Arrow Tuning - Traditional Archery (BST)

Hi, I'm Hannah Gart from Karma Tales. Welcome to Merlin's Archery Adventures. Okay, so what we're going to be having a little look at today is bear shaft tuning for your traditional bow. Now there isn't really a week that goes past where I don't get a message or an email off someone asking some advice on arrow tuning. Now the keen-eyed among you may have noticed that I've done a video on this already on my old channel, where my beard was a little bit shorter and my stomach was a little bit smaller. But we're going to revisit it again today and just look at how to tune an arrow into your traditional bow. Now the first thing you need to understand before you start arrow tuning, you need to nail a consistent release. It's almost pointless really spending a lot of time tuning an arrow unless you've got a consistent release. If your release is all over the place, you're not going to get a true arrow reading. So before you look at arrow tuning, make sure you've got a very consistent release. But once you've got a consistent release, we can then look at tuning your arrows to your bow. Now unlike say a target bow, you are shooting off the shelf. So you don't really have any means of tuning the bow. So all the tuning we're going to be doing is going to be tuning the arrow. So I think what we'll do, we'll go down range, we'll send a few arrows down and we'll look at some of the readings we get and that will determine whether or not the arrow is going to be too weak or too stiff. Now I happen to know that this arrow is going to come out hopefully a little bit too weak and that's what we want for the first arrow. We're looking for a weak arrow and what will determine a weak arrow is when it hits the target. If the knock is to the left, we've got a weak arrow. Now the other thing that we need to look at is I'm right-handed. So I'm tuning for a right-handed person, I'm tuning for a right-handed bow. If you are left-handed, then this whole process is completely reversed. So you're looking, you just reverse the whole thing from start to finish and it's the same process, it's just the left and right are reversed. So I'm going to shoot this arrow down range and we're going to look for a knock left reading which should indicate a weak arrow. So and then once we've got a weak arrow, we'll talk about what we're going to do with that then. So I'm going to send this down range. Okay, so we have got a very slightly weak arrow there. The knock is pointing slightly left as we can see. Now the knock is also high but we're not going to worry about knock high, knock low at the moment. We're just going to worry about knock left and knock right. So the knock is pointing to the left, so that indicates we do have a weak arrow. So what we're going to do, we're going to take off little increments of the arrow, probably in a quarter of an inch increments, taking that off until it gets straighter. So what it's doing is the arrow is weak obviously, so the more we take off the arrow, the dynamically stiffer the arrow is going to get. So the stiffer the arrow is going to get, the straighter that arrow is going to be in the target. So we're going to nip off to the arrow room, knock a little bit off this arrow and come back and shoot it again. Okay, what I'm doing here, I'm just applying some heat to the point of this arrow, trying to knock the glue inside that shaft. It's important with these arrows, especially the eastern axis, that you take the point and the insert out when cutting it down because you've got to hit an insert. But yeah, just applying some heat to that. So hopefully, it's also very important when you are heating up an arrow not to apply any direct heat to the carbon. Now, a little tip when you're tuning an arrow, which I haven't done on this one, but if you do swap the knock and the point over, I mean you normally have the knock on the end closest to the cresting, but if you swap it over and have the knock where the point should be, when you are making adjustments, it's easy just to pop that knock out and cut from that end and pop it back in. And then when you come to re-fletch your arrows, you haven't taken too much off this end so your feathers don't come over the cresting. But that's just a nice little tip for you there. Okay, so this is the arrow cutting tool. We're going to chop a quarter of an inch off the end of this arrow. But when cutting anything, it's always best to play it safe and use safety goggles. Okay, so we've just taken a little bit off the tip of that arrow, so let's pop the point back in and let's go back in the range and see if that's stiffened up any. Okay, so we've taken a little bit off the end of this arrow shaft. So let's send it downrange and let's see if it's coming out any straighter. I think there's still a bit more to go. I think we need to take a little bit more off, but it's always best to take little bits rather than big bits because you can always take more off. You can never put it back on, so you don't want to end up with an arrow that's too short and then you're going to have to start again with another shaft. So let's send it downrange and let's see what reading we've got this time. Okay, that still looks a bit weak, which I'm not surprised about. So let's just have a little look. Yes, we've definitely got a weak arrow reading there, so we're going to go back to the workshop and take another little bit off. I mean, we've still got a knock-high reading, but we're not worried about the knock-high reading. We'll address that at a later date. We're really just looking at the left and the right, so let's get back in the workshop and take another little bit off. Okay, so we've taken another quarter inch off the end of this arrow, so let's send it downrange again. Let's see if