Wow, Great Bow!

I just read another personal bow review. (I have read not a small number of these, I just don’t know what that number is.) The bow was claimed to be “nice to shoot” and was “incredibly accurate.” And, of course, people are urged to “try it out.”

The reporter doesn’t mention whether he is a sponsored archer or not, which leads to me wondering about his motivation for the “review.” There are, in archery, fanboys of the bows of certain manufacturers. Just as I grew up with “Ford guys” and Chevy guys” and “Mopar guys,” there are archers who are Mathews guys and Hoyt guys. If this guy is a fanboy of this company’s bows, then he might have posted this review just to get some props from his contacts inside the manufacturer.

I also have to ask “why?” Why is this bow more “accurate” than his previous bows? What were his previous bows? How much more “accurate” was it?

Of course, bows are not responsible for accuracy at all, we are. So bows aren’t accurate in an of themselves. A better statement might be “I shot more accurately with this bow than any of my previous bows (list of previous bows).”

What we do ask from bows is consistency, that if we aim them the same way and release them the same way that the arrows land in roughly the same spot. (I say roughly because the arrows have a lot to say about whether they land in the same spot and no two arrows are exactly the same, etc.)

The bow has to impart the same energy to each arrow and the guiding bits, mostly the arrow rest but also the eccentrics and their synchronous actions, have to guide the arrows in the same way, etc. And we can’t just use shooting machines to test a bow’s abilities in this realm. Some bows are stable and steady in the hand and some are not. Some are positively squirrely. For example, the last time I bought Claudia a new bow, she absolutely loved the way the bow “fit her hand.” I, on the other hand, felt as if the bow (another bow as she is left-handed and I am right-handed) was going to slide out of my hand and fly back and hit me in the face. After several attempts to draw that bow, I declined to try any more, for reasons of personal safety. Clamp that bow in a shooting machine and I have no doubt that you could wreck some arrows (one crushing the previous one).

So, back to the review I read. The bow was a carbon fiber-risered bow. I am not sure there is a net advantage to using such bows, except to the manufacturer who can charge a great deal more for the whiz-bang technology. The largest stabilizing factor of a compound bow is the mass of the riser. Newer bows are using longer risers and shorter limbs, which makes them somewhat more stable. The bow has to stay still while it is driving the arrow out, otherwise it changes the position we put it in while aiming. We can’t hold it still because we just add to the movement of the bow through trying. So, carbon fiber compound bows are lighter, which may be an asset over time because you won’t get as tired lugging it around and lifting it into position, but you are also sacrificing some bow stability through that loss of mass. So, what the carbon bows allow is for mass to be added back, but instead of being near the bow hand, the added mass can be placed out on stalks, which we call “stabilizers or rods.” In effect this takes mass that was concentrated near the bow hand and moves it out away from the bow, which makes that mass more effective at stabilizing the bow.

So, did my reviewer do that? Did he change his stabilizer setup? (He didn’t say.)

So, when I read one of these “reviews” all I can say is “Well, one person was happy with his purchase.”

Does it say anything, anything at all as to whether that bow would please me?

No.

Alert, Alert, Alert

Quintessential Archery has closed its business and that affects you thusly: they were the publisher of the very valuable book Simple Maintenance for Archery, the “go to” book for coaches and archers as to how to repair and maintain their archery equipment. They have sold all of their remaining inventory to Lancaster Archery Supply which is selling them off at a very low price. So, now is the time to get extra copies if you already have one or a copy if you have not.

Here’s the link: https://lancasterarchery.com/products/ruth-rowe-2nd-edition-simple-maintenance-for-archery

It Could Happen to You (or Your Students)

Recently professional golfer Viktor Hovland was flying to Hawaii to participate in a golf tournament. When his clubs finally showed up, there was breakage involved.

Why he wasn’t using a hard case is beyond me, but what do I know? (I always used a hard case when flying.)

So, could this or something like this happen to you? I suggest the longer you are involved in archery competitions and the more ambitious you become, the more likely something like this will happen to you.

So what should you do?

I remember Rick McKinney telling us that when he flew, his broken in finger tabs were not in his luggage but in his pocket. Everything else could be replaced.

Because of the wonders of modern communications, you do not have to carry a physical description of your bow, arrows, etc. with you, because you can park such a list online, in a Dropbox or whatever. But that list must exist and it must be updated every time you make an equipment change.

