This is the right place to start. Along with stating the most fundamental information about archery, we will clearly identify critical elements of understanding and importance, upon which, we will use to dive deeply into more confusing issues.

The whole job of a bow is to push an arrow in a straight line. To do this means that the arrow rest must be in line, at the very least, vertically with the travel vector of the nock point. Horizontal wander was initially desirable to employ the archers paradox to get the arrow fletching to clear the riser. Ideally though, the Nock vector should be a perfectly straight line from the point of full draw to the point where the arrow leaves the string. Consequently, the arrow rest should position the arrow at full draw so the thrust vector passes right through the center of the arrow and proceed to the target at a point that compensates for gravity and windage. Here's the point. ANY deviation of either the alignment of the arrow, or the travel of the Nock point will result in the arrow being pushed off course. This misalignment gets increasingly worse as the arrow gets closer to the point of release from the string. This is why any overdraw configuration is so radical. Its also why brace height becomes critical as it gets shorter. Its kind of like a wild woman. When things are set up right, its very good, but when things start going wrong, they go very, very wrong, very fast. If this isn't perfectly clear to you, put an arrow on a table. Constrain it side to side with a couple fingers up by the tip. With your other hand's index finger push the arrow by the nock straight along the path of the arrow shaft. If you did it right, the arrow should go straight ahead. Now choose a path along which to push the arrow and offset your front fingers slightly left or right of that path. Now push the arrow and see that the arrow deviates at a ever increasing rate until at the point where your hands come together, the arrow is almost perpendicular to the path of thrust.

Straight dynamic nock travel is the greatest challenge of a compound bow. Not so much with a traditional recurve or long bow. They have different challenges. The compound bow however, has all kinds of things going on dynamically to make the nock point move like a drunken fly. To name a few of the more important ones; the cams, or cam systems can be slightly out of time, the limbs probably warp relative to the vertical plane as the are pulled and released, the shafts of the cams or wheels may not be cut perfectly into the limb tip causing cam/wheel lean, and the limbs may be pulling with unequal pressure. All of these things cause erratic flight characteristics in the arrow, but the most fundamentally important remains the precise placement of the arrow rest.

Traditional bow tuning is nothing more than progressively guessing where to move several interdependent elements of the bow configuration in the hope that by trial and error things will improve. If enough time and effort is expended in this task, things will usually improve, or at least seem to. The final aspect is the real kicker. No archer shoots each arrow the same way each time. Some come pretty close. They are called professional competitive shooters. Even they however, may shoot very nearly the same each time, but they may always do the same thing wrong relative to the "perfect" style. What this means is that tuning a bow not only pushes things around without knowing if anything is set its correct design position, but when the tuning is done the bow is set up to compensate for the shooters errors in style. That is why two things are true with traditional tuning. First, the archer must tune his own bow and nobody else will be able to shoot it as well. Second, if anything in the shooter's style changes the reliability of the shot is lost. Depending on how it changes the results may be anything from minor to laughable. There is one overriding truth. All the dynamic elements of a bow are absolutely INTERDEPENDANT. This includes the shooter. One element cannot be changed without it influencing other elements. For example: If you tighten one limb, even slightly after setting up your rest-to-nock relationship, you will move your nock point relative to the rest of the bow geometry including the arrow rest. So, all your work to get your arrow flying without porpoising or fishtailing is now lost. So much for fine tuning.

This is true: IF YOU CHANGE ANYTHING - YOU CHANGE EVERYTHING

All this sounds pretty bleak, but it explains why tuning equipment is so difficult and frustrating and spawns so many opinions and procedures which are at odds with each other. It also explains why many people tire of archery because, it demands too much fooling around trying to get things working good enough to use. Now for the good news. The Bow Lab eliminates all the guesswork. Now an archer need only know how to shoot well. The bow can be aligned to its optimum operation by a technician and it will work correctly for anyone who shoots it. The archer with the better style will still shoot better, but poor scoring won't be because of bad tuning.