How to CREEP TUNE - PRECISION BOW TUNING

Well guys, it's a rainy, nasty day outside. So that means we're doing some shot videos today. Total R2 challenges are coming up, just summertime shooting. So I got the old hunting rig and she needs a little bit of a revamp. So we're gonna be coming out with some videos here soon, just kind of like going over how you should properly set up a bow once it's already set up, like some more fine tuning to get yourself dialed. So today we're gonna be talking about creep tuning. Creep tuning is the advanced process to make sure that your cam timing is 100%. It's essentially the shot in process to get your timing good and to have it set at the most forgiving setting when you don't make a good shot or essentially make a weak shot where you're not fully on the back wall and you start to creep forward because you're tired, you held a little too long, say you're on an animal and you hold way too long and you start creeping and you shoot. That's to make sure that the bow is still gonna hit at the same point when you're not 100% on the back wall. So creep tuning to make sure that your cams and your timing are in 100% sync. This is kind of like a, if you have a bow press at home or you're tight with a pro shop and you guys can tinker around one late night in the shop or something, this is something cool that you can do to help gain you a couple extra points or a little bit tighter groups on your bad shots. This helps you on your bad shots, not necessarily on your good shots, if that makes sense. It's going to make your bow more forgiving, especially so when shooting broadheads or anything along those lines. So this was actually, George Riles claims that he came up with this back in 2002. There's an article that he posted on Archery Talk. I'll link it down below. It goes step-by-step how to do this. So if you wanna reference that article, click the link below. George Riles, the inventor of the creep tuning method, 2002. And it was designed back when it was more of a variable, when you had super long axle-to-axle bows back in the early 2000s. You know, you had these really unforgiving cam systems, super spongy walls, and you really, in order to shoot really, really good in the tournament archery world, you really had to creep tune your bows. Nowadays, it's not as much of a problem. You can get away without doing it. And by doing it, the margin has shrunk a lot. Bow technology has gotten a lot better. Can it still help? Yeah, 100%. But is it as important as it once was when bow technology wasn't as good? For sure not. So step number one, you need a bow press in order to do this. But step one is just get your timing close by eyeballing it. And we've always, we've gone over this before in bow setup videos. With your timing, you need some sort of draw board. If you have a buddy, you can do the buddy system. You can draw back, just kind of flutter on that wall and someone can reference it at full draw. But we have a last chance draw board. So we're gonna go ahead and get this at full draw. So when referencing the timing, you're looking at the cable and then the mod. And the mod is gonna spin around and slam on that cable at the top and at the bottom. And you want them to be perfectly in sync. And what creep tuning does is it confirms that it's perfectly in sync. We're gonna see here where we're at. So we're touching right there and you really wanna flutter it back and forth. And then once it hits the cable, it actually moves a little bit. So you wanna rotate until it starts moving the cable. Then you come down to the bottom, do the same thing. So it looks like the top is maybe slightly ahead and I'm talking like millimeter. So we got cables moving there, go down to the bottom and I gotta move it a little bit more before it starts moving. So I'm actually gonna leave it there. I can maybe put a half a twist in it to keep it, but I'm gonna go right into the creep tuning so that it is maybe a millimeter off and we're going to just see what the creep tuning shows because I'm kind of interested. I haven't done this in a while. So this is what you need for creep tuning. You're gonna start out at 20 yards and you're just gonna get sighted in. Now, the best way to get sighted in when you're just trying to be very analytical about something is you put a straight line horizontally. So we got a target out there. We got a mag view. Actually, look at this. This is funny. So we got the mag view and I rigged it up. It's raining outside, so I didn't want to put it outside, but I rigged it up between the window here and just hooked up to my bino. So we're gonna get this ripping. You can see we got just a horizontal line on the target. I put a piece of electrical tape. So what I'm gonna be able to do is I'm gonna aim at that line and just float left and right. I really don't care where it lands on that line as long as I'm just aiming somewhere along that line. So it gives you a really good reference point, high and low. You can be very analytical about it. So we're gonna come over here and we're gonna shoot from inside the shop to outside. And you're just gonna get sighted in at 20 yards. Don't really worry about doing anything fancy. 