With the first days of archery season now just a little more than a month away, a few moments spent checking critical gear can avoid lots of disappointment down the road.

Compound bows are amazing machines, but they require maintenance just like any other. Knowing what to look for and how to fix it are important elements of responsible ownership. For a quick checklist, here are a few items the bow-tuning experts have to offer:

• Make sure your strings and your cables are waxed. Wax helps both of these critical components do their job without snagging or breaking. Cables and strings in need of wax will typically appear dry, with a gray or white color, and may show signs of wear in the form of fraying or fuzz.

Bow wax is available in tube form from your local archery shop. Spread a small amount of wax on a section of string or cable, then rub the area vigorously with a piece of leather to heat the wax up so it can coat evenly.

• Check your arrows for cracks or dents, especially if you’re shooting aluminum arrows instead of carbon. Dispose of any that don’t appear to be sound.
• Re-fletch any arrows that need new fletchings or vanes.
• Check your sight pins to make sure they are not loose or have any broken parts. If your setup includes a piece of rubber tubing that keeps your peep sight pointed down range, check it for dry rot or wear before it calls itself to your attention by breaking. A slap in the eye with a rubber hose is not an ideal start to a new bow season.
• Sharpen or replace broadheads. Many mechanical and fixed-blade broadheads offer replaceable parts or can be simply replaced altogether. More traditional broadheads, however, require regular sharpening whether they’ve been used or not. Like a pocket knife on a stick, oxidation alone can cause them to dull and they should be touched up often.
• If your bow is a dual-cam model, make sure their timing is on. Check for this by slowly drawing the bow. As you bring the string back, both should break over at the same time. If, instead of a single “bump,” you feel two separate bumps, the cams are out of time and should be brought to the attention of a professional.
• Consider taking your bow to an archery shop for a tune up.

A professional archery shop will make sure your nock point and rest are aligned correctly. It will also service the cams and check for any other problems the bow may have developed, either in use or in storage.

Avoiding crossbow blues

Crossbows, which have become wildly popular of late, have a few key points all their own that require minding.

The life and death of crossbows is rail lube. The rail on a crossbow is where an arrow, or bolt, sits once loaded and before it’s fired. The crossbow’s string, which needs wax just like those found on vertical bows, will not last long if the crossbow’s rail is left dry.

Additionally, when you’re loading your crossbow, make sure the nock is turned correctly and engaged with the string,. Too often, people assume if the odd-colored fletching is turned down, that’s all they have to look for, but the nock may not match up. If you fire your crossbow with the nock not fully engaged, it’s essentially the same thing as dry firing it.

Dry firing a bow or crossbow, which means drawing either and dropping the string without having an arrow properly loaded, has catastrophic consequences for either instrument’s structure and must be avoided.

Don’t store your bow or crossbow in the heat, and don’t shoot a bow that is hot. Even modern bows can de-laminate and shatter to ruins if you’re not careful.

Innovations in the world of compound bows and crossbows continue to make both more accurate and effective, a fact expressed concisely in the realm of hunting broadheads. The razor-sharp objects attached to the business end of arrows and bolts continue to benefit from the most modern of scientific manufacturing processes.

For decades, bowhunters have made their own choices between fixed-blade and mechanical broadheads. The former, chosen for their sturdy reliability, the latter for their ease of tuning, both have grown more effective through the benefit of science in that time.

Mechanical broadheads, which keep a low profile during flight then open on impact, gained their initial appeal because they were less apt to affect the flight path of the arrow on which they rode. Depending on how a bow is tuned, and on how perfectly straight the broadhead is mounted to each arrow, broadheads with fixed blades can cause deflection in their own flight path, their blades acting as wings, in a way those on a mechanical broadhead typically do not. The same science that has advanced all else archery-related, though, has helped arrows, and the inserts to which all broadheads are attached, advance as well. That, along with the science of aerodynamics and its application to the design of today’s fixed broadheads, has made that issue much less common.

That same science has made both styles of broadhead better at what they do best. Fixed-blade broadheads have advanced through a number of innovations and, today, the state of their art lies in broadheads each milled from a single block of steel. This allows each broadhead to be precisely-shaped and, since there are no parts to move or replace, tremendously strong. Strength, stability and the option for seasons of use are the fixed-blade broadhead’s core offering. Products like the Muzzy 1 lead this category.

Still easy to tune, mechanical broadheads continue to offer advances of their own, the most obvious being a cutting radius more than twice as large as those a fixed-blade broadhead may achieve. In this arena, the Rage Hypodermic is consistently among the category’s leaders.

Perfect practice

No matter which broadhead an archer may choose, effective use depends more on practice and familiarity with the gear than anything else.

Mississippi’s archery season for whitetail deer opened last week and remains open through the end of January. While various firearm seasons will come and go between now and then, bows and crossbows remain legal gear all the way through, which makes the value of archery gear and its advances all the more applicable. That gear, with lots of moving parts, needs constant attention as the practice meant to make shooting perfect also leads to wear on the gear over time.

At the beginning of a new season, as well as every week as the seasons go along, archery hunters should make sure their bow’s string isn’t showing signs of wear, and that their nock point remains centered.

Silent, still

All of the above goes toward making sure the arrow is pointed in precisely the same direction of the bow as it leaves the string. A final check of this can be made by measuring how far the arrow sits from the riser at the riser’s front and back. If a nocked arrow is out of alignment here, something is almost certainly out of plumb with the bow itself.

How soon or how often a bow’s elements work themselves out of kilter has a lot to do with how much they’re used, but lots of practice is critical to solidify the ability to shoot well, so it comes with the territory.

In the realm of bowhunting advancement, the string stop, a padded pedestal that sits just ahead of and below the point at which a launched arrow leaves the string, has been the greatest new archery invention of the past several years, doing wonders to make bows shoot quietly.

Everything about bowhunting is geared toward getting close and being quiet. The engineering of modern bows has steadily increased arrow speed over the years, but it’s nowhere close to the speed of sound. Bows that are loud upon release startle more game and cause more missed opportunities, but bows that shoot faster and, therefore, more accurately, tend to be louder. To counteract that, a number of sound- and vibration-damping devices can be applied, though the string stop cuts to the heart of the matter, stopping the string itself just past the point at which the arrow takes flight.

Anchor down

Added to a bow’s string above the nock point and below the peep sight, a kisser button is a small, plastic disc, roughly the diameter of a dime. At full draw, the shooter can touch this button to his or her lip, which ensures they’re using exactly the same sight picture every time, possibly the most important factor for any shooter of any experience level.

For more advanced shooters who want to practice at longer distances than they actually expect to shoot at game, the bowhunting equivalent of swinging a weighted bat before stepping up to the plate, best practices point to starting at maximum range and working closer, rather than the other way around. As with any workout session, fine motor controls get shaky with fatigue. By starting with the longest shots while you’re freshest, close work at the end will still offer good practice.

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