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Attaching a New Sight Tape

Overview

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

In this guide, we'll walk through the exact steps to align, or "zero", your sight tape properly.

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 people make is attaching their sight tape at the 20-yard mark.

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, just as it's not ideal for your initial sight-in.

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. Put 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.

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!