Your Bow Isn't the Bow You Sighted In Back in August

Somewhere around the second week of November, every bow I own starts lying to me.

Not by much. Not enough that you'd notice shooting three arrows at 20 yards off the back porch before an evening sit. But enough. Six weeks of getting hauled up a tree on a pull rope. Banged off ladder rungs in the dark. Rained on, frozen, then thawed in the truck with the heater cranked. That bow isn't the bow you tuned in August. It just looks like it.

And this is the worst week of the year to find out. The rut is the one stretch where the buck you've had on camera since September might walk under you at two in the afternoon. You get one shot at him. Maybe one shot all season. I'd rather spend half an hour on the tailgate tonight than spend the next eleven months wondering why my arrow hit a hand low.

So here's the check I run. It isn't a full tune. It's the stuff that moves.

Start with the string

Strings creep. Good ones too. Most of my bows wear Unbound strings on Bloodline VEC99, which is about as stable as string material gets, and I still look every year.

Peep first. Draw, settle into anchor, close your eyes for a second, open them. If you're looking through a peep that's rotated a few degrees, the string moved. And if the string moved, your timing might have moved with it. Picture the guy who takes a perfect broadside shot at 22 yards and sails it under the brisket. Sight's fine. Rest's fine. His peep turned a quarter-turn over five weeks, he found the edge of it instead of the center, and his head landed somewhere new at anchor. He'll blame buck fever. It wasn't buck fever.

Then the serving. Run a fingernail along the center serving around your loop, then down at the cams where the string wraps the track. Separation at the cam end shows up late in the season more than anywhere else. If you can see strands through the serving, that's not a this-weekend problem. That's a tonight problem.

Look at your D-loop while you're in there. Frayed ends, a burn mark, a loop that's slid a hair on the string. A tiny shift in that loop changes how your nock travels, and I've already written about what 1/16" of loop does to your groups.

Paint pen marks don't lie

If you didn't mark your bow when it was tuned, do it the next time it's right. Silver paint pen, one line across every bolt that matters: sight mount, scope housing, rest mount, cable guard, limb bolts at the pocket. Two minutes. It turns a mid-season inspection into a glance. A broken line means something turned, and now you know exactly where to look.

The one I catch most is the sight. Not the mount. The housing. I run UltraView sliders on three bows and the sliders themselves are bomb-proof, but one good knock against a tree step can tweak your 3rd axis just enough that you'll never feel it on flat ground. You'll feel it when you're bent at the waist shooting straight down a lane at 14 yards. If your misses from the stand have been leaning one way, this is probably why.

Rest next. Draw slow and watch the launcher. It should be all the way up well before you hit the wall. Limb-driven rests that ran perfect in September can come up late when it's 25 degrees and the cord's stiff. On a cable-driven rest, check that the cord clamp hasn't walked down the cable. Either one can put a vane into your launcher, and a fletching hit with a broadhead on the front is not a subtle miss.

Shoot the arrow you're going to hunt with

This is the one most guys skip.

Those three broadheads riding in your quiver have been out there since October. They've been wet. They've ridden in the truck. One of them got knocked against something when you climbed in at 5 a.m. Pull them out and spin every one. A wobble you can see means something's off: a bent ferrule, an insert that let go of its glue, a shaft that took a hit. Don't talk yourself into it. Swap it out.

Then check the edges. Fixed blades like the Iron Will hold up great, but every head picks up rust spots in a wet quiver. On mechanicals, look at the blade retention and make sure every blade still opens clean. Touch them up or replace them. A dull head on a perfect hit is still a long track job.

Turn on every lighted nock. I only run Firenock CTI, and they're reliable, but cold is hard on batteries for everybody. Finding out your nock's dead after the shot is a bad way to spend a night.

Now shoot. One arrow, practice head matching your hunting head, at your real max hunting distance. Cold. No warm-up arrows. That first shot is the only one that matters in November. If it lands with your field points, you're done. Go hunt. If it doesn't, don't touch the rest yet. Go back through everything above first, because nine times out of ten something moved, and the broadhead is just the first thing honest enough to tell you.

If you did find a moved mark, a new string, or a peep you had to re-serve, don't guess your way back. Pull your setup up in The Forge. Check your real speed with the phone chrono, rebuild your sight tape from that number, and if your practice head is wandering, the Broadhead Group check will tell you which way to move things instead of making you chase it one click at a time. Thirty minutes tonight. Then go sit all day. It's November.