Your Best Tuning Tips & Generalities

Since it seems the world has cleared out for the holiday weekend I thought I would get a thread going to supplement some of the other great info i have learned here and perhaps to consolidate it into one place where others can share the tips and breakthroughs they have had when tuning a bow for shooting and/or hunting. Maybe it becomes a sticky some day and or helps a noobie get it faster so the improve quicker and keep interest in our game longer. Some may be obvious but it may be good to have it all in one threads many of the others are older and while the info is still good they may be harder to find. Again this may be beating a dead horse and its just a consolidation of what i have read learned and seen in practice but again i think it could be beneficial.:deadhorse:thankyou:

What are your best tips, things you have learned etc that helped you get tuned better and faster. What got you over your hurdles and plateaus in this part of the game?

Here are some of mine and ill ask some questions of others later.

1A) never cut your shafts before you shoot them, its much easier to cut off later than it is to add back.

1B) A good way to not have to cut but to be able to shoot your arrows is to put in an insert with a small piece of plastic bag (not the super thin shopping bags but something a bit more robust) and cut or rip it into a 1inch long strip about 1/4 or so inch wide or less and place over the insert and push this into the shaft. Now with a field point in there you can pull it out with pliers without heat and it holds firm enough that you wont lose the tip and insert in your target. this way you can test at full length without sacrificing a shaft to the archery gods by cutting first.

2) Bareshafting doesn't show you anything till after about 20 yards or so, at least for me. I used to always try bareshafting at 15-18 yards when i started as that was all i could really shoot accurately at the time when i got better i did the same but bare and fletched shafts that grouped together perfectly at 18yds could be off the target entirely at 25 with the fetched grouping perfectly. Get back as far as as you can accurately shoot preferably past 20 yards to make sure you give the bare arrow time to react.

3) One change at a Time!!! if you change nock height and point weight you may not derive what is making the actual change. Also don't make permanent changes based on the flight of one arrow make sure you are seeing consistency in what you are doing before making a permanent change.

4) For nock point adjustments in Bareshaft tuning move the nock point to follow where the bareshafts hit relative to the fletched. If the bareshafts are hitting low vs the fletched lower the nock point till the groups come together.

5) Tune with how you plan to shoot or hunt... Namely if you are going to hunt with a bow mounted quiver tune with it on and have some arrows in there. Sometimes you can get lucky and a bow wont notice the difference other times its entirely different.

6) For a RIGHT handed shooter (Opposite holds true for lefties) bareshafts that impact right of fletched shafts are weak.
You can make said weak arrow act stiffer by
1) Lowering your point weight
2) Shortening your arrow
3) Decreasing you brace height (even though this will also increase speed which is generally counter intuitive but seems to hold true at least for me. if others disagree let me know and ill come back and edit.
4) Add weight to the rear of the arrow
5) add something to the string (silencers etc... I recently found that adding silencers in this case wool puffs was the equivalent of about 25grains of point weight, ie adding puffs made me have to use less point weight by that amount of weight
6) If you can, lower the poundage of the bow
7) Use a thicker string
8) Build out your sideplate

I'll be back but this should get it going. Any thoughts on equivalents i.e. 1 inch of arrow is equal to how many grains of point weight or how many grains of point weight equals how many levels of spine weight?
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