Bowsite.com

Tuning up and blowing up

I was discussing my setup with another trad archer on FB and he was surprised I was shooting such heavy point weight on a 400 spine shaft out of my setup and suggested I bareshaft tune to double check. granted, I made these arrows years and three bows ago...I just shot them with this bow, they few straight so I said whatevs and just kept shooting. these are 28.5" shafts with 100 gn brass inserts, and 250 grain field points.

so today I trimmed the quills off of 2 shafts and shot a bunch of groups. WOAH... the bare shafts not only flew tail left, but impacted several inches right of the groups (pic 1).

I'd ordered a point weight test kit, but it hasn't been delivered yet, so I rifled through my compound stuff and found some 125gn field points, put them on the bareshafts ans shot several more groups. they impacted right with the groups. and then disaster..lol..I robinhooded a fletched shaft with one of the bare shafts (pic 2). lol...so then I swapped all the 250gn points with 125s....omg...flatter shooting and grouping well...but still not perfect. but I'm going to leave it there until the test kit comes in. I want to try shooting full length shafts and tuning those up because I'm switching over to a fixed crawl and my gap with these short shafts is HUGE. longer-flatter shooting shafts should give me a better point-on & smaller gaps.

Hick, Food for thought, your mileage may vary. I tune so that my bare shafts are hitting an inch or two weak at 20 yards. Adding feathers stiffens the spine a tiny bit, but I think more important, is that the odds of a short draw or a less than ideal release under hunting conditions is much higher. Then the slightly weak shaft helps. I gave up on playing with high FOC a long time ago and default to the longest shaft and a lighter head to help with the gap and trajectory estimation. I just came in from shooting some newly made arrows (XX75-1816 alum / 100gr / 28.75" BOP / 409 gr finshed weight) my draw is 26". Using three under at the nock my point on is 25 yards. Between, 15 - 20 yards I only need to see a sliver of daylight below the target armpit, 3D deer. It is a nice 3d setup and pretty quick. I'd go for a heavier shaft when hunting season rolls around. Tekoa

And I haven't gone to the dark side using aluminums. That is my recurve setup. The longbows still get wood shafts.

John, I haven't shot woodies in well over a decade, lol.

I am not gonna micro-tune these as I said, want longer shafts (don't we all. :D ) to get that point on dialed in. I'm shooting fairly heavy with 60@28 setup with a 28 5 in draw. These arrows are actually too short anyway as I may be bumping up against the riser with a broadhead

I've got a dozen unopened GT Trad 5575 blems that I'm gonna tune at 32 or 31 inches.

Amazing to see the ins and outside of trad. Thanks for the education gentlemen!

Once you find a setup that works it can be minimalist. But once you start fiddlin with arrow setups the floodgate opens.

Hick im messing with my setup in the next couple of weeks, looking for better penetration so I'll be changing heads I have been shooting the last few years and i'll post up my experiment. Tekoa is really knowledgeable on this and sent me some really useful info recently. I only shoot wood shafts so I'm kind of tuning what I like to do to what I want it to. New heads, FOC will all be on the table. Just been too busy lately to get on it.

Back in the day we used to foot woodies to get the FOC up. :)

I haven't shot woodies in at least 15 years. once I went carbon it was hard to go back.

Did some tuning of a couple full length shafts yesterday...one Vapor 3000 (400 spine) and one GT Trad 5575 (400 Spine.) the vapor flew okay but weak, the GT flew weak but also way nock high....after struggling with it for a while I discovered that the GT nocks are way shorter top to bottom than the vapor and there was too much slop in between muy string nocks. put the vapor nock in the GT shaft and flew much better. ended up with 200 gns up front/50 gn insert, and a footing, and had to shorten the shafts a bit...so I'm guessing they are about 31"....but got them flying slightly weak compared to my fletched shafts.

fletched them up quick with just fletch tape and shot and flew like darts and had short fletched and the full length fletched within the 4 ring from 10 and 15. then I just shot the full length from 25yards and was hitting the 1 & 2 rings consistently at 6oclock...so I just gotta get the point on/crawl down. it is so much easier to gap with a longer shaft. so, these full lengths ended up being 598gns over all, (200 gn point, 50 gn insert, and 30 gn footing) and with this bow are prob right around 10gpp (short 60 pound limbs on a 19" ILF riser).

I've got a field point test kit coming in today that has 100, 125, 145, 175, 200, and 250 heads...so I'm gonna do some more precise tuning later on...

Wood versus carbon for trad. I like wood because it smells good when making arrows. Seriously, for me it is just because I like it. Not much logic involved. That said my practice routine is to shoot one arrow, over and over at unmarked distances. So perfect arrow to arrow group consistency doesn't come into play. I will confirm grouping for the four in my quiver when hunting.

Register here to reply to this topic