"Straight as an arrow." It’s a saying that’s used beyond archery, but archery is its root.
Achieving perfect arrow flight, or, getting your arrows to fly as “straight as an arrow,” should be the goal of every archer. If your arrow flight is true, then the sky’s the limit for accuracy. Paper tuning is one of the most common ways compound archers using mechanical releases determine whether their arrows are leaving their bows in a straight line. Through paper tuning you can determine that your arrow rest, bowstring, cams, and nocking point are all perfectly aligned, and that you are shooting the proper arrows for your setup. It also lets you know if your hand position on the bow and your shooting form are both correct.
So what you’ll need to paper tune is your bow and some arrows, a frame that can hold paper for you to shoot through, a target backstop and a shooting range. Your frame needs to hold the paper by all four corners, so it is rigid when you shoot through it. And the frame needs to be positioned high enough that you can shoot straight through it. You don’t want to shoot at a steep angle up or down. There’s a do-it-yourself paper tuning kit made by .30-06 Outdoors that provides a frame and paper to shoot through. All you have to do is set it on a stand holding the paper at roughly chest height. Place your target backstop 4-6 feet beyond the paper, so the arrow can pass all the way through the paper before it hits the target. You should stand about 6 feet away from the paper.
Before you shoot, you must make sure your hand position on the bow grip is correct. If you are torquing the bow at the shot, due to improper hand position, none of the bow settings will matter. You will have erratic arrow flight. Also, you must get a smooth, clean release. Don’t slap the trigger or pull your release hand out to the side. Simply pull straight back through the shot with your release. Also make sure to ensure your cams (assuming your bow has a dual-cam system) are in time - we will go over what that means later in the article.
So you take a good shot through the paper. What you want to see is a round hole with three or four slices extending out from it – depending on the number of fletchings on your arrow. If you see that, yell, “Bullet-hole!” and don’t change anything. Your setup is perfect. Short of the bullet hole, what you’ll see is a tear that features a rounded end where the arrow point went through the paper, and a three- or four-slotted hole made by the fletched end of the arrow. Think about the layout of your tear to figure out how your arrow is flying. If the rounded end is down and the fletched hole is above it, for example, then you know your arrow is flying nose down, with the point below the nock - this means your arrow is hitting the paper nock high.
Here’s a list of tears, and the most common remedies for each.
Nock High: Move your nocking point down, or your rest up.
Nock Low: Move your nocking point up, or your rest down.
Nock Right: Move rest away from the riser on a right-handed bow, toward the riser for a lefty - shift the cams towards the right on a right-handed bow, towards the left for a left-handed bow. This tear also can mean your arrow’s spine is too stiff. Switch to an arrow with a weaker spine, or you can increase the point weight on your arrow, which will weaken its spine.
Nock Left: Move rest toward riser for right-handed shooter, away for a lefty - shift the cams towards the left on a right-handed bow, towards the right for a left-handed bow. This tear also can mean the arrow’s spine is too weak. Switch to an arrow with a stiffer spine, or reduce your point weight.
If you’re scratching your head over the fixes to the rest for point-right and point-left tears, know that many archers struggle with solving horizontal tears, because the corrective action is counterintuitive. Logic would seem to dictate that if the paper tear shows the nock is left of the point – commonly called a nock-left tear - then you should move the rest left, to push the point left. But that’s not the case. What happens is, the arrow wants to fly in the direction of the string’s travel. So if your rest is too far to the left, the point will kick to the right as it leaves the rest to follow the string path, and your paper hole will show a nock-left tear. Move the rest right to solve the problem.
Take three shots through the paper each time you make a setting adjustment. If all three shots show the same paper tears, then you know they’re likely the result of issues with your bow, rather than your form.
Paper Tuning Steps and Solutions
In this section, I will go over the steps for each common solution to tear issues. This includes diagnosing the issue, determining the fix, and adjusting to a clean paper tear.
Rest Adjustment: Rest adjustment is the simplest and most common adjustment for fixing paper tears. Adjusting the elevation and horizontal position of your rest can greatly change arrow tune. If you have a paper tear that is high and left, move your rest up and to the left. You do want to watch out for extreme changes, though, where your rest is in an extreme position in order to achieve a solid paper tear - this can be indicative of other setup issues such as those below.
