I have been reading about shelf and strike plate materials. Thicker, thinner, softer,harder and so on. My question is do you change all any of these as your tuning and trying to find the exact arrow spine with point weight and cutting arrow or. Is this something you do after you have your arrows flying perfect but they are not impacting where you are looking and you change material to move the arrow where you want it to hit.
Thanks
Ideally you would tune a " complete bow" meaning everything on it you plan to shoot or hunt with. Quiver, string silencers etc including whatever you like for the arrow rest.
Some fine tuning can be done with side plate thickness as you get deeper into tuning.
I use the bear hair rest and leather side plate. I would say you're correct that you don't change the side plate until you have near perfect arrows then you can fine tune
. I'm sure some folks will do it a little differently but that's what works for me.
Play around a little. Just change one variable at a time. You can always change back if needed
I myself wouldn't even mess with including the shelf and strike plate materials in tuning ( unless... you just can't get it any other way with arrows you already have, that prove marginal).
Build a bow, put the stuff on it that you will be using. Now tune.
ChuckC
I use strike plate and rest material to move POI, after tuning for good arrow flight. If I want to move the POI to the right or down (for a RH shooter) I use a softer strike plate or rest material. If I want to move the POI to the left or up, I use a harder material. Some of the softer material that I use, such as a Martin Rug Rest or strike plate, is thicker than some of the harder material, such as leather. In this case, the thickness really doesn't matter, as the rug compresses to about the same thickness as the leather when the arrow is shot.
If I want to move the strike plate in or out, I will build up layers of leather and then put a different strike plate on top as the last layer, if desired. The only reason I have ever done this is to put one of the ultra thin arrows in the same center shot position as my normal diameter arrows.
Leather is the hardest material I use, followed by Velcro, followed by rug. If I have a new bow and have tuned an arrow to fly well, but it hits right or left at 20 yards, it is convenient to be able to adjust the POI by a few inches without affecting the arrow flight. Of course, trajectory at longer distances is affected by the cast of the bow, and one must adjust for that by aiming differently.