How do you tune your recurve bow?

[joetapley]

Surely a tuned setup is better, regardless of the archers ability

Yes it is - but level of tuning, as Rik said, is limited to the archer's skill level. I've never bothered to try to tune a bow (beyond basic setup level) as in my case the limiting factor is the the nut on the string, not the equipment.

[Marcus26]

Originally Posted by Rik

Only one of the options listed is "tuning"... tuning is about fiddling with a setup to improve groups. Most people aren't good enough to need to do it.

Sorry Rik that's totally wrong.
We only do the above process with my wife's bow before she goes out and shoots 290 Vegas rounds with her recurve and X10's. Top shooters don't 'fiddle' with their gear. They have a very deliberate and often straightforward process that they use to setup and that's it. No more changes untill something moves. She has not touched her gear since she got back from Madrid and switched from 68" to 66" limbs.


It's average to bad archers that fiddle.


tel you are spot on, every archer would benifit from a tuned setup. More often than not people will make statements like "I won't do that till I'm shooting 1200.." etc and yet that won't shoot that score till they do that required thing.

[currie1014]

yes that correct. I hope people did not read what i wrote as negative, it was not intended to be so.

[Shirt]

1) Find arrows that are correct on spine chart and buy some second hand.
2) Tune them as Marcus said and shoot OK.
3) Change limbs so arrows no longer spine. Decide that since you need about an extra inch of limb bolt to make them work, they WON'T work, so you might as well shoot them at a happy poundage.
4) #### about with button till they seem to group.
5) Shoot the damn things in the happy certainty that they'll go in the middle.

And then figure out roughly what spine you actually NEED so when you next buy arrows, you can get it right...

[Rik]

Originally Posted by Marcus26

Sorry Rik that's totally wrong.
We only do the above process with my wife's bow before she goes out and shoots 290 Vegas rounds with her recurve and X10's. Top shooters don't 'fiddle' with their gear. They have a very deliberate and often straightforward process that they use to setup and that's it. No more changes untill something moves. She has not touched her gear since she got back from Madrid and switched from 68" to 66" limbs.


It's average to bad archers that fiddle.

I know, it's a bad choice of words... It's better to say that tuning is a statistical process, of making small changes to a setup, to improve group size. You make a change, check the effect, reverse it if necessary. When you have a setup that produces groups of the desired size, you leave it alone. Is that a better way to put it?

tel you are spot on, every archer would benifit from a tuned setup. More often than not people will make statements like "I won't do that till I'm shooting 1200.." etc and yet that won't shoot that score till they do that required thing.

Most of the stuff that people call "tuning" is just basic setup - getting the arrow to leave the bow more or less straight and so that you don't have lateral sight shifts as you change distances. If that's tuning, then "making music" consists of taking bits of other people's records and chucking them together with a mixing desk (oh hang on, some people do think that... :wink: ).

The problem with real tuning is that it's time consuming. Most of us would benefit from more time spent learning to shoot than spent on tuning. Some people get stuck in a "tune, tune, tune" cycle, thinking it will gain them points (cf your remark about bad archers). Which is probably the origin of the "if you shoot less than 1200, it's not worth it" kind of remarks...

[Marcus26]

Well take it for what you wish, but I know of no top shooters who take more than about 10 minutes to tune their bows. The arrows either fly straight or they do not.

[SLOWHAND]

If you have access to an arrow cutter or live near to a friendly archery shop like custom built in Guisborough then get your arrows an inch or so longer than you normally would (so they are just on the clicker plate). If they are a little weak then cut them down by increments of a quarter inch untill the bare shaft tunes with the fletched arrows. ( I find that a half inch can make quite a difference to the tune). if they are a little stiff then go up a weight in pile and repeat the process. I also tune using pile weight and using a combination of these two methods I can get a bare shaft touching the others at 20yards. I have two sets of competition arrows, Ace 570's with 90 grain piles and Ace 520's that are half an inch longer and have 110 grain piles. The tune is almost the same (sight marks will vary of course) I got the 570's a couple of weeks ago and have already shot a 590 Portsmouth with them in the postal league. I shot a 578 FITA 25 at Pendle with the 520's so the system seems to work for me.

[Murray]

Too few people , IMO, consider adjusting bow weight to get arrows to tune. They seem to be superglued to a particular bow weight for some inexplicable reason. Half a pound here or there makes a big difference to how the arrows will tune.

As Marcus said, it doesn't need to take long to get a tune which is "good enough" for a large percentage of archers.

I can't comment on "top archers" tuning methods as I've never seen any of them do it in reality, although the fine-tune methods explained by Rick McKinney and Jay Barrs were pretty extensive and would take the best part of a day - whether they used these methods themselves, I couldn't say.

Personally, I set the sight vertically above the shaft, shoot bareshaft at up to 30m, bring the brasehaft in with a combination of bow weight and button (I don't like the button too stiff or too weak, hence the need to use adjust bow weight). If the shaft still isn't in the middle, there's something wrong with the spine selection.

Finally, I then check my windage is right for 30/50/70/90 then (if I'm shooting well enough) group tune at 70.

[Rik]

The only thing I immediately recall Rick McKinney saying about his setup methods, was that he did bareshaft tests out to 70m, then went back to a short distance and made a note of the bare shaft position there. That way he could duplicate the setup using bareshaft at the short distance, with less need for messing around with the rest of it (or words to that effect). But that's just basic setup, not fine tuning...

[Marcus26]

How do you 'fine tune' Rik? In my experiance there simply is nothing more to it, those who 'fine tune' never get it 'spot on' as it's a holy grail they are searching for.

One of the girls I coach used the method I described with a new set of arrows and immediatly shot 324 at 50m on an 80cm face. No need to mess with that any further, you just run teh risk of making things worse.