The story is somewhat old now, but champion compound archer Dave Cousins was flying to Sweden to participate in the World Field Championships and his airline lost his luggage, all of it. (I still don’t know whether it eventually turned up or not.) His teammates supplied a backup bow for him to use, including stabilizers and release aids, arrows, etc. After sighting in and practicing a bit, Dave was in second place after day one! If you think about all of the equipment variables involved, that is as close to an archery miracle as I have ever heard of.

Part of being a high level competitor is being prepared. And that isn’t limited to physical fitness and tuning your equipment. Preparing for the worst case scenario can be very helpful, even when the case isn’t worst. Plus, you may end up with a great story to tell your grandkids.

Reading Old Archery Books

I am an intellectual, a geek, I know that. When faced with a task the tools that come to hand easiest for me are books and articles, etc. What I want to address here is “reading old archery texts” and why you might want to do so.

There is a general tendency among archers, mostly compound archers, to look at the latest and greatest as having more value. We want the latest equipment, the latest tuning methods, the latest technique tips, etc. This is because we have been led to believe that things are better now that they were in the past and that, in general is true . . . but not absolutely true. My friend and colleague Tom Dorigatti has a bone to pick with the phrase “new and improved” which is a bit of marketing nonsense foisted upon us through TV ads and now other media. He claims, quite so, that something cannot be both “new” and “improved” at the same time.

Basically I have read archery books dating from recent to hundreds of years old. I have learned many things, including the idea of back tension goes back centuries. But specifically, let’s look at one book, namely: Doctor Your Own Compound Bow by Emery J. Loiselle

I gave away my copy of this book, so I am operating from memory. My later version included a section on those new-fangled two wheel compounds. Most of the bow was about four- and six-wheeled compound bows. Never having shot one of those older bows I learned a lot in seeing how they were tuned. They were open-ended systems so you could feed cables through from one end and they would come out the other, giving you a huge number of tuning options. Two-wheel compound bows are a closed system in which one thing feeds into another and so provided many fewer tuning possibilities.

The two-wheelers were also less complicated mechanisms and thus less could go wrong.

Historical tidbits are dropped along the way. Did you know that the earliest compound bows used banjo and guitar tuning pegs for their cabling take-ups? There wasn’t anything being ready made at the beginning, so they used what they had.

Did you know that the early compound bows had no bow presses to help work on them. The bows were loosened until there was no tension on the cables or string and then dismantled, which meant that retuning was required for any such process.

Did you know that the first bow presses had a single point of pull, resulting in myriad broken handles (and the invention of the two point harness)?

Did you know that “creep tuning” was invented in the 1970’s?

Some of this knowledge is of just historical interest but much of it underlies the processes used on modern bows and why modern bows are designed the way they are.

Old archery books are available for a song and many of them have information that is pertinent today still. You may be surprised at how little archery form has changed, for example.

Happy reading!

Coaching Tools—An Arrow Saw

There are many tools that archers have available to them that also serve coaches. One of the most useful is an arrow saw.

The reason an arrow saw is one of the most useful tools to a coach is that we often find ourselves in the position of helping archers tune their arrows. And the absolute best way to tune a new arrow is to take a tuning set of five of them (never work on a whole dozen until you have nailed down the parameters for your arrows) and test them when full length (I use bare shaft testing). (Always order your shafts and arrows uncut if you have your own saw.) They should test “weak” at full length, so then you cut a little at a time, testing as you go until they test just right. (By making small cuts and bare shaft testing them as you go, you can get a feel for how much to cut each time (each cut will move the bare shafts closer to the fletched group.) Generally the cuts get smaller and smaller as you “inch” closer to the correct cut length for your system. When you find it. Shoot the test set until you are comfortable with them and then cut the remaining arrows/shafts to that same length.

The first photo is of a Decut Minicut arrows saw which I saw an ad for at US $200. My saw is an old Apple Arrow Saw (mine doesn’t have the dust collection system like the one in the second photo), and there are modular ones that snap together, professional ones (professional arrow cutting?), etc.

Once you acquire one of these, you’ll wonder how you got along with it.