Nock Point Adjustment: This one is pretty simple. If your nocking point is not in the proper place along your shoot string serving, then your arrow is going to kick high or low through paper. If your tear shows nock high, you can move your nocking point down. If it shows nock low, you can move your nocking point up. As a starting point in your tuning process, the arrow shaft should be level with the berger holes on your riser. Too much change either way and you may need to adjust your rest and nocking point back to neutral.
Cam Shift: A good visual start to tuning your bow is to hold it out in front of you and see if the cams, the riser, the string, and the arrow (nocked on the string) are all relatively in line. If they are, great, start paper tuning. If your rest and nocking point are unable to fix tears, or if the rest and arrow placement are extreme in relation to the neutral area of your shelf and riser, then cam adjustment may need to be utilized. There are many ways to adjust cams on modern bows - this can include proprietary designs from the likes of Elite, Darton, Bowtech, Hoyt, and Mathews bows. It can also include spacer systems like those found on PSE and Prime bows. In extreme cases, you will need to twist cables in order to properly cant the cams and get them tuned properly. You will need to adjust your cams to the left in order to correct a tail-right paper tear. Similarly, you will need to adjust your cams to the right in order to correct a tail-left paper tear.
Cam Timing: Properly timed cams are a good place to start when tuning your bow setup. The idea is to have both of your cams roll over and come to the back wall at the same time. Not only will this potentially correct paper tears, but having the cams working as a well-tuned system will help your bow to operate at maximum efficiency, thus resulting in better overall arrow flight. Some compound bows have integrated timing adjustments: Bowtech, Elite, and Darton all have technology on their bows (as of the time of writing this article) that require minimal work to adjust timing. With the simple turn of an Allen key you can pull one cam into time with the other. I many cases, though, you might need to twist cables in order to properly tune the cams into time.
Cable Twisting: Cable twisting can be used to achieve proper timing as well as affect lateral cam adjustment and tilt. If your bow utilizes a yoke system - the cable splits on one end - then you can use this to your advantage when trying to fix left and right tears. If you are experiencing a left tear, go to your top cam and take turns out the right yoke cable, while then adding the same number of turns to the left cable. Doing this will change cam lean and will keep the overall length of your cable roughly the same - this ensures your timing and draw weight are not affected. Make this change on the top cam first, only going to the bottom cam if desirable results are not achieved. As for timing is concerned, if your bottom cam is hitting before your top cam - which means you need your top cam sped up - go to the buss cable on the bottom cam and put in a full or half twist, this will speed up the top cam and bring it into alignment with the bottom. The opposite is true for a slower bottom cam, where you would add twists to the top cam buss cable.
Tiller Adjustment: Tiller bolt adjustments can be helpful in fine tuning nock high and nock low paper tears. This is most likely only being done in cases where you do not want to move your rest higher or lower for your tuning requirements. Backing out the top tiller bolt causes your nocking point to drop, tighten the top bolt and it rises. Backing out the bottom tiller bolt causes your nocking point to rise, tightening it causes it to drop. Make sure when tuning using tiller bolts that you start from a neutral place - both bolts turned in or out the same amount. Also make sure not to exceed the maximum allowed bolt turns as per your manufacturer guidelines.
Roller Guard Adjustment: If you have a roller guard that is capable of being shifted left and right - such as those on modem Elite compounds among others - then you will be able to affect left and right tears (as well as vane contact) by adjusting your roller guard. Changing the position of the roller guard will change angle and tension on your cables. If you are experiencing a left tear, move the guard towards riser shelf. For a right tear, move it away from the riser. Apply these adjustments in small amounts and test each time.
Arrow/Rest Contact: If your arrow is making contact with the rest, that can cause paper-tuning tears. Spray your fletchings with white, aerosol foot powder and then shoot that arrow. If it’s making contact, you’ll see lines in the powder. Rotating the nock often will eliminate the contact problem.
Watch below as PJ walks us through modern compound paper tuning:
(Shooting a compound bow with fingers is more like shooting a recurve bow, and Lancaster Archery Supply recommends bare-shaft tuning in such cases. That’s a topic for another day.)