How to Sight In a Compound Bow

Learning how to sight in your compound bow may seem like a complicated process. All of the bells and whistles on bow sights these days can make it even more intimidating to mess with. In all honesty, it’s really not that hard. By following a few basic guidelines, you can sight in any compound bow with ease and be ready for archery season.

I’m going to run through the basics of sighting in both a multi-pin bow sight and a single-pin bow sight. There is more than one way to skin a cat and certainly more than one way to sight in a bow. This is just what has worked for me over the last decade of successful bowhunting. Try it, take what works, and leave the rest if you so choose.

Sighting In Your Bow

Make Sure the Bow Is Sound

Before diving into the shooting portion of sighting in your bow, you want to make sure that your bow is in sound condition. We want our bows to be operating at their fullest potential, so no other issues arise that have an ill effect on our sighting.

These are things like cam timing, arrow spine, the absence of nock pinch, making sure your arrow isn’t contacting anything it shouldn’t, tightening screws, and just general specs like proper draw weight, draw length, peep height, and first, second, and third axis adjustments.

All of these things can be sorted out at your local pro shop if you aren’t confident doing them yourself. There’s no shame in seeking advice from a professional to get you started on the right foot.

You’re also going to want to paper-tune your bow beforehand. This will ensure your arrow isn’t flying out of your bow at a weird angle, resulting in improper arrow flight. We want consistency because consistency equals accuracy. Now, we can start shooting.

Follow Follow Follow

It may seem counterintuitive, but always follow your arrow. What does that mean?

If your arrow hits the left of your aiming point, move your sight to the left. And if it’s to the right, move your sights right. When the arrow is hitting high, move your sight, or pin up, and the opposite for arrows hitting low. Your goal is to marry the sight up with where the arrow is hitting. Shooting groups of three arrows at a time can help show consistency in where you’re hitting.

Quick tip: In order to really see any left/right or up/down variation consider running a piece of masking tape vertically and then horizontally on your target to make a cross. The horizontal will help show any elevation inconsistencies and the vertical will help show windage inconsistencies.

Start at a Short Distance

In the spirit of keeping our arrow bill low, we want to start shooting at a shorter distance. I’m talking like 5-10 yards. This is just to ensure that we are on target and can confidently move back without the worry of taking out a pigeon accidentally.

Do this no matter the style of sight, whether it’s a single-pin or multi-pin. Adjust your sight housing up, down, left, or right until you are consistently hitting what you’re aiming at with your top pin.

On that note …

Sighting In Multi-Pin Sights

If you’re using a multi-pin sight, before you start shooting, you’re going to want to move your top pin up almost to the top of the sight housing. This is more important if you’re using a 5-pin and beyond and not as important with a 3-pin.

The reason you want to do this is to ensure you have enough real estate beneath your top pin to get all the way out to the desired yardage of your bottom pin. Once your top pin is in place, you’ll shoot and adjust your entire sight housing to marry it up with the dot at 5-10 yards.

Pins are usually separated in 10-yard increments. A common 5-pin configuration would be 20, 30, 40, 50, 60.

Once you’re good at a short distance, move back to 20 yards and repeat the process, moving your entire sight housing, chasing your arrow, until you’re hitting in the dot. Most folks use 20 yards as their first pin, so if that’s the case, it’s time to move on to the next step. If it’s not and you’d like it to be 30 yards, then move back to 30 yards and repeat the process. I personally use 30 yards for my top pin.

The Rest of Your Pins

At this point, you should have your top pin dialed to the desired yardage. Now, I suggest moving the rest of your pins up toward the top pin in equal margins just to make sure you’re on target for the rest of your yardages. You don’t have to be exact here. That will come in a second.

Stand at the desired yardage for your second pin and take the shot. If you’re low or high, instead of moving the whole sight housing, you’re going to move the second pin either up or down. Remember, chase the arrow. Do this until you’re in the dot, and repeat this process all the way through your pins.

As you go through this process, you might notice that your arrow is either drifting left or right incrementally more as you move out in distance. As long as you took the time to paper-tune beforehand, this is fairly normal. It’s hard to see these slight windage inconsistencies at shorter distances.

At longer distances, they are magnified. I will make very minute adjustments here until my arrow hits where I want it. After you do so, it’s crucial that you go back to the shorter distances to make sure things are still looking good. If they are not, then you have some other issue going on, and I’d suggest shooting through the paper again.

A note on sight tapes for multi-pin sliders: Acquiring the right sight tape for your setup is going to vary from company to company. Some provide tapes based on your arrow speed. Others have calibration tapes for you to use. This usually means finding 20 and 60 yards with your top pin and slider, making reference marks, and then matching those with a certain sight tape.

For Single-Pin Sights

Sighting in a single-pin sight is actually much less laborious than sighting in a multi-pin. Take the same “start small” precautions of course. Marry your pin up to where your arrow is hitting by moving the entire sight housing up, down, left, or right. Do this again at 20 yards. The next part is where things are different than a multi-pin.

Your Sight Tape

With a single-pin sight, you are operating off of a sight tape calibrated for your bow setup. These are slider sights, meaning you can very easily dial the sight up or down in order to set the indicator on your slider to your desired yardage. It provides to-the-yard accuracy, which is a huge plus for a single-pin.

Each sight company can be a little bit different in their approach to how they want you to get the right sight tape. The general steps, though, are to find 20 yards and make a small mark on your dial. Then incrementally move your way back to 60 yards, dialing down your whole way there. Once your arrows are hitting dead center at 60 yards, make another mark. These marks will serve as reference marks.

Some companies have a calibration tape to find the right sight tape, and others just require you to do the above and match your 20 and 60 reference marks with the right tape that they provide you with. You’ll get quite a few tapes covering the gamut on different bow speeds.

Once you figure out the right tape, leave your indicator on either the 20 or 60-yard reference mark. If it’s on the 20, install the tape so the 20-yard mark on the tape is underneath the indicator. If it’s on 60, install the tape so the 60-yard mark on the tape is underneath the indicator. Now, you’re ready to rock.

That’s a Wrap

If you’ve reached this point, you’re probably looking pretty decent on the range. Something I want to leave you with, though, is the importance of patience, recognizing when you’re tired, and recognizing that not all days are created equal to sight in a compound bow. We are also not perfect and have a massive influence on where the arrow hits regardless of the sight in.

Sighting in a compound bow is not something you can necessarily just bang out of the park in one go. Sure, you might get lucky, but more times than not, it will take a few visits to the archery range to get things dialed. And throughout doing so, you need to understand that if you’re tired, you’re not shooting to your full potential. This could lead to adjusting your sight to a mistake instead of accurate results.

Shooting your bow in the wind is not a great recipe for accuracy, and neither is shooting in the rain. Wind will make your pin dance around like a pinball, and rain will make your arrow hit lower than it should. Don’t try to sight in on days like this unless you are, in fact, longing for a headache. It’s good to practice in these conditions for hunting scenarios after you’re sighted but not during the sight-in process.

This is where I leave you. May all of your arrows fly true and hit their mark.