Our favorite quiver is undeniably the TightSpot 5-Arrow Quiver, but it’s followed by the TightSpot 7-Arrow Quiver. Both are astoundingly well engineered. They’re built in the USA and they come with TightSpot’s IronClad guarantee: If the TightSpot Quiver breaks on the original owner for any reason, TightSpot will repair or replace it at no cost.
Pretty hard to beat that. In fact, the TightSpot Quiver is so good, it made our Best Gifts for Bowhunters Guide.
To get us a closer look at its quivers, TightSpot sent us both versions to evaluate this hunting season. This is what we learned:
TightSpot 5-Arrow and 7-Arrow Quiver Review
For this review, I’ll focus primarily on the 5-arrow TightSpot quiver, then cover the differences between the 5-arrow and 7-arrow quiver versions.
The TightSpot Quiver’s claim to fame starts with its ingenious mounting system: You can mount the TightSpot quiver much closer to the side of your compound bow than you can with most other quivers.
This shifts more weight closer to the center of your bow, which reduces torque. If you think about this, any weight that extends out from the side of your bow’s riser will create some sort of torque or tilt or lean. If you hold your bow upright with a pair of chopsticks under the swell of your grip, your bow will want to tip toward the side the quiver is attached to. The further away the quiver is, the more effect that weight will have.
Of course, for short-distance archery, the weight of a quiver is fairly minor. Once you attempt longer and longer shots, minute effects of gravity and pressure start to add up.
Because the TightSpot quiver lets you mount the quiver closer to the bow’s center of gravity, you have less exterior force placed on the side of your bow.
Even with the TightSpot, there is some weight there. So to compensate, some highly-tuned shooters will place a rear stabilizer out the lower back portion of their bows on the side opposite their quivers. The downside of that in a hunting situation is that you have more weight and components sticking out of your bow. The TightSpot Quiver helps mitigate all of this.
TightSpot Quiver Review: Excellent Adjustability
While the TightSpot Quiver can mount very tightly to the side of your bow, the included mounting brackets and patented dovetail rail let you adjust how close or far you want the quiver from your riser.
In addition, if you’re serious about tuning and finding the best overall balance for your hunting bow, you can rotate the TightSpot Quiver to move the center of gravity forward or back.
Plus, you can move the quiver up and down the carbon fiber rods. For me, for hunting situations, I placed the quivers as tight as I could making sure that I didn’t affect the motion of my limb-driven drop-away Hamskea Hybrid Hunter Pro rest.
As for balance, I want my arrows to line up parallel with my string, more so for overall tidiness than shot-helping balance. I spend a lot of time pushing through brush and trees and not having anything stick out is more important to me than perfect balance. At least right now. The nice thing about the TightSpot is that it is so adjustable. If you get a new bow or get serious about dialing in long-distance shots, you’ll appreciate the adjustability.
One note: The TightSpot Quiver is not ambidextrous — you must choose the right-hand version if you’re right-handed and the left-handed version if you’re left-handed.
TightSpot Quiver: Stop Losing Dangerous Arrows!
For me, there is one key to the TightSpot Quiver that immediately makes it a smart choice: You can adjust the tightness of the arrow grippers. If you change arrows to a smaller diameter arrow, no problem! You can tighten the grippers. Plus, the grippers don’t wear out and get sloppy — as they wear, if they wear, you can adjust them tighter. So cool.
In terms of importance to bowhunters, none of this is that big of a deal to a bowhunter who walks into a tree stand on a well-defined path and then takes off their quivers when they’re up in the tree stand.
It matters a heckuva lot to any elk hunter or spot-and-stalk bowhunter. Why? As you move through brush and trees, you can lose an arrow out of your quiver. I never thought this was a big deal until it happened to me. While turkey hunting after sneaking up on a chatty tom, which eventually left the area, I noticed a missing arrow. I had no idea when or how it left my quiver — my attention was always on the tom. Worse, that arrow had a super-sharp broadhead on it.
That arrow could have slipped off and it could have jabbed me somewhere. If it took out a femoral artery, that could have been game over. Or game over for the the guy behind me. Think this can’t happen? Just this year an elk hunter, 2.5 miles from a pickup, lost an arrow out of his quiver in thick brush, didn’t notice it and tripped over it, stabbing himself in the leg. Fortunately the broadhead missed a major artery, and luckily, the hunter had three buddies with him and were able to carry him to safety.
I don’t know if the hunter had a TightSpot quiver or not — or even if a TightSpot quiver would have changed the outcome. If you walk in the woods, you know there are always millions of variables. But based on my experience with the TightSpot Quiver this year in heavy brush, I do believe the TightSpot can help secure most anyone’s arrows to their satisfaction because the grippers are so adjustable.
There is more here, though: Personal safety is one thing, but the risk extends to your equipment. If a broadhead nicks a string or cable on the way out of the quiver, it could end your hunt and maybe your bow.
I started asking other bow hunters if they’d ever lost an arrow, and it turns out, most of them had. Some were able to retrace their steps and find the lost arrow. I did. And this brings up another factor: Cost. If you truly lose the arrow with a broadhead attached, that can be a spendy mistake. Never mind the time it took to build and tune the arrow.
