Broadhead tuning: why field points lie

Every September, somebody puts broadheads on for the first time since last season, shoots a group at twenty yards, and calls us convinced he got a bad box of heads.

It is almost never the heads.

What a field point does not tell you

A field point is a smooth cone. Air goes around it and nothing about it wants to steer.

That means a field point will fly reasonably straight off an arrow that is leaving the bow slightly crooked. The arrow corrects itself in flight, the fletching does its job, and it lands in a decent group. The bow’s tuning error is real, but the field point has no way to express it.

What a broadhead does

A broadhead has blades. Blades are wings.

Put a wing on the front of an arrow that is leaving the bow at a small angle, and the wing starts flying, in whatever direction the arrow was already pointed. Instead of correcting, the front of the arrow steers, and it steers away from where you aimed. A tuning error that was invisible with field points becomes four to eight inches at twenty yards.

This is why broadheads are diagnostic. They are not causing the problem. They are showing you a problem that was there all along.

What broadhead tuning actually is

It is tuning the bow so that the arrow leaves it straight, using the broadhead as the indicator. Nothing is done to the broadhead itself.

On the bench, that means walking the rest and adjusting nock height in small increments, shooting a field point group and a broadhead group at the same spot, and moving the bow until the two groups converge. If the broadheads print left, the rest moves toward them. Small moves, one variable at a time, shoot after every change.

It also means checking the things that make an arrow leave crooked in the first place: center shot, cam timing, nock fit, rest contact, and fletching clearance. A rest that is a hair off will show up here and nowhere else.

Things worth knowing before you come in

Bring the actual heads you will hunt with. Not one from the box you kept for practice. The heads that will be in your quiver.

Bring the actual arrows. Same shafts, same inserts, same fletching. Changing any of those changes the answer.

Fixed blade or mechanical matters. A fixed blade has more steering surface and is a harder, better test. A mechanical hides more, which is not the same as being more accurate. It is being less informative until the moment it opens.

Spin test every head on the shaft. A head that wobbles on the insert will never group, regardless of tuning. Fix that before anything else.

When to do it

Three weeks before your season. Not the week of.

Broadhead tuning takes shooting, and shooting takes bench time and lane time. In the last two weeks of September there is a line for both. Come in early and you will have the bow back with time to actually get comfortable with it.

The payoff

When it is right, your broadheads and your field points hit the same place. You sight in with field points all year, screw a broadhead on in October, and nothing changes.

That is the whole goal. No mystery, no guessing at twenty-five yards in low light, no wondering whether the bow or the shot was at fault.

Bring the bow and the heads to (201) 843-7788, or read what a full tune involves.