SOSUMI

I made a mistake. In a previous post (Measuring Up) I made the following statement regarding measuring your bow’s draw weight without having a draw weight scale:

“If you want an actual measurement of your draw weight rather than an estimate, you need a stiff stick, at least 3 feet/1 meter long, with a notch in one end. From the bottom of the notch measure down the stick and place a mark at X˝, X being your draw length measurement but without the 1.75˝ extra. The stick is then stood on its end on a bathroom scale and the bow placed upon it with the string (where the arrows attach) in the groove and the riser hanging down. You then press down on the riser until the arrow rest hole/pressure button is even with mark on the stick and read the scale. Then subtract the weight of the bow on the scale all by itself. Of course, this is no more accurate than your bathroom scale, but it is something.”

The wrong part was “Then subtract the weight of the bow on the scale all by itself.”

This is not correct. The bow doesn’t know the source(s) of the forces drawing it. In this procedure, there are two forces: gravity and you pushing down on the riser. Both of these forces cause the bow to be drawn. If you just think of the bow just hanging on the end of the stick, the force of gravity is causing the bowstring to be bent a little, no? Yes. And so there is no reason to subtract the force (weight is a force) of the bow from this measurement, because gravity is causing part of the draw.

Interestingly I found two versions of this post: one with this statement and one without. Apparently I had corrected my error before but because I save everything obsessively, I had the two versions filed away under the same title. I remember a somewhat extensive debate about whether to subtract the weight of the bow or not when doing this procedure, but I don’t remember the details of those discussions. I do remember the confusion the generated.

I feel like the actress who was forced to say “My daughter and I are often confused” in a commercial for a dish soap (because their hands looked so much alike). The intent was to say “my daughter and I are often confused, one for the other, because our hands look so much alike” but came out as “my daughter and I are often befuddled.” Of course, the advertisers love such confusion as it gets their product mentioned in numerous discussions.

Like the woman in the commercial, I am often confused.

Why I May Never Bare Shaft Tune Again

The above title came from a post listed on Archerytalk Archery & Bowhunting News. The author went on to list nearly a dozen bows that he has had success and non-success tuning using the Bare Shaft method. All of the bows listed were compound bows with short axle-to-axle lengths.

Ah …

Bare shaft tuning was invented for recurve bows shot with fingers and loses much of its usefulness when applied to compound bows shot with release aids. (I assume the gentleman’s bows were shot with release aids because of the short ATA lengths, which makes them painful to shoot with fingers on the string.)

There is much you can learn from a bare shaft test, but when applied to a compound bow shot with  release aid, the list of benefits drops to about two, at most. It can help you determine if your nocking point height is correct and it can help you determine if your arrow rest position (aka centershot) is correct. For compound bows shot this way the arrow is very nearly square with the bowstring and parallel to the inside of the sight window cutout, so you can eyeball these into place and there is little more a bare shaft test can tell you.

I have commented before that archery’s “collective wisdom” contains a great deal of advice appropriate for one style of archery that really does not apply to another. This is one of those cases.

I suspect that most of his bare shaft tests were irrelevant, in that they gave results (they had to) but those results were not indicative of much of anything.

Compound bows shot with release aids are quite insensitive to arrow spine matches. Recurve archers must place an arrow spine match near the top of their tuning list, while compound archers can get away with a wide range of arrow spines. This is due to the force being applied to the nock of the arrow being directed very nearly straight down the shaft with little wobble, certainly not as much as a finger release creates.

Bare shaft tests will light up like a Christmas tree is you are shooting a recurve bow with fingers and your arrow is either under- or over-spined. Not so for compound bows.

In a couple of bow tests he expressed surprise that the bare shafts hit slightly low and left of the fletched group. For a right-handed recurve archer, many consider this test ideal. It indicates a slightly stiff shaft, which is considered more forgiving that a slightly weak shaft, with a slightly high nocking point position which gives the arrow slightly more clearance as the arrow slides past, aka above and to the side away from, the arrow rest. For compound bows, especially those using a “launcher rest” (kind of like a diving board, it has spring back only in the upward direction) some of those rests work better with  slight greater downward pressure on the rest blade, which is created by a slightly higher nocking point position which results in . . . drum roll, please . . . a slightly low bare shaft test result.

So, there was not much I could tell from his list of bows and his “success” or “nonsuccess” narratives, because there are way too many variables that would need to be checked to evaluate such claims.

What is sure is—when tuning, you do need to know what a test tells you . . . and what it does not.

Bare shaft testing works well for recurve and longbow archers and, believe it or not, “fingers” compound archers (I used to be one). But for Compound Release archers, not so much.

