A crossbow site organized around one buyer

There is a specific person behind every decision on this site: the hunter who is looking at crossbows because something changed. A shoulder that will not draw a compound any more. An age-based permit that has opened archery season. A state that has made crossbows legal where they were not. A surgery with a recovery that will not take a 60-pound draw.

That buyer needs different information from the spec-comparison enthusiast, and almost nothing written about crossbows is aimed at them. They need to know what they can physically cock, whether the bow fits the blind they hunt from, and which bolt and broadhead match the bow — not which model has the highest feet-per-second figure.

So this site ranks on cocking effort first, carries a cocked-width column that almost no competitor publishes, and gives the cocking-aid category its own full section rather than a paragraph at the bottom of a bow review.

Mike M. is the hands-on owner behind Iron Mako Media. He writes and evaluates everything here himself — there is no content desk, no panel of testers and no outsourced writing team. Every byline on this site is his, because every page is his.

What that means in practice is on the methodology page, and the short version is this: we have not put a season behind every bow on this site and we do not claim to have. Where an assessment rests on published specifications, the page says so in those words.

You will not find invented credentials here. No guide license, no pro-shop affiliation, no years-of-experience number, no awards, no “our team of testers”. Where a page needs authority this author cannot personally supply, it cites an external one instead and names it.

String & Stock is published by Iron Mako Media, an independent publisher of enthusiast gear sites. An independent, reader-funded publisher run by Mike M. under Iron Mako Media.

The site is funded by affiliate commission and nothing else. No manufacturer pays for a placement, no brand sees a page before it publishes, and commission rates do not influence rank order. The full statement is on the affiliate disclosure page.

87 pages across six sections, each one built around a problem rather than a product category:

• Crossbows — i need a bow i can actually cock and carry. 24 pages
• Cocking Aids — i cannot pull the string back. 10 pages
• Scopes — my bolt does not land where the dot is. 8 pages
• Bolts & Broadheads — i do not know which arrow my bow needs. 11 pages
• Targets & Cases — my bolt went straight through the target. 8 pages
• Guides — i need the numbers explained before i spend money. 19 pages

Every page is reachable within two clicks of the homepage, and the full index lists all of them on one page.

• No fabricated reviews, testimonials or ratings. There is no testimonials section on this site and there will not be one unless we have real, attributable reviews to publish.
• No invented specifications. Where a manufacturer publishes no figure, the page says “Not published”.
• No stale prices. Prices come from a live data layer and disappear on their own after 48 hours without a refresh.
• No invented credentials. See the section above.
• No links to products that do not exist. Every internal link on this site resolves to a real page, and every product has a resolved listing.

Email contact@stringandstock.com, or use the contact form. Corrections get priority over everything else. If you report a specification that does not match the manufacturer’s own figure, we check it and fix the page.