Dai­ly we re­ceive emails from peo­ple look­ing for ad­vice on ar­row set up, broad-head choice, or just gen­er­al bow tun­ing ques­tions. We are hap­py to help re­gard­less of whether they buy any­thing or not, we just want our con­tri­bu­tion to be pro­vid­ing good in­for­ma­tion to make more bowhunters suc­cess­ful. If it was just about mon­ey for us we would make sin­gle bev­el broad­heads.....but that’s for an­oth­er day.

    So what are some of the com­mon is­sues that bowhunters are ex­pe­ri­enc­ing and look­ing for as­sistance with? Well most are self in­duced due to the lack of a strong archery foun­da­tion. What does that mean ex­act­ly? I’ll do my best to ex­plain and hopeful­ly pro­vide clar­i­ty in hopes of sav­ing peo­ple a lot of un­due stress.

We ask four ques­tions when folks reach out to us through our web­site; com-pound/tra­di­tion­al, draw length, draw weight, and point weight. Those four an­swers will pro­vide us the foun­da­tion­al in­for­ma­tion we need to pro­vide the best pos­si­ble assistance. Here’s an ex­am­ple of what we re­ceive:

Only com­pound is an­swered, the oth­er three ques­tions are blank and it goes a little some­thing like this......

    “Right now I’m shoot­ing a 420 grain ar­row at 292 fps with an FOC of 13.9%. I want to in­crease my FOC to at least 19% and still main­tain my ar­row weight and speed. Can you make a rec­om­men­da­tion?”

    “With re­gards to your broad­heads, what Rock­well Hard­ness do you treat your blades to and do you have batch re­ports for each treat­ment? Will you be of­fer­ing your heads in sin­gle bev­el in the fu­ture?”

    “Do you fletch left he­li­cal and to what de­gree? My ar­row clocks left off my bow
and I have to main­tain that ro­ta­tion for op­ti­mum ac­cu­ra­cy. Also, do you mark the spine of your shafts for spine align­ment? Are your shafts weight matched with­in one grain?”

Whew....ex­haust­ing just read­ing all that isn’t it? What I want to an­swer is sim­ply this; TURN OFF YOU­TUBE!!!

    I’m sure this is go­ing to of­fend many, but some­times you have to hurt a few feel-ings to en­act much need­ed change. Here’s the hard truth, you can’t shoot well enough to no­tice the dif­fer­ence of most of that stuff, none of us can.

    Archers are skip­ping over the foun­da­tion­al as­pects of shoot­ing a bow and go­ing right to the fi­nite de­tails that hon­est­ly don’t mat­ter, and here’s why. Con­tent cre­ators are al­ways starv­ing for con­tent in or­der to stay rel­e­vant and they put out in­for­ma­tion that is just not ac­cu­rate and caus­es more harm than good. In most cas­es it’s not in­tention­al, it’s just that they lack the knowl­edge them­selves and are just re­peat­ing what they’ve heard else­where. Un­for­tu­nate­ly, the con­sumer is the ul­ti­mate vic­tim of this misin­for­ma­tion.

    When you’re learn­ing to drive, your par­ents put you in the fam­i­ly truck­ster and slow and steady is the only speed. You don’t learn to drive in a For­mu­la One race car at 250mph. The same ap­plies with archery, if you are slow and steady you’re go­ing to de­vel­op the fun­da­men­tals of shoot­ing that are crit­i­cal in or­der to ac­cu­rate­ly shoot broad­heads at game.

    The best shoot­ers in the world don’t even know what their FOC is. Just ask Levi Mor­gan, he couldn’t tell you be­cause he doesn’t care. Ad­di­tion­al­ly, I’ve heard him say in per­son and on mul­ti­ple pod­casts that he gets his com­pe­ti­tion ar­rows with­in 6 grains....and he’s lit­er­al­ly shoot­ing spots the size of a dime at un­known yardages. The dif­fer­ence in per­for­mance over 5-10% of FOC vari­ance is not mea­sur­able by hu­man shoot­ing stan­dards, it’s just not.

    With re­gards to clock­ing ar­rows based on their nat­ur­al ro­ta­tion off the string, we hu­mans just can’t ex­e­cute a re­peat­able shot well enough to no­tice. We’ve shot hun-dreds of ar­rows fletched both left and right to­geth­er at dis­tance and if the bow is re-mote­ly tuned they group all to­geth­er.

    Spine align­ment is real and it’s a dif­fer­ence mak­er. Here’s the kick­er.....it’s only an is­sue on some ar­rows. Qual­i­ty shafts that are man­u­fac­tured prop­er­ly don’t re­quire spine align­ment, ours don’t. I’m sure this will get all the mi­cro in­flu­encers up in arms be­cause they have to spine align the ex­pen­sive ar­rows they’re pro­mot­ing but the truth is what it is, sor­ry.

    I could go on and on list­ing all the fi­nite de­tails that many archers are ob­sessed
with but I’ll sum­ma­rize what’s tru­ly im­por­tant in­stead, and this is in no par­tic­u­lar or­der.

1. Shoot a heav­ier ar­row at a slow­er speed and fo­cus on ex­e­cut­ing per­fect shots. Make sure that you can shoot ac­cu­rate­ly enough first to even at-
tempt to mi­cro-tune your set up.

2. Learn the ar­row’s tra­jec­to­ry and try shoot­ing mul­ti­ple ranges with one pin.
This will force you to learn the cast of your ar­row. I prom­ise you that hav­ing
that ca­pa­bil­i­ty will pay div­i­dends in the field.

3. Prac­tice forc­ing your­self to in­duce bad grip torque a cer­tain way as to
achieve poor ar­row flight. Torque a group left, then right and you’ll amazed
what you’ll learn by in­ten­tion­al­ly do­ing it wrong.

4. Fletch your own ar­rows, tie your own D-loop and peep, and re-serve your
string. Get very fa­mil­iar with your equip­ment be­cause five miles in the
back­coun­try is not the place to learn.

5. You DO NOT have to get a new bow every year. It would be much bet­ter to
keep a bow as long as pos­si­ble to be­come in­ti­mate­ly fa­mil­iar with it.

6. Keep your bow sim­ple, sim­ple, sim­ple! If I could weld every­thing to my
bow to elim­i­nate screws, springs, etc I’d be over­joyed.

7. Don’t fol­low every new trend, gad­get, or prod­uct. There’s re­al­ly not been
any new prod­uct in the last ten years that I would con­sid­er a “game chang-
er”. In fact, the ma­jor­i­ty of new prod­ucts I’ve seen re­leased in the last few
years have been worse rather than an im­prove­ment.

8. Do not set your bow up one way for 3D and an­oth­er way for hunt­ing.
You’re de­feat­ing the pur­pose.

    I know that some of this may come across as pes­simistic to an ex­tent, but there’s no oth­er way to com­mu­ni­cate the dif­fer­ence be­tween BS and the truth with­out sound­ing that way. Our goal is to see more guy’s suc­cess sto­ries each year and the only way to do that is im­part what knowl­edge we have from a life­time of ex­pe­ri­ences, both good and bad.

    As al­ways, thank you for your con­tin­ued sup­port of this lit­tle com­pa­ny we love so
much. It’s brings great joy to us each day as we con­tin­ue to ex­pand our reach to those seek­ing guid­ance in their jour­ney to be­com­ing a bet­ter bowhunter.