20 yards right here. I actually really gotta get sighted in. Okay, a little closer. And it's best to always double check your homework as in like shoot a couple that hit the line. Don't just shoot one and done. You gotta go shoot a couple ends, make sure it's sighted in. That definitely helps. Okay, still more. So that felt like a good shot. Split the line in half. So I'm gonna shoot another one. See if that was actually true. Still in the line a little bit higher. Do another one. And it's like you kind of take the averages of your shot. Obviously it depends on your skill level. If the best group you can do is like a softball, then you kind of reference like a softball type of line. But if you can hit a line like this every single time at 20 yards, then obviously you can use this line as a better reference. Felt good too. Kind of skirting on the top side. Like I said, just take your time at this process. Shoot a lot. Get sighted in. Because if you don't get sighted in at the beginning, you're just gonna be chasing yourself all around in the process. Man, still floating on that high side. Okay, we're back in the middle. Another shot. That was definitely a little low. You always gotta take an effect of bad shots. Man, we're touch low again. We're chasing it. So I'm gonna pull those. That was 10 arrows. So it's like I'm right there. I'm fighting just like trying to get it fine tuned 100%. So I'm gonna go pull them, shoot a couple bit more. Again, it's so important you get that initial sight in mark. No questions about it that you're sight on at 20. Okay, let's give her another go. That felt good. Okay. That was right in the bottom of the line. Same exact spot. Bingo. That felt good. We just did, boom, a little higher, boom, a little bit higher, boom, right in it. So I'm gonna call that good. So now, sighted in 20 yards, 100%. Make sure that's tightened all the way down to lock it into place. Now what we're gonna do is we are going to pull very, we're gonna need full draw, and we're gonna pull very hard into the back wall to the point where you can still aim accurately, but ream into the back wall, really pulling on the mods against the back wall. Then we're gonna shoot. We're gonna shoot a couple times and we're gonna see where that lands. And I went at the top part of the line, middle of the line. So pulling on it hard right now might not have any effect on it. Okay, so those are three arrows that were pretty much right in the line, which is good. That means that I don't have to do anything or changes when I'm pulling really hard on the back wall. So now, we are going to be a little sally about it, and we're gonna pull back, and we are going to be really weak on the wall. So essentially, you pull back, you have the center of the let off, and you can pull on the wall really hard, and then you can just barely creep up just a little bit. You might notice what I'm talking about, like if you're shooting in the backyard, you get a little too comfortable, and at times, you almost get sucked into the poundage. If you have a really, really aggressive bow, that fine line of let off to being sucked into the poundage is very small compared to a more squishier bow or lower poundage and stuff like that. So on a Matthews, it's aggressive, but it's not too aggressive to where that fine line is too small. There's still some room to do this. So we're gonna get really sally on it and shoot a couple more. That's tough to shoot like that. Nice, okay, so that went quite a bit above the line. It's tough, because I'm used to pushing and pulling and pulling into the wall, and then you're trying to ease into it. Okay, nice, same spot. So here we go. I was a little nervous that we weren't gonna see any sort of change here. So shooting like normal, where I know about, you know, from shooting in practice, like how much I'm pulling on the wall, shooting normal, I got sighted in, reaming on it, probably adding 10 plus pounds of pressure on the back wall, still hitting good, but then when I'm being a little sally about it, about to be sucked into the poundage, it's shooting about that high at 20. So now we're gonna move over to the bow press and tweak our timing just a little bit. Okay, so our bow is hitting high when we do our creep for this creep tuning. So if it's hitting high, we're gonna want to put twist into the bottom cable that goes on the bottom cam. If our creep tuning hit low, we were going to put twist into the cable on the top cam. Now, George says that you always wanna put twist into it. You never wanna put twist out, because twist into it is way more responsive. You're gonna get way more of an accurate result than taking twist out. If you take twist out, it takes a while for the cable to settle because you're unraveling it essentially. So for it to fully unravel, it's not as responsive as if you just put a twist in, make it tighter. I guess just more responsive when you're tighter. In our case, our arrow hit a little bit high. So I'm gonna put in one twist into the bottom cam. So now we're essentially gonna check our homework and see if that did anything. All right, we got a fresh new arrows. Hopefully this works. That'd be easy if it was just one twist. I'm definitely out of time now. I can feel that. A twist might've been too much. I know. We'll switch it back to a half twist. That was just way too responsive. So we'll take a half twist back out. And this is the thing with any sort of higher level tuning is there's not really a, there can be like a roadmap, but a lot of it's trial and error. And that's why it's so time consuming. A lot of initial bow setup is pretty cut and dry and it's partially just how it gets set up. Some accessories that are on it, obviously the arrows, but every bow is like a little bit different. So when it comes to this high level stuff, it's just more unique, I guess. Let's see how this is. That's better. So we're gonna creep a little bit. Ooh, not too much. Dude, I was like right on the edge of the whole time. Still a little high. Let's try this. There's even a more trick to get even a more micro adjustment. So we're gonna put that half twist back out of it. Now we're back to where we were. But we're gonna take our end loop and we are going to flip this around and essentially twist the loop up a little bit more. Matthew's guys showed me this. This