Every bow tuning conversation fails in the same way: someone skips a step, adjusts something downstream, gets an improvement, and concludes they found the problem. They did not. They improved one symptom while the underlying cause — the step they skipped — is still wrong. The next variable to drift will put them back where they started, except now the bow is harder to read because the downstream adjustments are masking the upstream error.
The sequence below is complete for a compound bow. Steps 1 through 4 are required for every archer who wants a reliably tuned bow. Steps 5 and 6 are required for consistent long-range performance and competitive work. None of these steps is optional if the next one is going to mean anything.
Step 1 — Set center shot to 13/16"
Before any tuning begins, the rest must be positioned at the correct horizontal starting point. On a modern compound bow, that is 13/16" (0.8125") from the inside face of the riser to the center of the arrow shaft.
Measure the arrow's outside diameter with calipers, divide by two, add 13/16". That is the total distance from the riser face to the near edge of the arrow. Do not estimate with a ruler. Do not "eyeball" the string. Measure it exactly.
This number is not a tuning preference — it is the industry standard starting geometry. Every subsequent step assumes it is correct. If center shot is wrong and you paper tune anyway, you are building a tune on a flawed foundation. You may get a clean tear, but the bow will be tuned to compensate for the geometry error rather than corrected from it.
Set it once, correctly, before anything else. If any later step requires moving the rest, center shot must be re-verified before continuing.
Step 2 — Paper tune with multiple arrows and multiple grip positions
With center shot set, paper tune to establish the vertical and horizontal starting position for the nocking point and rest. The paper test captures the arrow's attitude at the deflection apex — typically 9 to 12 feet from the bow — and the tear pattern tells you whether the nock end is offset from the tip at that moment, and in which direction.
Two things are important here that most paper tuning guides miss.
Shoot more than one arrow. A single tear is a single data point. It could be a clean shot, it could be an imperfect grip, it could be a nock fit anomaly. Shoot three to five arrows and look for consistency in the tear. A repeating tear in the same direction is a real signal. An inconsistent scatter is noise — do not chase it.
Vary your grip position and average the result. The tear you produce is not a property of the bow alone — it is a property of the bow plus your specific grip geometry. If you tune entirely to one grip position and your grip shifts slightly under pressure at full draw, you have tuned to an edge case. Instead, shoot a few passes with your grip sitting slightly high on the handle, a few with it slightly low, a few with your normal hand. Look for the center of that range. Tune to the middle of your natural grip variation, not to a single controlled test shot.
This step also corrects the nocking point. Vertical tears are adjusted there first; horizontal tears are adjusted at the cam lean first, then the rest. See the paper tuning article for the full correction logic, including the direction-inversion that applies to minor horizontal tears near center shot.
Step 3 — Creep tune the timing
Timing must be confirmed before testing arrow flight at distance. If cam timing is off when you bare shaft, the nock path through the shot is curved — the arrow does not leave the string straight. That error expresses as a vertical impact offset at distance that looks exactly like a nocking point problem. An archer who bare shafts on a mistimed bow may adjust their nocking point to compensate for what is actually a timing error. Now both problems are wrong, and they are partially hiding each other.
Get timing right first. The diagnostic is a controlled comparison between two shot styles.
Shoot a group using hard, committed back-tension into the wall. Sight the bow in for these shots. This is your baseline. Then shoot a group using a soft hold — same aim, same form, but ease the back tension slightly so the shot feels like it is on the edge of running away before it fires. This is the creep group.
Compare the two groups vertically.
- Both groups hit the same vertical position: timing is correct. Stop.
- Creep shots hit high: advance the top cam — reduce the gap between the top cam and its draw stop at the moment the bottom cam seats.
- Creep shots hit low: slow the top cam — increase that gap.
Every timing adjustment should be verified on the draw board before returning to the target. See the cam timing article for the full draw-board procedure and the Axial default of 1/16" bottom cam first.
Step 4 — Bare shaft at 20 yards
With timing confirmed, bare shaft testing at distance tells you whether the paper tune and timing together produce clean flight across real distance — without the fletching masking a remaining error.
A bare shaft has no self-correcting mechanism. It flies exactly as launched. Shoot bare shafts at 20 yards alongside fletched arrows and compare the two impact points. If the bare shaft is landing within a few inches of the fletched arrows, the launch conditions are clean. If the bare shaft is consistently landing away from the fletched group, the fletching is correcting an error that the bow — and the archer — will not be aware of at short distances, but that will show up in group quality at 40, 50, and 60 yards.
