When you put hard earned dimes into your favourite bow, you should then begin the often tedious process of tuning it, not by means of adding flashy colours going large on your accessories, but by micro adjustments to your sights, peeps, D-loops, nocks, arrow rest, shooting centre, sight alignment, string yield; all with your favourite field tips and probably again with your top of the line but very divergent broadheads. At least that’s what happened to me.
Tuning should be all about your arrows hitting your target consistently, accurately and with the cleanest flight out of any divergences and oscillations. It is about achieving consistent true flight.
First off, you should verify that the arrow centre on your rest is spot on. Without that, you’ll be able to compensate only marginally and there will always be a certain amount of fishtailing, which is not necessarily a big deal if you shoot light field tips only. If you shoot broadheads though, you better have a target the size of small aircraft carrier or floating casinos, or you will easily overshoot and end in the bush looking for your arrows, if you are lucky. That is because you may actually find the arrows and they might be in reusable shape after a good scrub. If you aren’t so lucky and you somehow manage to shoot your arrows through the impossibly small gap between your target and the nice solid wooden club target used to rest your own target against, you’ll hear that certain sound of disaster, just while you’re still in full draw position, as if time had stopped the moment the trigger let go. Yes you guessed it, it just happened to me and when I got to the crash site, all there was to see was a decapitated arrow shaft with what looked like an exploded forward end; and of course, no sign of the broadhead. Once again those dimes just seem to evaporate eh? Some blind touching around made me think that the broadhead may have not quite evaporated, perhaps it only got liquefied into the earth, so the knive came out and started slicing out bricks of ground and grass at every suspicious location, carefully mincing them afterwards to reveal no sign of it. After loosing a good amount of valuable daylight, SAR got called off and moved on.
A few rounds later and just for the fun of it, I had got the hang of pointing some distance up and left to where I was aiming, well enough that a pair of arrows wrapped around each other, as much as stiff carbon shafts allow, in a most definite kissing position. Upon close inspection afterwards showed that one of the arrows suffered from severe sliced vane disorder, leaving no option but to partly mutilate it, which interestingly enough, hardly affected the already fishtailing flight pattern. Well, I'm sure the purist would now scream upheaval running about with arms up in the air, but I was happy as it kept the so-called "minute of grapefruit", well “minute of foot” perhaps.
To adjust your nock centre can be an interesting experiment as well. Ideally speaking, you should need couple of fletched arrows and a bunch without. Group the fletched arrows in the target and take that as your datum, then aim for that same spot with the unfletched arrows and observe whether the nock position and the arrow rest are rightly set or not.
If impact point of the bare shafts is too high then your arrow stance aims too high and so your nock point is too low, thereby it should be raised accordingly. Similarly, if the bare shafts impact too low then the nock point should be lowered.
Along the horizontal axis, if the bare shafts impact too far right, the arrow rest is also offset to the right and should be moved to the left. Consequently, if the bare shafts impact too far left, the arrow rest should be moved to the right.
Bare in mind that lateral arrow shift is also affected by the arrow stiffness and to test that, again, you’ll need a bunch of fletched arrows and one or two without vanes. First off, fire a group of fletched arrows followed by the unfletched arrow. Three things can happen to the vaneless arrow, it veers off to the right, to the left or it packs onto the existing group. It is generally accepted that if the unfletched arrow veers left, it is too flexible or that it has a low stiffness, whereas it if veers right, it has too high a stiffness.
Ways to improve an exceedingly flexible arrow are to use lighter arrow tips, shorten the arrow and reduce the draw weight. When your arrows appear too stiff, increasing the arrow tip weight and the draw weight should help.
If you have a case of too stiff an arrow and you are at the top load rating of your bow and you do not want to increase the weight of your tips, there is always the possibility to consider a faster spinning fletching; and if not, a trip to the local shop might just fix that in a less intricate way.
Fletching in general is like every other component you can find in this sport, with an immense list of suppliers, each with their particular criteria of material, geometry and design peculiarities; and what choice you take on your fletching will vary depending on how you see archery.
For my first set of arrows, I relied on the retailer recommendation of the very standard four inch soft rubber vanes, which worked quite well until I realized that my whisker-style arrow rest was beginning to damage the fletching. It turned out that vanes can only do so many pass-throughs the whisker rest fibres until the fletching begins to weave and stretch.