Addendum We are still figuring out the consequences of the recent movement toward short axle-to-axle compound bows. When I began, bows were 46-48 inches ATA. In the past a number had been considerably higher (up to 54 inches, I believe). Over time, bows became shorter and shorter, which is an advantage for bowhunters shooting from cramped positions, such as a deer stand, but for target archers not so much. (The biggest stabilizing force of a compound is . . . the riser. Making it shorter actually makes it harder to hold steady. This is possibly one reason why many designers went to flat limb or even “past parallel” limbs which require longer risers (I think, anyway).)

To make a short ATA compound bow, that can be shot by tall archers (I be one) you have to provide the bowstring to reach all that way back and the way they did it is to provide very large eccentrics. These pay out large amounts of bowstring that was previous wrapped around those large eccentrics, allowing people with 31-32 inches of draw to use those bows. But that replaces a simple limb movement with a complex play out and take up of a string around a cam. How this affects the way we tune is not yet clear to me. So, people are doing what they have always done and seeing what works.

The bottom line, is if a tuning procedure doesn’t seem to work for you, try another; there are dozens of the danged things. But be sure you know what the test will tell you, and it is most helpful if you know why (so you can figure out strange results).

A Problem with Right Fliers

We are trying to find helpful ideas for you to pursue “Archery in a Time of Pandemic.” (We will be publishing a number of articles in Archery Focus to this end.) Since I have not been able to meet with archery students I have offered them free remote coaching and one of my newer students has taken me up on this offer. The issue we are dealing with is fairly often right fliers being shot. The archer is right-handed and shoots Olympic Recurve.

We had previously addressed things like centershot issues, form and execution issues, and arrow spine issues and are still exploring those things but I came up with another possible source of such a problem while watching Jake Kaminski’s new YouTube series on tuning Olympic Recurve bows. Here is what I sent my student. (Please realize that I can only see his bow and arrow spreads in pictures.)

* * *

I have been watching Jake Kaminski’s tuning series and he made a point I hadn’t thought of before which could be causing your rightitis—limb alignment . . . or rather, limb misalignment.

Many people do not know why adjustable limb pockets were created, but it was because the only recourse we had before they were available was to send our bows back to the manufacturer, who got tired of adjusting misaligned limbs and replacing malformed risers. So, they made the adjustable limb pockets so people could fix their own damned bows . . . and thereby created a whole new class of misalignments.

Now, almost all take down recurve bows have adjustable limb pockets and one problem this allows is this: the top limb points a little to left and the bottom limb also a bit left. Now the bowstring, which can still be eyeballed to line up with the center of the riser is actually parallel left of where it should be. This means the bowstring is moving toward the left of center of the bow and that throws the arrows off to the right . . . well it predisposes them to do so anyway. A particular kind of poor loose makes for a way right arrow, a loose not so bad results in one that is just slightly right, that is ordinarily correct by a slight windage adjustment of the bow sight. So . . . spot, spot, spot, spot, right flier, spot. Kind of what you have been getting.

Checking whether this is the case is not so easy. It is easiest done if you have a large flat surface, such as a quality ping pong table. If the bow lays flat on that surface, bingo! You lay the bow flat on the surface and then measure how far the string is up from that surface. Then you flip it over and do it again. If the bowstring is in the central plane of the bow, the same tabletop to string measurement should be had (this is the desired state).

Just thought you’d want to know. (I did mention that there is always more than one cause for every effect, did I not? :o)

I do hope you are fairing well.

Steve

Coach Lessons

About a week and a half ago, I had a number of coaching lessons scheduled, probably the last face-to-face lessons I will be giving for several months due to the pandemic, and I had a bit of an epiphany. I had finished my last lesson and was packing up to go and I struck up a conversation with another archer, as we archers so often do. This gentleman has had a couple of coaching sessions with me recently so we were acquainted. He was at our indoor range trying to get a new bow set up and tuned for his 16-year old son.

There was clearly something not working as he seemed frustrated. The conversation naturally gravitated to the issue: his son and he, both Recurve archers, had been recommended the same arrows over the phone. This rang an alarm for me, not because of the phone conversation, the dealer referenced was quite reputable, but because of the situation. The son looked a couple of inches shorter than the dad and when asked, that was confirmed along with the fact that dad’s draw weight was seven pounds higher than the son’s. I asked about their draw lengths and he said, “they are the same.” To my eye, and brain, they should have had about two spine groups difference between their shafts.

