Pin overlaps?

[GF.]

Setting up for broadheads has me pondering this one anew....


The numbers aren't exact, but bear with me... If my #1 pin is about 3" high at around 15 yards, zeroed at 23 yards, and 3" low at 28 yards, do I want to have my #2 pin hitting +3" (high) at 23 yards, zeroed at 28 and dropping to -3" (low) in the short 30s, and then my #3 pin 3" high at 28, zeroed where #2 hits -3" and 3" low at the #4 pin's zero there in the mid 30s???

I guess the thinking is that if you never want to be off by more than +/- 3 inches, for example, then if you mistakenly use your #2 pin at the #1 pin's zero, then you're only 3" high. If you use the #1 when you should be into the short side of the #2 pin's window, then you're not going to be more than 3" low.
Follow me? :confused:

Just seems like there ought to be a series of 6" high POI 'windows' you could set up for, but I think 50% is too much overlap. If my numbers are anywhere close to OK, it'd take 4 pins to get to a 36-yard zero and a 5th would only take you to 40 on your zero, with may 4 yards margin for error short and 3 long..

On the other hand, you could routinely blow your range guesstimation by 1 whole pin and not get clobbered on it. :D At roughly 28 yards, you could totally lose your cool, and still make a hit on a 6" target whether you called it pin #1,#2, or #3. And really, since that #3 would be good to go at 36 yards, that ain't too dang bad for real bowhunting....

Or is it?

What's your preferred set-up?

[dave-t.]

I tried the mental gymnastics of honing a sight system in and re-building the wheel, but there is a reason 99% of archers go with a standard 20, 30, 40yd pin set up.

Look at it this way, if you blow your 20yd pin shot, the thirty yard will only be 4-5" off (me estimating by what you're explaining).

20, 30, 40 is easier to remember than 23, 28, 34.

For quite a while I set at 20, 35, 50yrds, because I never intended to hunt past the 20yd pin, but wanted to practice longer shots because they show form issues. Now I'm set to 20, 30, 50yds.

I do have a buddy that is blowing past all of this with a new PSE Omen that has been worked over, supposedly chrono'ed 366fps, and he swears that he is one pin 0-40, and then a 50 and 65yd pin. He flat clobbered an antelope doe last year at 45yds shooting slick tricks, so I don't give him advice on the subject.;)

[GF.]

Outsmarting myself is a constant danger.... Probably because it ain't all that hard to do....:rolleyes:


1-pin from 0-40? Ye Gawds!

I still maintain that 45-plus yard shootin' ain't exactly bowhunting as I know and love it, but seeing as I can group plenty tight enough to kill an Elk at 40 yards (and provided I can do it with the broadheads as well as the FPs!) I guess I can't honestly say that I wouldn't take that kind of a shot, given a laser reading and everything else looking good. OK, looking perfect... :rolleyes: Pretty much my max, though, because that's a helluvalotta hang time. Cranking up the feeps another 20% would take the edge off, but still...... Isn't that why they invented guns?:D

I just don't happen to own one o' them fang-dangled laser gee-gaws, so I'd sooner have a little margin for error on the guesstimate.... though it is a little hard to believe that I would need or even really want to set things up so that they're quite as tight as described above... I just know that I would be looking at things in the field as "slam-dunk", "gettin far enough" and "only with a laser on it", so stretching my first 3 pins out to 20/30/40 (or maybe 23, 32 & 38) and having the other two for artillery practice is probably more sensible than worrying about round numbers on a practice range. So maybe instead of overlapping the full 3 inches, I'll cut it to 1.5 or 2.....

[dave-t.]

Here is a thought I tried to give you a max distance range.

Set a bottom pin that brackets 16" (or whatever you prefer) at the max distance you would shoot. If you will shoot to 40yds, then below that 40pin, set another pin for the bracket. If the deer is smaller back to belly than that, he's farther, if it fits then he's at 40yds, if the deer overlaps the pins, he's closer.