Looking at ways to repair it, I came across the procedure of dipping the vanes into boiling water then out and into almost frozen water. So I prepared two vases one with each and then, one at a time, immersed the arrows with the damaged fletching into the boiling water for 30 seconds or so, holding it upright so that the fletching would not touch anything other than water, then out and into the cold water for another 30 seconds, with slight adjustments prior to the cold bath if necessary. I had to repeat it a few times, but the result was a rather rejuvenated fletching.
While taking care of my arrows another time, I noticed how the vanes were not all set at the same angle, with some having a clear straight setup or zero incidence, while others would have up to 2 degrees. That explained how some arrows repeatedly flew with a characteristic detuned or fishtailing flight, almost like the Dutch roll found on older aircraft designs.
After much consideration I decided to remove the worst fletching of about half of my arrows and procured enough shrink-to-fit fletching from a reputable brand, to cater for the old and a new set of hunting arrows. I did as thorough job as possible, removing every proof that those arrows had ever been fletched, then after the subsequent cleaning and preparation, I mounted the broadheads on the arrow, aligned the new fletching to them and dipped for 10 second into boiling water. A close examination showed that I had just eliminated the vane angle and vane positioning as a variable, which had just become a constant feature across my arrows. With this new quick spin fletching, the arrows should benefit from a more stable flight and therefore accuracy; and let’s face it, if archery is not about accuracy, whether for competition, hunting or simply to make a point, why would you spend hard-earned cash on the best equipment you can get right?
All right then, it does not matter if you scrolled all the way down to the most wanted section of this blog or if you actually read all my jabbering, here’s today’s recipe:
Veal, beef and pork shepherd’s pie
Tuning should be all about your arrows hitting your target consistently, accurately and with the cleanest flight out of any divergences and oscillations. It is about achieving consistent true flight.
First off, you should verify that the arrow centre on your rest is spot on. Without that, you’ll be able to compensate only marginally and there will always be a certain amount of fishtailing, which is not necessarily a big deal if you shoot light field tips only. If you shoot broadheads though, you better have a target the size of small aircraft carrier or floating casinos, or you will easily overshoot and end in the bush looking for your arrows, if you are lucky. That is because you may actually find the arrows and they might be in reusable shape after a good scrub. If you aren’t so lucky and you somehow manage to shoot your arrows through the impossibly small gap between your target and the nice solid wooden club target used to rest your own target against, you’ll hear that certain sound of disaster, just while you’re still in full draw position, as if time had stopped the moment the trigger let go. Yes you guessed it, it just happened to me and when I got to the crash site, all there was to see was a decapitated arrow shaft with what looked like an exploded forward end; and of course, no sign of the broadhead. Once again those dimes just seem to evaporate eh? Some blind touching around made me think that the broadhead may have not quite evaporated, perhaps it only got liquefied into the earth, so the knive came out and started slicing out bricks of ground and grass at every suspicious location, carefully mincing them afterwards to reveal no sign of it. After loosing a good amount of valuable daylight, SAR got called off and moved on.
A few rounds later and just for the fun of it, I had got the hang of pointing some distance up and left to where I was aiming, well enough that a pair of arrows wrapped around each other, as much as stiff carbon shafts allow, in a most definite kissing position. Upon close inspection afterwards showed that one of the arrows suffered from severe sliced vane disorder, leaving no option but to partly mutilate it, which interestingly enough, hardly affected the already fishtailing flight pattern. Well, I'm sure the purist would now scream upheaval running about with arms up in the air, but I was happy as it kept the so-called "minute of grapefruit", well “minute of foot” perhaps.
To adjust your nock centre can be an interesting experiment as well. Ideally speaking, you should need couple of fletched arrows and a bunch without. Group the fletched arrows in the target and take that as your datum, then aim for that same spot with the unfletched arrows and observe whether the nock position and the arrow rest are rightly set or not.
If impact point of the bare shafts is too high then your arrow stance aims too high and so your nock point is too low, thereby it should be raised accordingly. Similarly, if the bare shafts impact too low then the nock point should be lowered.
Along the horizontal axis, if the bare shafts impact too far right, the arrow rest is also offset to the right and should be moved to the left. Consequently, if the bare shafts impact too far left, the arrow rest should be moved to the right.
