Ninety minutes. That's what a full tune takes on my bench for a bow I've never touched before. Not twenty minutes while you flip through a catalog up front. Not three weekends of chasing paper tears around your garage. Ninety, with a clock on it.
And here's the part that surprises people: most of that time, nobody's shooting anything.
A lot of shops sell a "tune" that's one paper shot and a rest tweak. That's not a tune. That's a photo of one symptom, taken once, at eight feet. I've written before about how to spot that kind of work. This post is the opposite: the full sequence I run, in order, with the minutes marked, so you can build the same workflow at home.
0–15: Measure everything before you touch anything
The first fifteen minutes are the boring ones and they matter more than everything after.
Axle-to-axle. Brace height. Peak weight on a scale, not the limb bolt count. Draw length against spec. Timing marks on both cams. Then strings: serving separation, peep rotation, fuzzy strands where the cables meet the rollers. Write every number down. Actually write them.
Last fall a buddy brought me a bow that "wouldn't hold a tune." He'd moved his rest four times in a month. ATA measured 3/8" short of spec. His strings had crept, the whole geometry was sliding, and every fix he made was aimed at where the bow used to be. No amount of rest work fixes a bow that's physically shrinking. New strings, back to spec, and the tune held all season.
If you skip the measuring, you're tuning a moving target. That's where the "my bow won't stay tuned" guys come from.
15–45: Draw board first, paper last
Bow goes on the draw board before an arrow goes anywhere near it. I want both cams hitting their stops at the same instant. Not close. Same instant. If the top cam hits early, that's cable twists, a half twist at a time, check again. This is thirty minutes when it's ugly and five when it's clean, and it is the single highest-leverage block of the whole ninety.
Here's the thing about cam timing: it's upstream of everything. A bow that's out of time will paper tune. You can bully a bullet hole out of it with enough rest movement. Then it opens up at 40 yards and you blame your release hand. The paper lied to you because you asked it a question it can't answer.
While it's on the board I check tiller. Thirty seconds. Almost nobody does it and it's free.
45–70: Center shot, then let the arrow vote
Rest goes to 13/16" from the riser as a starting point. A starting point. Not gospel, not a spec, just a place to begin that's usually close. Nock point square, or a hair high for a hunting rig with a drop-away.
Now paper, at six to eight feet, and only to catch gross errors. A clean-ish tear and I move on. I'm not going to stand there massaging a rest a sixty-fourth at a time to perfect an eight-foot tear, because the arrow hasn't recovered from paradox yet at that distance and the information is mush.
The real vote comes from bareshafts at 20 and 30. If the bareshaft impacts left of the fletched group, I fix it at the cam with yokes or shims, not by dragging the rest around. The rest got the bow close. The cams finish the job. Do it in that order and the rest stays where the manufacturer meant it to be, which matters for cable clearance and fletching contact later.
70–90: Verify, mark, log
Last twenty minutes: walk-back out to 60. Tape line on the target, one pin, shoot at increasing distance, watch whether the string of impacts stays on the tape or drifts. This is the test that catches the stuff paper flatters.
Then I mark everything with a silver paint pen. Rest housing to riser. Nock point. Cam module screws. A line across the peep serving. Ninety days from now, when something feels off, you look at your marks and know in ten seconds whether anything moved. No marks means every weird group starts a new investigation from zero.
And the numbers from minute zero, plus the final rest position, poundage, and arrow specs, all go in a log. This is the step everyone skips and it's the one that makes the next tune take thirty minutes instead of ninety.
The guys whose bows "stay tuned" aren't lucky. They know their numbers, so drift shows up as a measurement instead of a mystery.
If your log is currently a napkin in your bow case, put your whole setup in The Forge instead: bow specs, arrow build, the works. When something changes mid-season, you'll have the baseline sitting right there, and the diagnosis takes five minutes instead of a lost weekend.