Now, I say “about two spine groups difference” because arrows are very sensitive to “cut length.” The rule of thumb is there is a one inch difference between spine groups. (Go ahead and look at any spine chart and that is about how they work out.) So, an arrow two spine groups too stiff could be made shootable by cutting them two inches “too long,” too long being longer than the recommended cut length.

So, the son is shooting bare shafts to set up these arrows and, again, my eye immediately told me the problem. Being two inches shorter than his dad, the son’s draw length should have been one inch shorter, but it was not. It was clear, to my mind, why it was not in that the youth was leaning away from the target, which results in a raised bow shoulder. So, I asked the dad about this. “Was this a new adaption to his shot or had it been there for some time?” This leaning away from the target is a time honored adaption youths make to deal with a bow that is just too heavy (the shoulder muscles responsible for holding the bow up against gravity, the deltoids, develop rather late). But, this may have been a habit developed when the youth was younger or recently adopted and I wanted to know which it was. It seems to have been around for some time, so I explained what was going on. The net result is that a high bow shoulder leads to an overly long draw length.

So, we did a test to see if he could handle the physical mass of his new bow. The test is simply to hold the bow with one arm in full draw position (we had to adjust his posture a touch) and count . . . slowly . . . one thousand one, one thousand two, . . . etc. If you cant make it to “five” before the bow starts to descend, the bow is definitely too heavy. If the bow begins to drop after five, it is probably too heavy. If you can get to 10 without the bow dropping, then it is probably not too heavy and if you can keep going past ten, you are as strong as you need to be. The young man passed the test which means he no longer had a need to lean away from the target.

So we got him “plumb” and raising the bow without raising his bow shoulder and checked his draw length. It was now roughly an inch shorter than his dad’s. The dad asked me what else they needed to do and I responded, without thinking, “Nothing, everything will just cascade down because of that one correction,” and it seem to do just that.

I said my goodbyes with the hope that their tuning session would go well from that point onward.

On the drive home, I realized that I hadn’t really thought things through . . . consciously. I just “looked” and “saw” and spoke. I spent a little time figuring out the “whys” involved on the way home, for example when you lean away from the target, if you think of the bow arm as being just part of your reference system, the leaning of the upper body moves the head, and your anchor point, farther away from your bow hand (and the bow). This is what causes the “too long” draw length. When the archer stands plumb (straight up and down) the rear elbow is elevated, the angle the fingers make on the bowstring becomes square, for all of the reasons that we adopt that form, those postures, in the first place, so if you remove the lean, everything else just falls into place.

The young man involved sucked all of this up and made the corrections needed in just a shot or three. (He learns fast as many of the young do.)

But the lesson for me, and possibly for you, is to accept that your intuition is a very useful tool. I didn’t think all of this through, I just reacted to the situation. This can lead to chasing one’s tail, as I have done many times before, but that chasing is probably also part of the learning process. And if my intuition doesn’t work, and sometimes it does not, then thinking through everything consciously is necessary.

And, I have been working on a book project lately which is how to coach archery from physical principles. I hope this will lead to me having a better understanding of what is going on and by sharing that will help you diagnose the technical problems you encounter. Maybe this story will become a “case study” for that book.

Getting Serious: Helping Them with New Arrows, Part 3

Helping Them with More Advanced Tuning

When your archers have mastered basic tuning, they often are curious about more advanced tuning. Let’s jump to the end of the line to look at the Cadillac, no the Rolls-Royce, of tuning: group tuning.

Preliminaries to Group Tuning
This is something an archer shouldn’t undertake unless they have reached a stage where they are consistently grouping well at all distances they are competing in. Since this process is quite laborious, to attempt it before the preliminaries are in place will be a great waste of time. So, this is not for beginners or even intermediate archers.

What Group Tuning Accomplishes
There is a short list of things that group tuning accomplishes. In the early stages it confirms the quality of the tune at all of the competing distances. Later, it is used to expose very small improvements that can be extracted from an archer’s equipment.

Getting Started—Proportional Group Sizes
If a your or your student’s bow and your arrows are tuned well, then consistent groups should be possible and observed. And because arrows are fairly simple projectiles they should show some consistent behavior, one of which is that the sizes of the groups should be proportional to the distances shot.