Bare in mind that lateral arrow shift is also affected by the arrow stiffness and to test that, again, you’ll need a bunch of fletched arrows and one or two without vanes. First off, fire a group of fletched arrows followed by the unfletched arrow. Three things can happen to the vaneless arrow, it veers off to the right, to the left or it packs onto the existing group. It is generally accepted that if the unfletched arrow veers left, it is too flexible or that it has a low stiffness, whereas it if veers right, it has too high a stiffness.
Ways to improve an exceedingly flexible arrow are to use lighter arrow tips, shorten the arrow and reduce the draw weight. When your arrows appear too stiff, increasing the arrow tip weight and the draw weight should help.
If you have a case of too stiff an arrow and you are at the top load rating of your bow and you do not want to increase the weight of your tips, there is always the possibility to consider a faster spinning fletching; and if not, a trip to the local shop might just fix that in a less intricate way.
Fletching in general is like every other component you can find in this sport, with an immense list of suppliers, each with their particular criteria of material, geometry and design peculiarities; and what choice you take on your fletching will vary depending on how you see archery.
For my first set of arrows, I relied on the retailer recommendation of the very standard four inch soft rubber vanes, which worked quite well until I realized that my whisker-style arrow rest was beginning to damage the fletching. It turned out that vanes can only do so many pass-throughs the whisker rest fibres until the fletching begins to weave and stretch.
Looking at ways to repair it, I came across the procedure of dipping the vanes into boiling water then out and into almost frozen water. So I prepared two vases one with each and then, one at a time, immersed the arrows with the damaged fletching into the boiling water for 30 seconds or so, holding it upright so that the fletching would not touch anything other than water, then out and into the cold water for another 30 seconds, with slight adjustments prior to the cold bath if necessary. I had to repeat it a few times, but the result was a rather rejuvenated fletching.
While taking care of my arrows another time, I noticed how the vanes were not all set at the same angle, with some having a clear straight setup or zero incidence, while others would have up to 2 degrees. That explained how some arrows repeatedly flew with a characteristic detuned or fishtailing flight, almost like the Dutch roll found on older aircraft designs.
After much consideration I decided to remove the worst fletching of about half of my arrows and procured enough shrink-to-fit fletching from a reputable brand, to cater for the old and a new set of hunting arrows. I did as thorough job as possible, removing every proof that those arrows had ever been fletched, then after the subsequent cleaning and preparation, I mounted the broadheads on the arrow, aligned the new fletching to them and dipped for 10 second into boiling water. A close examination showed that I had just eliminated the vane angle and vane positioning as a variable, which had just become a constant feature across my arrows. With this new quick spin fletching, the arrows should benefit from a more stable flight and therefore accuracy; and let’s face it, if archery is not about accuracy, whether for competition, hunting or simply to make a point, why would you spend hard-earned cash on the best equipment you can get right?
All right then, it does not matter if you scrolled all the way down to the most wanted section of this blog or if you actually read all my jabbering, here’s today’s recipe:
Veal, beef and pork shepherd’s pie
This is dinner tonight with some friends coming over and writing about it has advanced my otherwise routinely accurate hunger ramblings faster than the good o’Concord used to shrink time zones… Anyways, here it is:
Ingredients:
3 tbsp of olive oil
1 large onion finely chopped
1 large carrot finely chopped
300 gr of minced veal, 300 gr of minced beef and 300 gr of pork
2 cups of meat broth
1 cup of tomato sauce
1 tsp of chopped thyme
1 tsp of chopped parsley
1½ cups of peas
1 kg of nice potatoes in bite cuts
6 tbsp butter (unsalted)
½ cup of milk
Salt, white pepper and nutmeg
Preparation:
Heat the oil at medium-high heat then add the carrot and onion and when the onions become transparent through in the mince and reduce to medium heat for 15 minutes, cooking until reaches an even brown colour.
Add the tomato, herbs and broth and simmer for 10 minutes, adding the peas at the end.
Move all the food into a baking dish and leave to rest.
Boil the potatoes in salty water for 20 minutes at medium heat, drain and mash with the butter milk and add a pinch of salt, pepper and nutmeg.
Spread the mash over the meat with a fork and back until golden for 25-30 mins in a preheated oven at 200°C.
Enjoy.. and if anyone tries it, let me know how it went!