For hunters: tune the bare shaft to within 3" of the fletched arrow impact at 20 yards. Then do your final confirmation at your typical hunting distance with broadheads. Broadhead tune at close range — 20 to 25 yards is enough for most hunting setups. The broadhead tune is the practical endpoint for a field bow.
For target archers: the goal is not to make the bare shaft impact perfectly coincide with the fletched shaft impact. The goal is to tune the arrows to the position you actually shoot from — your real grip, your real anchor, your real form. A target archer who tunes to theoretical perfection but does not actually shoot that way has tuned to something they cannot repeat. Tune until the bare shaft is consistent with your fletched arrows at 20 yards, given your actual shot execution. That position is the correct one for you.
There are two schools of thought on where within that range to aim the bare shaft position. A common convention is to tune the bare shaft slightly low and left of the fletched group. The reasoning is directional: if the arrow launches with a slight downward and away bias, any residual error will cause the arrow to miss the rest on exit rather than contact it. Rest clearance is guaranteed by the tune itself.
Axial's preference is to tune the bare shaft slightly high. A bare shaft hitting high means the nock is riding slightly low — the arrow carries a slight point-up attitude on exit. That attitude creates a small amount of lift at the beginning of the flight path, where gravity is working hardest against the arrow. Lift that opposes gravity at the most critical phase of flight is theoretically more consistent than a neutral or point-down launch, which surrenders that early advantage. Both positions are within the acceptable range; the difference is which failure mode you are optimizing against.
Step 5 — Torque tune the sight and rest at 20 yards
After bare shaft establishes your tuned launch position, torque tune tests whether that position holds under grip variation at distance.
Shoot groups at 20 yards while deliberately varying the torque you apply to the riser — a few shots with intentional left-grip torque, a few with right, a few with your normal neutral grip. Watch the horizontal spread of the group. The adjustment is not lateral movement of the sight or rest. It is fore and aft movement — sliding the sight or rest forward or backward to change the lever arm relative to the grip pivot. Moving a component forward or backward changes how much the bow rotates at that point when grip torque is applied, and therefore how much impact variation that torque produces. The goal is to find the fore/aft position where moderate grip variation produces the least horizontal spread in the group.
Adjust the sight first. Moving the sight fore or aft does not disturb the paper tune or the bare shaft result. Work the sight position until the group tightens under grip variation.
Adjust the rest only as a last resort. The rest position is the foundation that paper tuning and bare shaft testing were both built on. If you move the rest, you have changed that foundation. You must return to step 2 and re-paper-tune before continuing. There is no shortcut. A rest adjustment that is not followed by a fresh paper tune produces a bow that is partly tuned to the old foundation and partly to the new one — it will behave inconsistently, and the cause will not be obvious.
Step 6 — Group tune the arrow set
Steps 2 through 5 may have been run using one or a small number of arrows. This final step confirms that every arrow in the set performs consistently with the others.
Shoot the full matched set — all the arrows you intend to use — at 20 to 30 yards. Look for any arrow that consistently lands away from the group. A single outlier is an arrow problem: mismatched spine, a bent nock, a damaged vane affecting the oscillation phase, or a point weight that is meaningfully different from the rest. Replace or repair the outlier. It is not a bow problem and adjusting the bow to accommodate one odd arrow will degrade the performance of the rest.
If you bareshafted each arrow individually earlier in the process and confirmed consistency at that stage, you may not need a separate group tune pass. The value here is specifically for archers who tuned to a single reference arrow and have not yet confirmed that the remainder of the set matches it.
What is not in this sequence
A number of tuning methods circulate in archery communities that are not part of this sequence. That is not an oversight.
Walk-back tuning is a center shot diagnostic borrowed from recurve archery. It can produce a correct result, but it duplicates work that steps 2 through 5 already perform — and on a compound bow it is more likely to mislead than inform. Horizontal walk at distance on a compound bow is usually a gross geometry error or a second-axis problem with the sight or peep. Those are not solved by moving the rest. Bare shaft testing and torque tuning at 20 yards catch the same errors more directly, with less risk of chasing a compound problem using a recurve diagnostic. See the walk-back tuning article for a full discussion.
Other methods — French tuning, button pressure tuning for compound, various shortcut variations on paper — address partial subsets of the problem and may produce a workable result without surfacing the actual cause. They are not wrong in every case, but they do not build on each other the way these six steps do, and they are not required when this sequence is followed correctly.