Tuning A Broadhead

One of the things I do at the archery shop is tune broadheads to an arrow shaft. This video shows you how an arrow spins true when it is perfectly square to the shaft. If there is any sign of wobble to the arrow shaft, the arrow will plane in the direction the broadhead is pointing regardless if your bow is paper tuned.



The blades act as wings and truing up your broadhead to the shaft will virtually eliminate planing.

At the other end of the shaft, I fletch vanes with a 1 degree offset. This minimizes turbulence interference between the blades in the front and the vanes in the back when you align the blades with the vanes.

Idle Hands Are The Work Of The Devil

The Devil doesn't know me, then. My hands are always fixing or building something.

At the archery shop, the workbench was getting cluttered with parts and tools, so I took the initiative and build a 3-tiered rotating carousel parts holder, with materiel that I procured from Lowe's and soup containers from the local Chinese fast food joint:

Now I just need another six container to fill in the holes that remain unfilled. It's amazing what one can do with a drill, a hole bit, a jigsaw, a pipe cutter and some ingenuity.

New Toy

Okay, so a new bow miraculously came to me this past week. I shoot bows. Lots and lots of bows in the course of a week after I work on them. As I have been "promoted" to the pro shop's pro-shooter, Bowtech sent me a Destroyer 350. Hopefully, I'll get sponsored by some archery equipment manufacturers in the future.

On my bows, I particularly like the HHA Optimizer Lite sight, which I tinkered with and accurized.See the extra pin coming off the factory brass pin? I made and installed that. It helps increase accuracy to the sight by putting the pin closer to the sighting tape and gives me 3 points of alignment, rather than two - the brass pin, my pin and then the mark I put on the sighting tape. From stock, I wondered how I would be able to align a brass pin to the yardage mark,with only 2 points of reference, when the pin sits a good 3/32" away from the yardage mark, and any deviation of adjustment would change the point of impact at further distances. With this improvement, I'm able to dial in the yardage to the inch, which is how I can consistently group 3" at 60 yards in the bullseye.

I also shoot a Quality Archery Design Ultra-Rest LD, which provides total arrow clearance upon pulling the trigger. This affects accuracy because the arrow rest drops away at the moment of the shot so there is absolutely no contact with the arrow as it comes off the string. I don't like rests that capture the arrow from the start of the shot cycle to the end, because any kind of arrow contact at the shot detracts from accuracy. The one great thing the Ultra-Rest has above all other drop-away rests is that if you elect to not shoot, and you let down on the draw, the rest comes back to its resting position, keeping the arrow fully captured until you decide to shoot later. All the other drop-away rests fall away even if you let down slowly, causing the arrow to drop willy-nilly off the bow shelf. This would make a lot of noise and scare off any prey you are hunting.

So, back to the bow - I had a hell of a time paper-tuning it. After a few hours of shooting it, and then adjusting it, and then shooting it some more, and adjusting it some more, and so on and so forth, it turns out it needed a couple of turns on certain cables to bring the cams into time. I then shot an arrow that blew a perfect hole in the paper.

The only thing left for me to do is to take it to the range and sight it in from 20 yards to 70 yards. That should take me about half an hour. Guess I'll have to wait till the sun is out.

Bowtech General Bow

I'm a big fan of Bowtech bows, but they do have a few bow lines that just aren't up to snuff. One bow in particular is the General, produced in 2008.

The General simply has too many negatives against it to make it even a good bow. The first and second things they did wrong was placing the string stop at the end of the arm that houses the cable rollers. This creates an obstructed view through the string peep to the front sight. The other thing wrong with this string stop is the rubber insert that cushions the string when the bow is shot. This rubber piece is molded in a way that causes the string to kick to either the left or the right, throwing off the nock end of the arrow as it leaves the bow. Due to this, the General is a hard bow to paper tune. If it were up to me, I'd remove this string stop and install an aftermarket one in the rear threaded bushing.

Third, the cables rollers don't come with a fence that ensures the cables don't jump off the rollers. I've seen many longer-draw Generals come in where the cables derailed from the rollers. I've had to fabricate cable fences from aluminum stock to install on the General.

Fourth, the cable rollers don't pull the cables far enough away from the arrow shelf, so that an arrow fletched with a Blazer or Predator vane is most likely to hit a cable, deflecting the shot.

In my opinion, Bowtech should have recalled the bow and rectified these problems, because it would have been a great bow if they did.

If that General I tuned today belonged to me, I would have made it right.

Paper Tuning A Bow 101

This is a perfect tear through paper from an arrow shot off a bow that is perfectly tuned. It is one hole. The back of the arrow goes through the same hole that the point created. The 3 scraggly lines coming off the hole are created by the vanes.

This is an example of a bad tear from a bow that is not properly tuned. The point went in on the left and tore an elongated hole to the right where the back of the arrow completed the hole.