I tried that for a while, but deer aren't one size fits all. Especially if you hunt from a tree stand and the ground. The perspective one of the angles is off, but you do have a set measured distance that can give you some perspective on distance.

All said and done, I scrapped the idea after the first season trying it.

[GF.]

It took me about 30 seconds to think through all the pros and cons of what you just suggested, and it'd probably take me a good half hour to write it all up. It's not that I think so fast as much as that I type so slow....

Just the same... I don't think I'll bother ;)

K

I

S

S, Baby!!!



It's the simple life for me!

[Twanger]

I hear ya' GF. I've thought about stuff like that, but am so locked into 20, 30, 40... that I doubt I could ever learn 20, 26, 32, 38, 44 or some-such. BTW, my 20 and 30 yard pins are about 5 inches apart. Was shooting some at 30 yards last weekend and forgot to use my 30 yard pin and dropped one about 5 inches low... WTF? :eek: Then it hit me. Wrong pin. That's what I get for talking to a buddy while I'm shootin'.

I now have pins at 20, 30, 40, 50 and 70. That's one danged big gap from 50 to 70 dont-cha-know.

[GF.]

GREEN 22!

YELLOW 28!


RED 33!


HUT! HUT! HUT!

Ooops. Right season, wrong game :D

I think if you use a rangefinder, you've gotta keep it simple, whether that's 20-30-40, 25-35-45 or whatever your launch speed will allow. Probably for a lot of whitetail guys, starting at 15 and going up by tens isn't a bad idea, just so you really keep it on a rope at the short ranges and don't inadvertently hit too high from a stand when you're 20 feet up. You guys who can consistently get inside of 20 yards probably do this anyway...

But if your range estimate is never going to be much more precise than 'short', 'medium', 'long' or 'fahgeddaboudditt', then it makes sense to me to put in a little overlap and stretch the Max PBR for each pin as wide as possible. That's just a lot fussier to set up, because you have to be able to shoot in about 2 yard increments instead of going by 5's or 10's....

I just don't want to find out that my 28 yard pin is something potentially disastrous like 6" or 7" high at 20 yards; being off by that much in your estimate is entirely to be expected, actually, and as my brother found out, it can work out none too well for anyone concerned...

So I've got a project for while the grill is heating up when I get home :D

[happycamper]

Naw........I agree totally on a 20 30 40........I could hit something further.....but.....

[ncboman]

20 30 40 50 60. :p

I'm only super confident to 30 at the moment though. Gotta practice the longer pins some more.

... been lazy shootin and busy workin for the liar Obammy. :o

[Twanger]

Usually I have a 60-yard pin, but we have a couple of 'brass balls' shots on the 3D course you can make at 70 yards so I moved the 60-yard pin down to 70. It's amazing the difference between shooting at 50 and 70. On elk/bison sized 3D targets it's basically a no-brainer shot at 50 yards - I'm about 100% in the kill zone, but at 70 yards it's more like 50%. :mad:

[My buddy]

I shoot a 3 pin sight set at 20, 30 and 40 yards.

I find that it is best for me to determine yardage in 10 yard increments so it makes since that my pins would be set that way.

for hunting, I like them close, so I use my 20 yard pin.

[GF.]

Usually I have a 60-yard pin, but we have a couple of 'brass balls' shots on the 3D course you can make at 70 yards so I moved the 60-yard pin down to 70. It's amazing the difference between shooting at 50 and 70. On elk/bison sized 3D targets it's basically a no-brainer shot at 50 yards - I'm about 100% in the kill zone, but at 70 yards it's more like 50%. :mad:

Lemme guess..... YOu're scattering high and low more than side-to-side.

You're a fizz-issist... What's the downward velocity of a 250 fps arrow at 50 yards vs. 70?

[ncboman]

fps doan matter much at long distances. Once it gets to a certain point, the bottom is falling out regardless.

Stretching way out gets so much on the edge of human ability, minor factors can make the day good or bad regarding accuracy. How recently you have eaten for example.

I regard comfort as a very high factor in long range accuracy. You shoot better when you are comfortable with the bow as an extension of yourself.