is like, you can essentially, since this is twisted, you can twist it up a little bit more and that gives you like a micro adjustment. So consider that a quarter turn. Those are quarter turns. You can do half turns in here. We got a quarter turn now. Let's see what we got. Quarter turn back. We started with a full and it made way too much of a change so now we're back to a quarter. Did a half and we're back to a quarter. Same spot. Let's try this. We're mainly just experimenting here. Let's try just a normal shot. Oh, we're back up high. This is what I'm saying. You gotta have such incredible patience with this. Creeping. And there's such a minute difference there. I'm gonna look at this for fun too. That's swung a good bit out of time. You're telling me a half twist did that much. So I tweaked my timing again and essentially this whole process, what it is, is this sight in process gives you a starting point of what direction to move and you're gonna have to keep tweaking it until your arrows hit exactly the same spot, reaming on the wall, being normal and creeping a little bit. So that's all this process is. So I tweaked it a little bit more and now we're gonna see, I'm gonna do a normal shot, see where it lands and then I'm gonna creep and see where it lands. Okay, so that was quite a bit higher. So I'm gonna get sighted in again and cause that's the thing, as you're changing timing, especially it's bow dependent but changing your timing really changes where impact is. So that's why in the stage of setting this bow up, I just have my setup dial on this. I don't have a sight mark yet. So some of this tuning, most of the tuning you do in a bow, you wanna do it before you get a really good sight mark or sight tint, I guess. Okay, that felt pretty solid. All right, that was right on the top of the line. So now what I'm gonna do, I'm gonna creep a little bit and just see where it lands. And really, the quick and dirty way to do it would be what I'm doing kind of now later in the stage where you shoot a normal shot and then you creep a little bit and aim at that same arrow. If it goes high or low, then you just make adjustments as need be. You don't need to be as formal about it, I suppose, if you just wanna do a quick check. Nice. Dude, honestly, that's not bad at all. So I just shot, that was my 10th arrow this time around. So let me go pull them and we'll just do a couple more back and forth. But I think that feels good. It even feels a little bit different. Your timing makes your sight picture, your back wall experience, and a lot of your shooting experience just totally different. So every little tweak we did, I can feel a very big difference. This is almost like one of those little voodoo things where when you shoot a shot and you're like, why the heck did that go high? Or why the heck did that go low? A lot of that comes from these more high-level deep-rooted problems like you need a full twist into your cam or a half twist into your cam to get you set perfectly in sync. It definitely helps going a little extra mile and a little extra work to do this, but we're gonna do this one more time. So I'm gonna give it a normal shot here first. Okay, good. Man, I almost missed the target. Hit it at the edge. Okay, that was right on the line. Felt good. So now we're gonna ease up on it, do a little creeping. That was a bad shot, but hey, it's still laying on the line. That's what we like to see, but we'll shoot a few more. It's really tough to make a good shot while you're creeping because it just, it goes against everything kinda how you wanna shoot, pushing and pulling or rotating through. So you gotta be really careful. And that's why, you know, it's a volume game. It's an average game. Like all these shots were about right here. All these shots were about right there. Don't just shoot once and call it quits sort of thing. Dude, I'm really happy with that actually. And the bow feels a little bit better. I know that I was kinda, I've been shooting just the past week or two, changed a couple of things on it and it just, I know that it wasn't 100%. Man, that's tough. Right on the line. Dude, those four shots are like perfect on the line there. Man, well, so the next step that we can do, I'm not gonna do it, but to more fine tune, because this sounds like a 50 plus arrow fine tune, put that target out at 40 yards and do the same process again. Essentially, it's just gonna, it's gonna maximize what's wrong if there is anything wrong now. So you get sighted in 40 yards, shoot like normal, boom, boom, boom. And then you creep, pull hard on it and get that just more dialed in right there. So just one of those steps, man, of getting a perfect setup is creep tuning. You know, obviously bow setup initial, just bolt everything on, make sure it's right. It's pretty cut and dry. But then next is paper tuning. Obviously you get the arrow flying out of the bow. Pretty good, which if you bolt everything on correctly, have the right arrow spine, have the right setup. The paper tune should be really close, but you get that kind of dialed in. And then, you know, your next step, you can do a creep tune. And then what we can do next is like a walk back tune. And then what we can do next is more of a broad head tune, I suppose, after the walk back, even though by this point should be pretty dang close. So yeah, one thing after the next, to just fine tune in the setup. But this phase four, we're getting dialed in for TAC, Total Archer Challenges and creep tuning is complete. So thank you guys for watching. Hopefully that wasn't too confusing because it is just a little bit of TLC, a little bit of patience and just kind of trial and error with all this stuff. So thank you all for watching. We'll catch you in the next one.