About
A bow atelier. Not a shop.
Sparrow Expeditions isn't a bow shop. It's an atelier — a small workshop built around one-on-one work with one archer at a time. Your bow goes on my bench, not into a queue of twenty.
It's also not my day job. I run another business that pays the bills. This — the tuning, the custom builds, the late-night fletching jigs — is what I do because I can't help it.
I built it for one kind of archer: the one who's already obsessed. The one who knows the difference between a 3% FOC bump and a 12% one. The one whose group at 80 is two arrows wide but won't sleep until it's one. The one who'd rather drive 90 minutes for a real tune than walk into a big-box and let a kid push pins around.
If you want fast and good-enough, there are shops for that. I'm not one of them.
Why I built The Forge
The Forge is the software side of the atelier — the build calculator, the tuning wizard, the spine math, the sight tape printer, the range log, all of it. I built it because nothing existed that put the work in one place.
You can find a place online that does sight tapes. You can find another place that does some arrow math. You can find a third that calculates dynamic spine. You can find a fourth that lets you browse shafts. None of them talk to each other and at the end of the day none of them made you better. They just let you do isolated math in four different browser tabs.
I wanted a place someone could go and do everything archery-related under one roof. Build the arrow, tune the bow, log the practice, print the tape, score the broadhead for the game class, see why your dynamic spine is 30 units off from your static. One workflow. One tool. One archer getting incrementally better every time they touch it.
The Forge runs on the Kaizen principle — the Japanese idea of constant small improvements that compound into mastery. As I learn more on the bench, the tool absorbs it. As customers feed back what's missing or wrong, the tool fixes it. As I tune more bows, the database gets sharper. The version you subscribe to today is not the version you'll be using in six months. It will be measurably better, at no additional cost, because the loop never stops. As I get better, this gets better, and in return everyone using it gets better.
That's the whole pitch. A workshop you can carry in your pocket, built by someone who's still on the bench, still tuning real bows, still listening.
What you're actually paying for
You're paying for someone to look at your bow the same way I look at mine. Every measurement. Every cable twist. Every yoke adjustment. I don't release a bow until the bareshafts and broadheads are stacking with the fletched group, the cam timing is dead-on, and the sight tape is verified against your actual chrono — not a spec-sheet estimate.
That takes time. I don't do same-day work. Most builds and tunes are a few days to a couple of weeks depending on what's in front of you on the bench. If you need a quick string twist before tomorrow's hunt, I'm not your guy. If you want your rig dialed for the season — and you want it to stay dialed — hand it over and let me do the work.
How I got here
I've hunted on four continents and shot enough rounds to know what a bow sounds like when something's wrong. I've watched equipment fail in places where the nearest pro shop was a week away. I've also been on the line at competitions and shoots and called a press-stop on someone's draw because the noise was off — twice that ended up being a cracked limb that would have blown up in their face on the next shot. Once it was a serving slip that was about to detonate the string.
You learn to hear those things when you've put enough arrows downrange. And once you've heard them, you stop wanting anyone else's hands on your bow.
The tools on my bench
I don't cut corners on equipment because corners are exactly where bows get destroyed. Everything I touch your bow with is the best the industry makes:
- Archery Tooling Concepts (ATC) press and draw board. The press the pros use — finest fingertip control, zero limb stress, no compromises. The ATC draw board lets me watch every degree of cam rotation through the full draw cycle and catch sync issues a slow-draw-by-hand will miss.
- Firenock PAPS system (Press Activation Positioning System) — perfect axial alignment for arrow component installation. The difference between a .003" runout build and a .001" build.
- Last Chance Archery — every fixture, jig, and measuring tool that touches your build. Fletching jigs, spine testers, arrow squares, the works.
Good tools are non-negotiable. A precision tune off a beat-up press is a guess. A beat-up press is also how limbs crack.
What I'll do for your bow
Tuning. Cam pre-lean, cam timing, sync, tiller, center shot, paper, bareshaft, walk-back, broadhead. Every step, in order, none of them skipped. Sight tape printed from your own chrono numbers — not an estimate.
Custom builds. Spec'd to your draw, your hand, how you actually hunt or shoot. Firenock CTI internal reinforcement, titanium kits, premium inserts and outserts — the parts most shops can't even get, fit by someone who's built them dozens of times before.
Specialty arrows. Lighted-nock builds, EFOC hunting setups, target arrows balanced spine-to-spine. Sub-five-grain weight spreads, runout under .002".
Expeditions and instruction. Smaller part of what I do but the part I love most. Guided hunts, group shoots, one-on-one form work.
About the name
Sparrow = spear + arrow. We started as a flock of friends who hunt and spearfish — same instincts in the woods or in the water. The crossed arrow and paddle in the mark stand for that. A sparrow is small, flies far, and pays attention. That's what we want our work to be.
If you want to work with me
Email sal@sparrowexpeditions.com with what you're shooting, what you're chasing, and what you're trying to fix. I'll come back with a realistic timeline and a price. No bullshit, no upsells you don't need.
If you want to try the free tools first — the Forge walks you through everything I'd do in person. Free tier covers the basics. Use it.
— Sal