[dave-t.]

I agree that a persons ability with a bow can be different from day to day. When I would routinely practice to 50yrds, some day's I'd have 4-5" groups for as long as I wanted to shoot them, and have all the confidence that went with it, and some days I'd have 9-11"+ groups, and couldn't get better on the day for anything, and have all the doubt that comes with bad shooting.

Anybody can have a bad day with a rifle or shotgun too, but a bad day with a bow can be a really dramatic change from what is normal. If I can't concentrate on form to get out of a shooting funk in a very few shots, then I'm done for the day. I'm not going to practice shooting bad. Move up close, and get a couple easy bulls-eyes, call it a day.

[GF.]

Agreed... The 250 is just a placeholder to make the math a little easier for ol' Walt, but it doesn't look like he's playin' today :D

I always had trouble with converting a time of flight and an acceleration rate to an instantaneous velocity in skool, and this one gets nasty because you have to figure on a deceleration rate for your arrow and apply that to the launch feeps to work out your time of flight to reach a given distance, and then you apply the sink rate for gravity to that amount of time...:eek:

But even if you shoot your arrows in a vacuum so's they'll never slow down, the difference between 50 and 70 yards is still 40% which, if I'm not gonna fail this one, is the difference between dropping at 19.1 fps vs. 26.75.

Talk about your bottom falling out....

Just to keep it easy, let's say a hunting bow shoots an arrow fast enough that it averages 265 fps over 70 yards; that's .79 seconds flight time, during which the arrow accelerates (straight down) to a sink rate of 25 fps. So at that range, the arrow will cover a bit less than 26.5 feet (horizontally) in 1/10th second, and it'll fall 2.5 feet (30 inches) straight down in the same amount of time. That's 1 1/8" of drop per foot of distance.

So if you laser the shot at somewhere in the 70 yard range and you're holding in-between the pins because you're not set up for that exact distance, it'd be virtually impossible not to introduce a couple yards' worth of aiming error; and then your rangefinder's only good to within a yard, give or take.

Anyway, all things considered, call it 2.5 yards worth of aiming and range estimation error. On a 65 yard shot, that's less than 4% off, and that's damn good, right?

Except that at a sink rate of almost 3.5"/yard, a perfect shot aimed 2.5 yards short is going to strike 8.5" low of where you wanted to hit.:eek:

And "JMO" ( :rolleyes: ), that ain't good enough, especially since you're allowing the animal, the wind, and everything else 8 tenths of a second to conspire against you. It's one thing to put a pin right on an itty-bitty target right at your sight-in distance, but as Walt's results show pretty clearly, the loss of precision in your aiming point just due to the distance increase and the frailty of human vision, plus the loss of precision because you're now aiming at an imaginary 'spot' on the side of an animal (foam or flesh don't matter!), plus any fudging you have to do because the rangefinder says you're in-between your pins.....

It's a horror show waiting to happen....

[GF.]

There's a reason I passed up a chip shot on a cow Elk way back when....


Doubt.

I had been pussyfooting around in a bedding area and saw one brown leg taking a stride off the trail; I'm pretty sure they had a sense that I was around, but I guess my scent control was good enough that they didn't spook when I passed them some distance downhill from 'em. What they didn't know was that I'd seen that one leg :D

So I went a little distance past where I'd seen the animal, and used a little creek as cover while I worked up the hill. There's extra thick growth along those creeks, plus, while the thermals generally run up-hill in the afternoons, there's always cooler air flowing downhill in these spots. Anyway, I got up maybe a little above where I thought they'd be and worked across until I came around a big ol' Doug Fir and there was a big cow about...hell, Idunno... maybe 10 yards? 15? Couldna been 20 yards away. Broadside, big as a barn, and not a care in the world beyond scarfing down the huckleberries. But I just didn't have it that day. I knew it was a gimme, but I talked myself out of it because I'd blown a shot earlier in the week - or thought I had, anyway.

Glad I remembered that episode, though, because I'd kinda forgotten that trick for playing the wind:cool: