Buckmasters Magazine

Five gear issues that affect bow accuracy.

Practice makes perfect. And certainly it is true that a key to accuracy with a bow and arrow is to practice, practice, practice. A compound bow is not something you can pick up once a year and immediately drive tacks.

But practice isn’t the only path to perfection. You can practice like a fiend and still have problems with accuracy. If your equipment isn’t set up properly and tuned to perfection, then accuracy will suffer no matter how much time you put in practicing with your bow.

Following are five aspects of your equipment that can affect accuracy. Keep an eye on them and make sure they’re within recommended tolerances, and your accuracy and confidence will soar.

CAM TIMING

For peak performance, the cams on your bow should roll over in perfect synchronization as you draw the bowstring.

Over time, cables can stretch, often taking your cams out of sync. Arrow flight then becomes erratic.

Even if you shoot a single-cam bow, make sure that cam is rolling over the way the engineers designed it to roll. Manufacturers of single-cam bows have different ways of keeping tabs on cam roll-over. Check with the maker of your bow to find out the correct method for your model.

Bowhunters with dual-cam bows can check their cam timing in one of two ways. The first is to use a draw board, a device that sits on a table and allows you to hook your bowstring to a crank, which draws the bow for you. The second way is to draw the bow by hand while a buddy watches your cams.

Each cam will have a stop on it somewhere. That’s a metal protrusion that either hits a cable or limb when the cam has reached its full rotation during the draw cycle. On dual-cam bows, the stops on each cam should hit at the same time.

You will need a bow press to correct timing deficiencies on virtually all compound bows, because the remedy requires twisting your cables. Twist the cable that’s hit first by one of your stops. How many twists depends on how much correction is needed. If you don’t have a bow press or don’t feel comfortable twisting cables, take your bow to a pro shop for help.

BOW TUNING

A bow is not that different from a musical instrument. A guitar is capable of making musical sounds as long as the strings are attached. But only after it’s tuned is a guitar capable of making beautiful music. Likewise, a bow can shoot arrows as long as the string and cables are attached. But it needs to be tuned to achieve optimum performance.

Tuning a bow involves making sure the cams are timed correctly, and it also involves setting the center-shot.

The goal is to make the necessary adjustments to the cams, the rest and the nocking point so an arrow leaves the bow perfectly straight. If your arrow isn’t leaving the bow perfectly straight, you’re always going to battle problems with accuracy.

The rest and nocking point work together to produce level arrow travel. The distance from the riser to the center of the rest also must be adjusted so the string pushes the arrow along a straight path away from the bow.

Sometimes, this flight path cannot be achieved by rest manipulation alone. Sometimes you have to tilt the top cam left or right to move the bowstring into the optimum position. This is called cam lean. You affect cam lean by twisting the yokes on bows that have them. This also requires a bow press and might be something best left to pro-shop technicians.

Paper tuning will help you figure out all the adjustments that must be made to get your bow to shoot straight. Paper tuning involves shooting an arrow through a sheet of paper from a distance of about 3 yards. The goal is to get a small, round hole that’s perfectly surrounded by three tears caused by your fletchings. The number of fletching tears, of course, depends on the number of fletchings on your arrow.

SIGHT AXES

Bow sights have three axes. The first one usually isn’t an issue and is typically set by the manufacturer. It’s the other two that can cause problems.

First, let’s understand the three axes. All three run through the sight pin housing, and all three axes must be perfectly level for optimum accuracy. If they aren’t, there are situations which can lead to your arrows hitting left or right of your aiming point.

The first axis runs through the sight-pin housing in a horizontal line, splitting it in half from left to right. The second axis is a line that runs through the exact middle of the pin housing like a bullet fired through a circle, or the way your eye looks through the housing. Finally, the third axis splits the housing in half with a line running top to bottom.

For optimum accuracy, all three axes must be perfectly level. If they aren’t, it can lead to your arrows hitting left or right of your aiming point.

Some sights don’t allow you to make second- and third-axis adjustments. If you have such a sight, there’s not much you can do to remedy the problems caused by improper alignment of those two axes. But if you can make those adjustments, then it’s up to you to do so.

