Insert tune vs. nock tune vs. broadhead alignment

[Billy Goat]

Interesting. My assumption was that I had a wonky or untuned arrow. Over the weekend I had new strings put on and the bow was tuned for me and I haven’t seen the corkscrew since. But your comment has piqued my interest - what would be out of tune to cause the corkscrew?

You shoot bare shaft to find the spine?

I use to shoot bareshafts, rotate the nock so I got the exact same impact, then fletch for that orientation.

Now I just fletch and shoot, rotate till they all hit the same hole(hooter shooter allows me to cheat). Gillingham has a method of shooting through paper, rotating the nock until all arrows react the same coming out of the bow. Seems it would work.


A whisker biscuit will make an arrow act weird because of the contact. It's way easier to get a bullet hole with through paper because it puts drag on the back of the shaft as it clears the bow, but doesn't mean everything is correct.

Corkscrewing arrow is the back of the arrow not following the point, or an odd vane color giving the appearance, but likely the back of the arrow whipping around. Can be caused by contact, weak spine, really poor form, centershot being way, way off.


I'd get rid of the illuminated nocks. They usually don't fit the string very well at all. Only ones that I have seen that I would use are Firenock, otherwise they are all junk in my opinion. The nock is where your arrow makes the most contact with the bow, and where consistency is important.

 

[VIII]

Don‘t waste your time. Aligning broad heads blades the same on each arrow, most commonly with the fletching, does nothing to help with accuracy or tuning. If you believe it helps (it doesn’t) then I suppose it might give you a little more confidence in your setup or could help align the arrows the same in a quiver so the fletching on the arrows doesn’t touch which can create unwanted noise.

Lastly, I’ve never had an insert that didn’t align if the shaft was squared after cutting it. Outserts for sure but never an insert.

I appreciate the candid response. If it’s sold as snake oil I’ll pass on aligning the broadhead. It seems that most people don’t, but at my experience level, it was worth asking.

Duly noted on the insert. I had never heard about it until today when I was heading down the rabbit hole.

 

[VIII]

I use to shoot bareshafts, rotate the nock so I got the exact same impact, then fletch for that orientation.

Now I just fletch and shoot, rotate till they all hit the same hole(hooter shooter allows me to cheat). Gillingham has a method of shooting through paper, rotating the nock until all arrows react the same coming out of the bow. Seems it would work.


A whisker biscuit will make an arrow act weird because of the contact. It's way easier to get a bullet hole with through paper because it puts drag on the back of the shaft as it clears the bow, but doesn't mean everything is correct.

Corkscrewing arrow is the back of the arrow not following the point, or an odd vane color giving the appearance, but likely the back of the arrow whipping around. Can be caused by contact, weak spine, really poor form, centershot being way, way off.


I'd get rid of the illuminated nocks. They usually don't fit the string very well at all. Only ones that I have seen that I would use are Firenock, otherwise they are all junk in my opinion. The nock is where your arrow makes the most contact with the bow, and where consistency is important.

Now that you fletch then nock tune do you ever run into an issue with where the vanes sit?

 

[Billy Goat]

Now that you fletch then nock tune do you ever run into an issue with where the vanes sit?

No I haven't. I still use 3 fletch, but that's an argument for 4 fletch.

 

[MattB]

I appreciate the candid response. If it’s sold as snake oil I’ll pass on aligning the broadhead. It seems that most people don’t, but at my experience level, it was worth asking.

Duly noted on the insert. I had never heard about it until today when I was heading down the rabbit hole.

I always index my broadheads. Not for accuracy, but rather to keep my fletchings from touching and making noise when in the quiver.

 

[dj1975232]

I've never seen much use in BH alignment, but I do bareshaft nock tune my arrows through paper prior to fletching. It at least gives me consistency of how the arrow is coming off my string.

 

[mod-it]

I'm with Billy Goat on spine indexing.
I prefer to just fletch arrows with all the same color fletchings and then nock tune them afterwards. If I really, really want an off-color indicator vane, then I will group tune/nock tune the arrows into a target before fletching them. Shooting them through paper as bareshafts never works out for me, after I fletch them I still get several arrows that don't behave the same as the group. (Tim Gillingham has a good video on this. He did two dozen arrows and then showed that after fletching them they were making different tears from each other)

I definitely believe squaring arrow ends is important. No matter how carefully done, some arrows still always have a little tab on them after cutting. It is important for the insert to sit flush so it is aligned with the arrow. I would wager that a high percentage of broadheads that show a wobble on a spinner are from the insert install.

I like to trim arrows to length from both ends, as carbon arrow straightness defects are most likely to happen on the ends. If I cut a 32" arrow down to 28", I'll cut 2" from each end rather than all of it from only one end.

While I agree with the others that aligning broadhead blades with vanes is not needed, it is super simple to do so without having to do insert alignment. Just get a set of rubber o-rings to put between the broadhead and the insert. Most archery places have them. They are awesome for keeping target tips from coming loose too.