Searching by File Type Solves Another Mystery

ByRichard Byrne

A long, long time ago I was pretty good at archery and even trained at the Olympic Training Center in Chula Vista, California when it first opened (that’s me in the picture in this post). While it’s close to three decades since I was competitive I still follow the sport and participate in a message board called ArcheryTalk. It’s there that people fairly regularly post questions asking for help identifying older equipment. I love those questions.

Me at the Olympic Training Center in Chula Vista, California in 1996.

This morning someone posted a question looking for help identifying this older compound bow. The manufaturer (Browning) and the model (6T6L) were obvious and I recognized it immediately as being from the early to mid-1990’s. The person wanted to know exactly which year it was made and wanted any available additional information about it.

Knowing that every manufacturer of compound bows included owners manuals with their bows, I figured that I could probably find an owners manual for the one in question. Unfortunately, the manufacturer changed hands sometime in the early 2000’s and was later discontinued entirely. That meant searching on the original manufacturer’s website didn’t lead to any information. However, all was not lost.

I know that there are archery afficionados/ historians who do keep copies of old, printed catalogs and owners manuals. Taking an educated guess that there was someone somewhere on the web that uploaded to a website a copy of a Browning 6T6L owner’s manual. And, again an educated guess, that copy was probably uploaded as a PDF. Therefore, I entered into Google “Browning 6T6L” followed by filetype: pdf. Sure enough, the second result was an Italian website that hosts a copy of the owners manual wherein I confirmed that the bow was made in 1995 and, thanks to Google Translate, I could read more about the bow.

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