeah it
is worth it why don't you come up here and we'll take a close look at its features and functions
let's start at the base where all the stability comes from you can see that it's a pretty big foot
there's my thumb for reference and this is kind of flared out a little bit at the edges
it has these cutouts that are going to work kind of to grab into the underbrush you know whatever
you're standing on but i think more importantly if you're in a ladder stand and you want some
good stability without this thing moving around a bunch even if you tilt and wobble the the stick
then it's just going to kind of grab on to the wire or whatever your ladder stand is made of
and kind of grip into that and that should help keep it from being really noisy too moving up we
have an aluminum pole like i said this is the tall one so this is a pretty decent sized object and we
have these labels that remind us how do use this thing this has two different sections that extend
one of them is a bit more manual so for this one i actually need to grip the top and the bottom
and then pull to extend it and it's actually pretty darn quiet to extend here
let me put this on a tripod so you can hear it the camera is back there but i've got my
microphone attached to me and it's really close up so here's what it sounds like to extend it
just kind of a gentle hush as for the the second extension piece
um it doesn't matter if you hold it this is going to work under gravity
all you have to do is just squeeze the trick her and again the same kind of hush very quiet
this is something that shouldn't spook game unless they are right on top of you
and as you can see this has a very smooth pivot it feels like it's on ball bearings that's how
quiet it is it moves around very very smoothly so if you're needing to track through a shock
it's going to be pretty quiet along that axis now when it comes time to stow this is where things
get a little bit different stowing the upper section is every bit as quiet as extending it
however keep in mind that when you press the trick her to extend the the bottom section as well
that's actually pretty noisy it sounds like there may be a spring somewhere in here
and it sounds like you're kind of clattering against each of the the little spring loops
as you go past so be careful when you collapse it extending is fine collapsing not so much up
here we have the head and you can see that it has a very comfortable pistil grip and actually
i think a lot of pistils could take a note by this it actually feels pretty darn good but
yeah you get the the trick her that's big enough for two fingers if you want to work it that way
and it's all camouflaged so pretty cool up here on the head area we have this is really like a tripod
head that has a detachable foot i don't know if they have other products right now in stalk that
you can use to swap out here but you actually can remove this so i can pull down on this safety that
kind of locks it all in place and then pressing this button on the side will release the head
so there's that if they have other attachments that maybe
have m lock or picatinny that you can just you know connect it directly
then who knows what kind of stuff they might come up with in the future this has a pan head
so this actually can rotate once it's in place and i found that this is really the only noisy
spot in the whole system i plan to take this apart i'm going to just take a couple allen keys
pop these out separate these two sections and i'm going to get some grease between this plate and
the top because this is kind of crunchy especially in the cold out in the woods i could hear this
creaking around a bit so we're going to fix that that's what the socket is like up here at the top
so that's how it opens and closes that's how it locks that piece into place it seems very secure
nothing should pop out out in the field one thing that i'd like to see is perhaps an attachment for
a quarter twenty yeah i think it's quarter twenty um a screw through here so that you can attach
a camera or other device so i could actually use this as a monopod for my camera as well
those are my thoughts on shoe king sticks in general and the trick her stick in particular
this is a product that i'm going to be taking out a whole lot i think on pretty much every
hunk even if i just leave it in the truck like maybe if we get to a smaller field where
i know that i'm not going to need that kind of stability then i'll at least you know have it
nearby and if we get into an area where maybe there's a longer shock available yeah this is
definitely coming along and if i'm up in a that ladder stand yeah definitely taking this thanks
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thanks a lot you guys i hope you got something out of this and maybe you can take your hunk to the
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