As for adjustability, you can adjust the tightness of fit to your liking. Because I hunt in a lot of brush, I ratchet my grippers down fairly tight. You need a hex-head wrench to tighten the grippers, and when you adjust one it can have a small cascade effect on the others in line with it. Consequently, I found that you need to adjust tightness back and forth among the grippers, testing each arrow a few times to get it all dialed in. It’s not hard. Took less than 5 minutes.
So the TightSpot gripper system? To me, that’s the most important feature of the quiver, by far.
Shop TightSpot Quivers at BlackOvis and get free shipping on all domestic orders!
TightSpot Quiver Vibration and Sound
I’m not the kind of guy to break out a meter to measure sound or vibration, but in my experience, the TightSpot Quivers seemed to dampen felt vibration as well as dampen sound. Was it transformative to the shooting experience? No, but it was noticeably better than shooting with a common low-cost entry-level quiver.
TightSpot claims that its quivers kill vibration and sound in five ways.
1. The extra-long “wheelbase” of the TightSpot quivers gives you a longer distance between the arrow grippers and the hood, which TightSpot says reduces arrow and quiver vibration (compared to quivers that would leave more arrow sticking out of the bottom of the quiver).
2. TightSpot includes a bumper strip on the crossbar that arrows can rest against when in the quiver. This point of contact can help dampen arrow vibrations.
3. TightSpot has a “QuadFit” 4-way spacer on one of the carbon rods. It lets you slide the spacer against your cable guard to create a point of contact against your bow to help absorb vibration. (Because of the clearance I wanted with my limb-driven rest, I didn’t use this feature.)
4. The TightSpot quiver uses two long woven carbon rods that provide great stability and, again, help absorb vibration.
5. Last of all, TightSpot uses an acoustic dampening material inside the hood of the quiver in the space between the hood ceiling and the insert. This, too, makes the quiver quieter.
The TightSpot quiver — like most good quivers — helped reduce some felt vibration on my shots and seemed to quiet two different bows. To me, all of this is more of a bonus than a major buying criteria.
TightSpot Quiver Review: Grippiness
I was initially concerned about the TightSpot Quiver’s ability to hold arrows because there is only one gripper for each arrow, not two. The field point or broadhead sticks into the hood of the quiver and is simply held there because it’s recessed and the gripper creates some tension when you put the arrow in properly.
If you’re a bowhunter who doesn’t want the sharp edge of a broadhead to touch anything, this design might make you pause. And if you’re using an expandable broadhead, how might this design affect your broadheads?
TightSpot has an answer for you: A Secondary Gripper accessory. I haven’t tried it out, but I can tell you this: If you lodge the point of your broadhead into the hood and slide the arrow into your gripper with a bit of upward tension toward the hood, your arrow will be very secure. If you absolutely don’t want broadhead contact, get the Secondary Gripper accessory.
TightSpot 5-Arrow vs 7-Arrow Quiver
For most bowhunters most of the time, the TightSpot 5-Arrow Quiver will hold enough arrows for most bowhunting situations. On the other hand, the 7-Arrow Quiver weighs just 1/10th of one once more: 10 ounces vs 9.9 ounces. With essentially no weight penalty, why not? That said, the more arrows you carry on the side of your bow, the more weight you have to pack — and the more torque you’re going to create.
In addition, the extra two slots result in a flipped bracket that gives room for two bottom arrows. These two arrows (instead of three) then rest on the bracket’s bumper and help reduce vibration. If you choose the 7-arrow version but opt not to use the extra two slots most of the time, you can flip the mounting bracket to match the 5-arrow configuration to get three arrows to rest against the rubber bumper (but you’ll have to flip it back if you head out on an epic hunt where you want seven arrows in your quiver).
So, if you’re going to head out on a true backcountry hunt, having two extra slots could be a definite advantage if you hit a limb and lose an arrow. Or flat-out miss. If you like to grouse hunt while elk hunting but hesitate to sling your best arrows at grouse, having two extra slots would let you pack arrows you could dedicate to grouse.
For the sake of simplicity, we like the 5-arrow version best — but it’s not technically better than the 7-arrow version in any meaningful way. In fact, you could argue that the 7-arrow quiver is better because it can hold more. It’s totally a personal preference kind of choice — and the pricing between the two is the same.
Shop TightSpot Quivers at BlackOvis and get free shipping on all domestic orders!
TightSpot Quiver Review: The Verdict
The TightSpot 5-Arrow Quiver and TightSpot 7-Arrow Quiver are both astoundingly well-engineered quivers that let you adjust the tightness of the arrow grippers to match the diameter of your arrows. In addition, its lightweight, slim design lets you place the quiver tight to your bow, reducing accuracy-robbing torque. Like most great quivers, the TightSpot reduces vibration and sound, too. As far as cost goes, the TightSpot is on the very high-end of the price spectrum, but it’s made in America and is backed by a lifetime guarantee. When you consider the cost of losing an arrow in the brush — never mind the danger involved — the value of the TightSpot gripper design becomes particularly compelling. Very highly recommended.
Get the Gear:
- TightSpot 5-Arrow Quiver
- TightSpot 7-Arrow Quiver
- TightSpot 3-Arrow Quiver
- TightSpot Secondary Gripper
