There seems to be some sort of " quality and optimal performance line" between some of us who tournament shoot vs. some of us who hunt, and " middle of the road" is fine when shooting at a living creature, but not when trying to hit a baby X ring on a Vegas target, or 12 ring on a McKensie turkey at 48 yds, which you simply cannot do consistently unless your setup is " optimal" ?

I' m not going to go on and on and chastise anyone here for what they choose to do, but you should really think about this for a second.... We all should continue to strive for perfection in our setups, that ensures more X' s or 12' s, and quicker and cleaner kills, bottom line.

Now---

As I' ve stated many tinmes before, bareshafts, field-tipped arrows, and broadheads will not and should not group together when tuned for optimal performance individually. This is fact. Tune each one individually in a hooter shooter to run a perfect bullet hole arrow after arrow, (or group tune to the best of you ability at distance) THEN try to put any of the others into the same hole or group without touching anything. It will NOT do it, and even when furhter adjusted to a " middle of the road" tune for all you will still NOT get them all into the same hole or same sized group as you would when individually tuned to the best of ones' ability. 2-3 or 4-6 inch differential at any distance out of a machine or when group tuning is NOT " close enough" in ANY hunting or tournament situation IMHO, and especially so when you add the human-error element which magnifies these less-than-perfect holes and/or groupings. This is how we fuel the anti' s crusade when we setup our equipment to " Middle of the road, close enough" and then go out and throw marginal shots into game animals, possibly wounding instead of quickly and humanely putting them down by being that 2-3" or 4-6" much closer to perfect. If anything, I' d rather throw a marginal shot into a foam McKensie or a paper X-ring than I would into a living animal, and I don' t do that for tournament score preparation, so why should I feel " middle of the road" is good enough for me anywhere else and especially on a hunting setup? I personally do not.... We all owe it to not only the game we seek, but the tournaments we play and ourselves as sportsmen to ensure that no matter what, we are doing everything we can to make sure our setups are working at optimal levels at all times. " Middle of the road" tuning is simply not good enough IMHO.

If you all feel that finding a " middle of the road" tune is good enough, that' s your choice.... My advice and technical recommendation is to tune to the individual application at hand, and put those puppies into the same hole or TIGHT group every time. Spine still has to be perfect to get optimal groupings at all distances, so you don' t need to run a bareshaft to find that out.. there are some great charts and programs out there that do that for you now! With perfect groupings of each individual setup, if you screw something up it will be much more forgiving, and you still may be able to harvest that animal instead of possibly wounding and losing them, and be in that X or 12 ring a lot more often. That' s it in a nutshell. Good shooting, Pinwheel 12