These two holes were created by the same bow. The problem with the bow were many - the cams were out of time; the drop-away rest was not correctly positioned at centerflight; the string suppressor was off-center and was shifting the bowstring to the right (and in turn, the nock end of the arrow) causing the back end of the arrow to kick to the right at the end of the shot cycle; the strings and cables were reaching the end of their life and will need to be replaced next year - the list goes on.

When a bow is paper tuned, windage will be consistent from 10 yards to 60 yards and beyond. If not, the arrow will shoot to the right or the left at further distances. In the example above, the bow before tuning will have shot the arrow to the right due to the string kicking the arrow to the right, at further distances, even though the shooter may have the bow sighted in at 20 yards.

Splitting Arrows And Other Things

For the past 7 years, I have immersed myself in my archery. I shoot with a compound bow with accessories only hunters use. I'm not into target shooting using scoped or magnified sights and I don't have use a 3-foot-long stabilizer, even though I own one. When I was first starting out, I knew almost nothing about bows. I bought the "best" bow that I could afford, which was a Reflex Grizzly. Reflex is the lesser quality brand by Hoyt. Mind you, this bow shot great for me, but not knowing anything initially about hand-shock, bow movement, bow noise, etc., I thought I had a really good bow for the money. (The Grizzly is on the right. My friend's Reflex Highlander is on the left)

I used to compete with guys at the range, one of whom was a real target shooter with all the aforementioned high-tech accoutrements on his bow. He was a real good shooter and would consistently score 300x on his league shoots every week. However, these shoots were no more than 20 yards. So he approached one night and bet me a dollar that I couldn't hit an M&M from that distance.

On my first attempt, I came pretty close, but I was just a hair away from it. And yes, the make it "interesting," the M&M was inserted into the foam targets, sideways. Well, for whatever reason, he didn't hit it either.

So, for the next half hour, we kept shooting at more and more M&Ms stuck into the target wall, until I finally hit it. Is it coincidence that it happened to be an "orange" M&M that I hit?

So I won a few dollars that night, but I was completely hooked on improving my game, so the speak. In the weeks, months and years to follow, I would continue to improve my shooting and increase my knowledge of archery. I eventually moved on to a better bow - the Bowtech Guardian. This was a radical new bow with a center-pivot design that eliminated 99% of the noise and shock when it was shot. This bow didn't move in my hand when I shot it.

Compared to the Guardian, shooting the Grizzly was like hitting an aluminum bat against a steel column. I quickly sold my Grizzly and stayed with the Guardian. It is one of the quietest and most shock-free bows I have ever shot. With this bow, I was consistently getting groups as tight as, or better, than this:

This is a paint chip of a cartoon character whose name rhymes with "Hickey House" from a big-box home improvement store whose name rhymes with "Dome Repo." It is about 1.5" in diameter with 6 of my arrows stuck in it from 20 yards. It was a real tack-driver, and before long, I was doing this:

This was my first "robin-hood" from 30 yards. There came others at different yardages with the most recent one from 80 yards:

This was shot from my Bowtech 82nd Airborne bow that you see me shooting in a previous post. I had just gotten a new set of arrows and these happened to be the first 2 shots I took with them from 80 yards. I was in the process of sighting in the bow at that distance, with my aimpoint being the bullseye on both shots. The 82nd Airborne is a really nice bow also, but it has something the Guardian doesn't have: speed. It is rated at 342 fps with a 300 grain arrow at 60# with a 30" drawlength. At my drawlength of 26.5", I can send a 300 grain arrow downrange at 303 fps. My Guardian only rated around 318 fps with a 300 grain arrow at 60# and 30" drawlength. A 300 grain arrow from my Guardian only gets me about 260 fps.

However, being the innovative schmuck that I am, I "improved" my Guardian with an aftermarket roller cable guard that helped increase my Guardian's peak weight from 62#* to 67#.

My saving grace that I didn't blow up the bow's limbs is that I am a short draw, so the limbs aren't as stressed at 26.5" as they would be with someone with a 28" or greater drawlength. Of course, in doing this modification, I voided the warranty on my bow, but I'm not concerned about that. If the limbs crack, I'll just get new ones that are 70# and change the roller guard back to the stock cable guide rod and slide.

Both of my bows are tack-drivers, but they woudn't be if I didn't have a professional bow tuner take me under his wing as an apprentice. Having been unemployed for over 18 months, I spend a lot of my time at the shop learning to tune bows and arrows between looking for a job (yes, arrows have to be tuned when you put broadheads on, but that's a topic for another day).

I also shoot a recurve bow with arrows fletched with feathers. Though they are not as accurate as a compound bow, a recurve's accuracy is mostly up to the archer. And I do have one "robin-hood" with my recurve at 20 yards, though I didn't take a picture of it.

* Bowtech's bows never come in at or below their 60# ratings, and are always 2 or 3 pounds over. At 67# and 26.5" drawlength, my Guardian shoots 385 grain arrows at 260 fps. The peak weight of my 82nd Airborne was 62# as well, when I first bought it.