What actually happens when we tune your bow.

A tuned bow is one that sends the arrow away straight. That is the entire goal. Every step below exists to remove one specific reason an arrow leaves crooked.

1. Measure before touching anything

The bow gets measured as it arrives: draw length, draw weight, axle to axle, brace height, cam timing, string and serving condition, nock fit, rest position, peep height.

This matters more than it sounds. Half of what people call a tuning problem is a mechanical change that already happened: a serving that separated, a rest that crept, a peep that rotated. Finding that first saves an hour of chasing.

2. Draw length and draw weight, set to you

Draw length comes off your actual anchor, not a wingspan chart. Too long and you cannot get to a repeatable anchor; too short and you lose the back tension that makes a release clean instead of a flinch.

Draw weight is a weight you can hold at the end of a long sit and on arrow forty of a league night. Almost everybody wants more than they should have, and it is the fastest way to build a habit that takes a year to unlearn.

3. Cam timing

On a two-cam bow, both cams need to roll over together. When they drift apart, the string leaves the bow at a slightly different angle each shot, and no amount of sight adjustment will fix that. Timing gets checked against the manufacturer’s marks and corrected by twisting the cables.

4. Center shot and nock height

Center shot is the arrow’s left-to-right position relative to the string. Nock height is its up-and-down position. Get either wrong and the arrow leaves at an angle, which is the root cause of nearly every flight problem people describe.

Both start from a measured baseline and then get refined by what the bow actually does, not what the manual says it should.

5. Paper tuning

Shooting through a sheet of paper at close range makes arrow flight visible. A clean round hole with three fletching slits means the arrow went through straight. A tear tells you the direction and the amount.

• Tear left or right. Usually center shot, sometimes arrow spine.
• Tear high or low. Usually nock height or rest timing.
• Diagonal tear. Both, and they get fixed one at a time.

Adjustments are small and one variable at a time, with a shot after every change. Changing two things at once means you learn nothing from either.

6. Broadhead tuning, for hunters

A field point is a smooth cone with nothing to steer with, so it will fly acceptably off a bow that is slightly out. A broadhead has blades, and blades are wings. Put one on the front of an arrow leaving at a small angle and it steers. Four to eight inches at twenty yards.

Broadhead tuning fixes the bow, using the broadhead as the indicator. Nothing is done to the head itself. We shoot field points and broadheads at the same spot and walk the rest until the two groups converge.

Bring the actual heads and shafts you will hunt with, and come three weeks before your season rather than the week of.

7. Out on the range

Then it gets shot at distance, on our own lanes. A bow that tunes clean on paper and shoots badly at twenty yards has not been tuned, it has been adjusted. Paper is diagnostic. Twenty yards is the verdict.

8. The second look

Every bow gets looked over twice before it goes back out the door. Bolts, cables, serving, rest, sight, peep, nock fit.

That rule did not start with us. It started with the man who opened this shop in 1957, and it is the reason a lot of people have been bringing bows here for thirty years.

What it costs

It depends on what the bow needs, and we will tell you before we do it. Nobody here is going to add work you did not ask about and put it on the ticket.