For example, if your archer shoots three dozen arrows at 30 meters and the diameter of the group is 20 centimeters. If that process were to be shot at double the distance, 60 meters, the diameter of the group should also double, so the group should be 40 centimeters across/high. At triple the distance, you should get groups three times as large, etc. Of course, this is on a windless day with no other influences upon the archer.

So, other than the archer, why might one not get proportional groups? Two common problems are excessive drag and clearance issues. If the arrows themselves have excessive drag associated with them (often this is attributed to poor fletching but it would have to be really, really poor to be the main cause because the drag associated with the shaft is far, far greater than of the fletches), the excessive drag will slow the arrows rapidly and as their speed is lost, the arrows become less stable and groups expand. If this is the case, the grouping at longer distances will be larger than expected. Clearance issues are issues in which the arrow, as it is leaving the bow, strikes something on its way out. That something can be a fletch or even the arrow itself. The thing it hits can be the riser or the arrow rest. It can even be the string dragging on the archer’s chin as the shot is loosed. These issues cause unstable arrow flight from the beginning, which the fletches can damp out over time. This results in groups at the closer distance being bigger than expected when compared with the sizes of the groups at longer distances.

Testing for Proportional Group Sizes A perfect place to do this is the practice butts of a field range because there are almost always a wide choice of target distances already set up. If you are at a target range, you will have to set up targets at the distances your student will be shooting. You will need three, better four, target distances and it makes things simpler if you choose easy multiples of the smaller distance, e.g. 20, 40, 60, 80 yards/meters or 15, 30, 45, 60 yards/meters. You can do it at any four distances, but then you will have to do some math. It is also easier if you use the same size target face.

The process is to shoot enough arrows to establish a reliable group size (you can disregard obvious mistakes). You can determine the group sizes either from the rings on the target (use decimal scoring) or by wrapping a string around the arrows and measuring the length of the wrapping string (a rough circumference of the group). Obviously if you don’t have many arrows, you will need to shoot a number of ends and the string technique is a bit messy (if you have four groups of six arrows, you will have four circumferences and you can just average those). The circumference or diameter (width/height) of round groups are direct measures of “group size.”

It is best if all of the arrows are shot on the same day so that the same conditions exist as well as the archer being whatever they were on that day (no day-to-day variations in mood or physical ability).

Making the Comparisons If you were able to pick four easy distances (20, 40, 60, 80 yards or meters) then the groups sizes should line up as well. The smallest one should be able to be multiplied by 2X, 3X, and 4X to get the other three (or close enough). Do not expect these to be exact. The 40 group size might be exactly half of the 80 with the 60 exactly half way in between, but the 20 group size is off. If so, this means that either the test was a bit iffy (you can just repeat that distance to confirm the number) or you may have a clearance problem.

You may have to do this a number of times to get a set of group sizes you feel good about and are “believable” as to what they are telling you. But when you have done this, you will feel that you have a good idea of what your expected group sizes are at those distances (you will know what is “normal” for you).

And That Was the Easy Part
The basic group testing is to make sure that there aren’t any glaring problems with your setup or tune. Once that is done we can get into fine tuning.

To fine tune your bow-arrow system by group testing, the procedure is the same for nocking point height adjustments and centershot adjustments, even button pressure adjustments. You establish a repeatable group size at one of the longer distances in your “suite.” Then you make a minute change in one of the variables, for example, a 1/32ʺ (0.5 mm) change in nocking point position, and then you check the group size again. Another little change, another test, and so on. You are looking for the group size to shrink when it hits a sweet spot. Obviously you need to test changes both up and down in the nocking point, testing each change. After, say, making four 1/32ʺ downward changes in your nocking point, you need to go back to normal and try making upward changes. Ideally we would see the group sizes shrink and then go back up in size around the “sweet spot.” But we don’t know exactly where we are in that scenario, so we have to feel our way along. And, “ideally” doesn’t come around very often, so we take the best we can get.

Clearly this is laborious and should only be undertaken when your archer has settled form and a settled draw weight and a settled draw length. If your student is still growing, don’t do it. If they are thinking about changing bows, don’t do it.

There Just Has to Be Something Easier!
There are quite a number of intermediate tests that are substantially easier to perform, but are not as fine. We will cover a couple of these next time: Shooting at Vertical and Horizontal Tapes and French or “Walk-Back” Tuning.