it's straightened up any. I still think we're probably going to need to take a little bit more off, but like I say, baby steps, taking a little bit at a time. It saves a lot of headache in the long run. Okay, that's still not left, which is what I was expecting, but it's coming out a little bit straighter now. We've still got that knock-high reading, but like I said before, we're not worrying about the knock-high reading. We're just worrying about the left and the right. So back to the workshop, take another quarter inch off and see if that straightens up even more. Okay, so that's another quarter of an inch taken off, so let's sling it downrange again and let's see if it's straightened up any. Okay, that's actually straightened up really nicely now. I'm kind of tempted to go with it actually. I could maybe take maybe an eighth of an inch off and that might drop it around a little bit further, but I'm actually quite happy with that. That is actually pretty close to being spot on, but just to make sure that I'm consistent with my release, I'm going to shoot it a few more times and let's just make sure it's still going in there nice and straight before we finalize it. But yeah, that looks pretty good to me. Okay, so that has been bear shaft tuning. As you can see, we have had to take a fair bit off that one arrow to get it coming out nice and straight. Just to recap, you're looking for a knock left reading, which indicates a weak shaft. If the arrow is extremely weak and that knock is way off to the left, then consider going up a spine range because that sounds like it's a little bit too weak. And vice versa, if it's to the right, if it's anything to the right, it's too stiff, so you need to come down a spine range. But yeah, it's quite simple really. It hasn't really taken that long. It helps if you've got access to an arrow cutter or something. But yeah, that's basically what you need to do. Now, if you remember, we were looking at... We've got it coming out nice and straight, but we still had a knock high reading. The knock high or knock low reading is adjusted by simply moving your knocking point. If you've got a knock high reading, it usually means that you've got your knock too high, so try bringing that down. Again, if your knock is too low, then you've got a low knock reading and your knocking point needs to come up a bit. But saying that, shooting off the shelf, you can get something to occur called ramping, which will give you a knock high reading no matter what you do. So if that occurs, don't stress too much about having a knock high reading. If you've got a knock low reading, that's easy to adjust. A knock high reading, don't stress too much if it's not coming out perfectly straight. I think even Byron Ferguson tunes his arrows to a very slightly high knock reading if the book I read about him was accurate. But anyway, I hope you found that useful. We'll be going into more in-depth talking about tuning traditional bows at a later date. But yeah, that's been bare shaft tuning. I hope you found that useful. Take care, shoot straight, and I shall see you later. Bye-bye. Whoa, hold on there, cowboy. We're not quite finished yet. There is just a couple of points I wanted to mention that I neglected to talk about in the video. So if you bear with me, I'll mention them now. And the first is the fact that in the video, we're bear shafting carbon arrows. But that doesn't mean you can't bear shaft any sort of arrow, really. You can bear shaft aluminium. You can bear shaft wood if you want to. The process is still exactly the same. You're still doing exactly the same thing. You're still shortening that arrow and making it stiffer. The other thing I wanted to mention, it's a little tweak, really. Let's say, for example, you've got an arrow coming out and it's ever so slightly too stiff. If you wanted to make that a little bit weaker again, you could increase the point weight. It's a lot easier with carbons. You can just screw them out and screw a new point in. And the bear shaft we was using today was a 100 grain point. If I wanted to, I could put 125 grain point in there. Or if I wanted to drop it back a bit, I could drop it down back to, say, an 80 grain point or something. So there's always tweaks you can do. It's not just a case of cutting the arrows. If it's something that you're not comfortable with or you haven't got access to an arrow cutter, you can change the point weight. And that does make the arrow, obviously, a heavier point will make the arrow dynamically weaker and a lighter point will make the arrow shaft dynamically stiffer. But it does alter the mass weight of the arrow. So if that's something that you're concerned about, then you need to work out exactly what you're doing there. And the other thing that I wanted to mention is the fact that bear shaft tuning isn't the only way of tuning. There are other methods. There's paper tuning and you can shoot fletched arrows along with unfletched arrows and sort of see where they are in relation to each other and then tune them in that way. But we will be looking at the different types of arrow tuning at a later date. But the bear shaft tuning, that's the way I like to tune. It's the one I feel most comfortable with. So that's what I do. But also, this video is, there's a companion video to go with it, really. I did a few weeks back and I did a video all about the arrow and the arch's paradox and how it enters the paradox and what a stiff arrow will do and what a weak arrow will do. So if you just click on the video up here, that should take you to that video. And if you want to look at a little bit more about how the arrow works, then that's the place to go. But we are actually finished now. So I do apologise. You take care and I will see you on the internet. Bye-bye.