Leveling the second axis is key for making sure you’re holding the bow straight. That is, you want the top limb of the bow directly over the bottom in relation to gravity. Your perception of what’s correct can get skewed when you’re shooting on uneven ground. That’s why most sights today have a level built into the scope. Whether you’re on the side of a mountain or on flat pavement, you can check your bow alignment by looking at your sight level.

But if the second axis isn’t leveled, then your sight level can lead you to believe your bow is tilted left or right when you actually are holding it perfectly straight, or that your bow is level when it’s actually canted. You will cant the bow one way or the other to bring the sight-level bubble into the middle, thinking that’s the correct bow position. It’s not, and you will see arrow drift as your shot distance increases.

The third axis is critical to treestand hunters. Let’s say you’ve got your second axis level and you’re holding the bow perfectly level. If you tilt the bow forward, like you would shoot toward the ground from a treestand, or tilt it back, as if you were shooting uphill, the bubble in your sight level remains in the middle on a sight which has a properly aligned third axis. If the bubble moves left or right, then you know the third axis isn’t level.

Manufacturers allow second- and third-axis adjustments in a variety of ways. Check with the maker of your sight to determine how to level those axes. You will need a vise or some other tool to hold your bow upright, and then a level to hang from your bowstring or riser to make sure the bow is standing perfectly straight. Once it is, you can make axes adjustments.

ARROW SPINE

In the simplest terms, arrow spine refers to how much a shaft flexes. All arrows should flex some, but you don’t want them to be too flexible, nor should they be too stiff. Generally, the higher your bow’s draw weight, the stiffer your arrow spine needs to be.

Shooting an arrow that’s too stiff or too weak will cause accuracy problems. Those problems will be magnified if you shoot a fixed-blade broadhead.

The first order of business is to refer to the spine chart created by the manufacturer of your arrows. They all have charts that will tell you which shaft to choose to match your draw length, arrow length and draw weight.

Most times, that’s all you need to do to make sure you’re shooting the right arrows. However, aggressive cams and short brace heights can affect shaft selection, and you might need to tweak your selection, especially if the charts say you are right on the line between two different spines.

Let’s say you are paper-tuning or broadhead-tuning your bow and you just can’t quite get things perfect. Maybe you are getting a slight tear in the paper left or right that won’t go away no matter what you do to adjust center-shot. For a right-handed archer, a stiff spine causes nock-right tears; a weak spine causes nock-left tears. Reverse those for lefties.

You can massage arrow spine by playing with the weight of your field points. Reducing point weight increases spine stiffness, while increasing point weight weakens the spine. Try different points if you’re having problems with paper tears or consistent accuracy. If a different weight point fixes the problem, you can change broadhead weight to match, or get arrows with a stiffer spine if a lighter point fixed the problem, or a lesser spine if a heavier point was the ticket.

UNEVEN ENDS

Unless you’ve got a 33-inch draw length, odds are you had your arrow shafts cut to fit your draw length. Sometimes, these cuts do not leave the shaft ends perfectly square. If that’s the case, then your points might sit in the shaft end at a slight angle. This probably isn’t going to cause much of an issue with a field point or even with many expandable broadheads.

But if you’re shooting a fixed-blade head, or an expandable that’s got some blade protrusion along the sides of the head, then you can count on accuracy problems. That head is going to wobble in flight, which is going to deflect air in an uneven fashion and cause your arrow to fly erratically.

You can check the square of your shaft ends by inserting a broadhead and then rolling the arrow across the edge of a table or counter top. You want the broadhead (fixed or expandable) to be able to spin freely. If the head isn’t sitting in the arrow straight, you’ll see it wobble as the arrow rolls.

When you buy arrows or shafts from a pro shop and have them cut to length there, tell the shop technician not to install the inserts. Get an arrow-squaring tool, go home and square the ends of the shafts with the tool. Basically, you seat an arrow on the tool, spin the shaft, and the tool will file down the end until it is square. Glue in the inserts and then square the ends again with the inserts in place. Do this, and you’ll know for sure that your heads will be in perfect alignment with the shafts.

Take care of your archery equipment and it will take care of you. Get everything set up correctly, and then the only thing standing between you and killer accuracy is practice. Knowing your archery equipment is tuned to perfection and that you’ve practiced regularly will give you supreme confidence when you’re in the woods drawing back on a bruiser buck.

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