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Attaching a New Sight Tape

Overview

You have a freshly printed sight tape ready to install on your sight. How do you ensure it's correctly placed?

Or maybe...your tape is already installed, but you seem to be always hitting low or high at distance.

In this guide, we'll walk through the exact steps to align, or "zero", your sight tape properly so it's dead on at all distances.

The Goal

Even if your printed sight tape is perfectly accurate, you still need to zero it. Zeroing means making sure the numbers on your tape precisely match actual target distances.

Specifically:

  • The "40" mark on your sight tape matches 40 yards in reality.

  • The "80" mark matches 80 yards in reality.

  • The "100" mark matches 100 yards in reality.

The Most Common Mistake

The most common mistake we see is folks attaching their sight tape at the 20-yard mark or the top of their sight's adjustment.

It seems logical—you move your sight to 20 yards, align the indicator with "20" on the tape, and you're set, right? Unfortunately, probably not.

The issue is that 20 yards isn't a reliable distance for zeroing your tape.

Even if your arrows seem to hit perfectly at 20 yards, there's likely some tiny, invisible error in that mark.

This slight error won't be obvious at short distances but becomes very noticeable at longer ranges (40, 60, or 100+ yards).

Distance Magnifies Error

Even a tiny error in a 20 yard mark, only a few thousandths of an inch, will be magnified significantly at greater distances—threefold at 60 yards and fivefold at 100 yards!

The Correct Way

For this reason, we always recommend zeroing and putting your sight tape on at a farther range. Ideally this is as far as possible.

Depending on your shooting ability, 60, 80, or 100 yards are great choices.

(If you don't shoot that far, don't sweat it. Just shoot at the farthest range you're comfortable with. The only rule is: the farther, the better!)

The Process

Let's say we chose 60 yards as our zeroing range.

  1. Shoot at a thin, horizontal line on your 60 yard target. We like to use painters tape!
  2. Get your sight hitting this line perfectly at 60 yards.
  3. At this point, you know your sight is dialed to exactly 60 yards. Lock it down!
  4. Put the tape on the sight so the indicator points to 60 yards on the sight tape.

At this point, you know 60 on your sight tape is exactly 60 yards in reality.

The tape is now zeroed!

Validating the Other Ranges.

Now that we know 60 on the tape is 60 yards in reality, we can test the other ranges.

Work your way in, checking 50, 40, 30, 20, etc.

Then, you can work your way out, checking 70, 80, 90, 100, etc.

Now the top of my sight's adjustment isn't 20 yards?

This is super common!

Let's say you complete this zeroing process and now your sight tops out at 24 yards on your tape. You want the top of your sight's adjustment (your home position) to be 20 yards exactly, not 24.

If you're sight has a fixed zero stop (that is, you can't adjust where your sight tops out), we'll need to modify this zeroing process a little bit if you wish to ensure the top of your sight's movement is 20 yards (or 30, 40, or whatever you want your 'home' position to be).

Some sights make this process easier than others via micro-adjustment features, but nonetheless, we're going to be making adjustments via the sight's housing position instead of the tape or indicator positioning.

Here are some examples of where these adjustments will be made:

Black Gold

Dialed PRÜF

Note

Depending on the design of your sight, some of these housing position adjustments double as 2nd-axis leveling adjustments. Once you're done zeroing, it's always a good idea to check your sight's 2nd-axis.

The Process

Note

I'm using 20 yards as an example here, but this can be whatever range you'd like your "home" position to be.

1) Dial your sight all the way up, and move your indicator to point to exactly 20 yards on your sight tape. Now we know the top of the sight's movement is 20 yards on the tape.

2) Check how the sight is hitting at 20. If it's not close, adjust the sight's housing position to get it closer. It doesn't have to be perfect, as we'll be fine-tuning at further ranges.

3) Then, work your way back to a further range - like 60, 80 or 100 yards. Shoot at a thin, horizontal line with the sight dialed to that range exactly. If it's not hitting perfectly, adjust the sight's housing position until it is!

Now, your sight is zeroed properly at a further range, and the top of your sight's movement is 20 yards exactly. Mission accomplished!

Troubleshooting

If you find that, despite your sight tape being zeroed perfectly at 60 yards, it's not quite right at other ranges (like 40 or 100 yards), there may be an issue with the sight tape itself.

At this point, we recommend taking a look at our troubleshooting guide to try to determine the source of the issue!