I took up traditional archery because of what I presumed would be it’s simplicity. I’ve only been at it a few months but the one thing I’ve learned is there’s a seemingly infinite amount of variables and combinations. Some days I dwell too much on those things then other days I say screw it and just enjoy shooting the bow. I figure the details will sort themselves out in time and for now it’s more important just to enjoy the sport. I know one thing….I’m having a blast.
Agreed. Tuning can be as simple or complacated as you want to make it, and that can change day to day. It has a very user adjustable level of difficulty in that regard.
It may sound like heresy to some but most of the tuning can wait. New archers or new to traditional shooting archers are often much better off back burnering most of the tuning.
Get a shaft with a spine that’s in the ball park along with a ballpark weight field point, and leave the arrow uncut. Start with a serving string nocking point about a half inch over center and slide it down 1/16” at a time until your arrows start leaving the bow without being fletching high. Use a drop of glue to secure it in place. Then forget the rest of the tuning for awhile.
Just shoot and focus on the basics until you’ve developed good form and can consistently group arrows on the target with whatever aiming method you are most comfortable with.
Then once you’ve got yourself squared away with that bow, start worrying about whether the feathers are kicking left or right out of the bow. If you don’t have enough left or right to notice, you may decide you’re done at that point,
If you are right handed and they are kicking noticeably right, the spine is too stiff and you either need to add weight to the pointy end, or you need a softer arrow spined shaft, If they are kicking left, the spine is too soft. You can either switch to a lighter point or start shortening the arrow until they are flying straight.
If you plan to hunt with a particular broad head, use a field point of the same weight and then adjust the arrow length shorter to increase the spine. If you need to add weight to decrease the spine with that point weight either add weight behind the insert or in front of it.
I generally don’t bother free shafting until I‘ve adjusted shaft length and point weight, and then it’s more of a check than a tuning effort. If the shafts fly straight, it confirms that you are tuned and you can consider whether you want to go with shorter flatching feathers to reduce drag and flatten the trajectory a bit.
And of course you can then start increasing or decreasing brace height to play with noise, draw weight, and arrow speed - and potentially get into some arrow tuning issues again.
Or not.
Remember most bows will shoot good groups with field points even with an arrow kicking the fletching left. Where tuning really starts to matter is in hunting where the aerodynamic effects of the broad head are impacted by an out of tune arrow, and where penetration is greatly reduced if the shaft isn’t flying true.
At times I have put so much thought into archery related things its scary.
