Most archers stop bareshaft testing at 20 or 30 yards. They shoot a clean group, the bareshaft is touching the fletched group, and they call the bow tuned.
That's where the test starts being useful. It's not where it ends.
What a 30-yard bareshaft actually tells you
At 30 yards, a fletched arrow's vanes can hide a lot of sins. The vanes are still steering hard at that distance, dragging the shaft back onto the trajectory line even if the launch was sloppy. If your dynamic spine is anywhere in the right neighborhood, the bareshaft and fletched groups will look the same at 30. The vanes are doing the work.
That's not a tune. That's a margin of error that hasn't been pushed yet.
Past 50 yards the vanes give up. Drag is winning, lift is going gyroscopic, the shaft is committed to whatever vector it had at launch. If your dynamic spine is off by a degree, you start to see it. At 70 yards you can't hide it.
Distance amplifies the signal, linearly
The math is boring. A small launch error (call it a degree of pitch or yaw) gets multiplied by flight time. At 30 yards the bareshaft lands maybe 2 inches off the fletched group. At 50 it's 5 to 6. At 70 it's 8 to 12 inches off if the tune is sloppy, and within an inch or two if the tune is genuinely dialed.
That's why John Dudley calls a 70-yard bareshaft pass "tuned forever." If the bareshaft is touching the fletched group at 70, your dynamic spine, your center shot, your nocking point, your rest height, and your cam timing are all so clean that minor environmental shifts — a humid morning, a slightly different shaft from the same dozen, a broadhead with a hair more drag than the field points — won't move the impact enough to matter. The tune is robust. It survives reality.
A 30-yard pass doesn't tell you that. A 30-yard pass tells you the bow is in the window. Those are different things.
Why most archers stop short
Three reasons, in descending order of how much they matter.
First, most ranges aren't 70 yards. Public 3D courses go to 60. Indoor goes to 20. The average backyard is 30 paces. You'd have to drive somewhere to even shoot the test.
Second, you can't see the shaft. At 30 yards a bareshaft is obvious in the target face. At 70 it's a smudge unless you've got a spotter or binoculars or you walk down to the target. Most archers don't want to walk that much.
Third, the test is psychologically miserable. A bareshaft missing the target at 30 yards lands in the grass next to the target. A bareshaft missing the target at 70 lands forty feet behind the target in your neighbor's pasture. People stop because they're afraid of breaking arrows.
That last one is rational, by the way. Get the tune as clean as you can at 30 and 50 first. Only push to 70 once you're confident the bareshaft will at least hit the bag.
How I run the test
Two bareshafts, two fletched arrows of the same build, shot at a single bull from 70 yards. Slow, deliberate, identical execution on every shot. I shoot the fletched first to anchor the group, then the two bareshafts. I walk the target after each round, mark the impacts, walk back, repeat.
What I want to see: bareshafts within 4 to 6 inches of the fletched group center at 70. That's the pass condition. Closer is better. Touching is the unicorn.
What tells me the tune still has work: bareshafts 10 to 14 inches off, consistently the same direction. That's a dynamic spine signal even though everything else (paper, walk-back, broadhead group at 40) looks clean. Most often it means I'm half a spine off and the fletched arrow is paying the rest of the difference. Sometimes it's a nocking point that's a hair high. Once it was a cam-timing drift after 2,000 shots that nothing closer than 70 could surface.
The pressure-test
The 2026 PCA Arrow Ballistics Study by James Yates and Tristan Litke deliberately designed their broadhead accuracy regression out to 70 yards because their bench testing showed mean group radius keeps growing meaningfully past 50. They're measuring the same thing I'm measuring with a bareshaft — the upper bar of what the build is doing once vanes give up. Different signal (broadhead groups vs bareshaft impact relative to fletched), same conclusion: the tune doesn't really earn the word "tuned" until you push it past 50.
Dudley's bareshaft progression matches. He'll often skip the 50 step and go straight from 30 to 70 in his demos because the gap is the point. If you can't shoot it at 70, you don't know what you've got.
What we do inside The Forge
In v114 we extended the BareshaftStep in the Tune wizard with an explicit 30 / 50 / 70-yard progression. The 70-yard pass surfaces a specific verdict in the readout: "tuned forever." Not a feel-good label — it's gated on the bareshaft sitting within 6 inches of the fletched group center, three rounds in a row.
If you've passed 30 and 50 but the 70-yard impact is 10+ inches off, the wizard routes you back — most often to a half-spine reconsideration or a nocking-point micro-adjustment, depending on which direction the bareshaft is drifting. The full diagnostic matrix is in the Tune wizard inside The Forge, and the methodology behind the test is at /pages/methods. Every release with what changed and why is at /pages/version-history.
If your range doesn't go to 70
Find one that does. Or build one. The hardest part of dialing a compound bow to the upper bar is having the space to actually see whether you got there. There's no software fix for distance. PCA's lab has a 100-yard lane because they need it. Most pro shops have a 20-yard lane because that's all the customer will use. You can't tune to the standard if you can't test at the standard.
I shoot a friend's 80-yard backyard lane for the final 70-yard pass on a build. Drive 40 minutes for a 90-minute session, walk away knowing the bow is tuned forever. It's the most useful drive I make all year.
Write to sal@sparrowexpeditions.com if you push past 50 and the bareshaft signal doesn't match what I described — those edge cases are how I sharpen the wizard.
— Sal