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Sight Tapes

Overview

This section will guide you through the process of creating a sight tape for your bow. We'll also discuss the various options at your disposal and offer troubleshooting tips for common issues.

Prerequisites

Before creating a sight tape, you'll need to have completed the following:

Creating a Sight Tape

Start by navigating to the Sight Tapes page within the application.

You can modify the Active Setup at the top of the page.

Configuring the Marks

Density Altitude

This is the density altitude the sight tape will be configured for. This is useful if traveling and you'd like to make a tape for the destination's density altitude.

Read more about density altitude here.

Range Configuration

  • Starting range - The closest range on the sight tape.

Note

If your starting range is less than the highest mark on your sight tape (typically 12-14 yards for most setups), we will truncate the sight tape at this topmost mark. We call this the 'turnover range'. This is due to the parallax error that occurs from your eye being higher than your arrow.

At ranges closer than your turnover range, you'll need to aim with a mark further down the tape. For example, at 2 yards, you might need to use your 80 yard mark. At 4 yards, you might need to use your 50 yard mark.

To calculate how to aim for ranges closer than the highest mark, check out the Short Range Marks page.

  • Ending range - The farthest range on the sight tape.

Tip

If your ranges run past the bottom of the sight tape, you can always increase the tape length until they all fit!

  • Increment - The increment between each range on the sight tape.
  • Switch to 1yd increments at - If checked, the sight tape will be configured to have 1 yard increments starting at this range. For example, maybe you want 2 yard increments out to 40 to reduce clutter, and then switch to 1 yard increments for ranges beyond 40 yards.

Customizing the Tape

Our tapes are extremely customizable. As you make changes, the tape preview will update in real-time. This will be exactly the tape you'll get when you print!

Note

Before starting customization, we recommend measuring the space your sight has available for the tape, and set the tape length and width accordingly.

We've done our best to provide reasonable default sight tape dimensions sights. However, we haven't physically measured every sight out there.

Note

When you print a sight tape with customized settings, we save these settings for you. These are tied to the particular sight model you are using, so when you create future tapes for the same sight model, your custom settings will be applied automatically.

Printing the Tape

When you're satisfied with your custom tape, it's time to print! We currently offer three printing modes:

  1. Standard Mode

    • This will print 3x copies of the sight tape on our standard printing page. This page includes notes about the bow and arrow setup, sight tape settings used for creating the sight tape for future reference, and a scale checker to ensure the sight tape was printed at the correct scale.

  2. Sight-In Mode

    • Sight-in printing mode will print 5x different scaled sight tapes by slightly tweaking the sight-in mark measurement(s) by 0.003" from what was supplied during the sight-in process. These are intended to be used to compare to your shot-in marks. See below for more information on tape verification.

    • The purpose here is to remediate potential measurement error from the sight-in process.

    • Once you've found a perfect match, update your sight-in measurements with the new measurements, if needed.

    • Note: Today we offer this option only if mark distances were supplied with a caliper measurement or our calibration tape. We're deciding on the best approach to offer this sort of idea for those who use target sight marks for the sight-in process.

  3. Custom Position Mode

    • This allows you to specify the precise location of a sight tape on a printed page. This is particularly useful for those printing on label paper and want to control the precise location of the tape on the page or if you want to conserve paper by printing multiple tapes on a single page at different locations over time.

    • The position is defined to the upper-left corner of the tape. For example, if 1 inch from top and 1 inch from left are specified, the top of the tape will be 1 inch from the top of the page, and the left side of the tape will be 1 inch from the left of the page.

  4. Travel Tapes Mode

    • This mode will print 5x sight tapes in either 1000ft density altitude or 1.0fps launch speed increments to bring with you. This is a great way to have a few tapes made ahead of time for different conditions.

    • This mode is particularly useful for those who travel to different locations for shoots or hunts.

  5. Specialty Tapes Mode

    • The Specialty Tapes method is designed to download a sight tape file for a very unique purpose, such as printing with a specific label maker.

    • This method will download a PNG image of a single sight tape, specifically sized and formatted for the Phomemo D30 label maker.

Info

Ensure you print at a custom scale of 100% and do not select 'scale-to-fit' or 'fit-to-page'. This will keep the sight tape's sizing accurate on the printout. More details on print scaling here.

We recommend initially printing in Sight In or Default mode on plain printer paper to verify everything prints to the correct scale and to verify the tape is as you desire.

Once confirmed, then we recommend using the Custom Position mode to print onto your desired weatherproof, adhesive label paper.

Tip

Printer and paper recommendations can be found here.

Click 'Download PDF', and a PDF will be generated and downloaded for you to print.

We recommend opening and printing the PDF with Google Chrome, Apple Preview, or Adobe Acrobat.

Verifying the Tape

Once your tape is printed, it's crucial to verify its accuracy.

Step 1: Scale Check

Details on verifying the scale of your tape can be found here.

Step 2: Verify Marks

If you used the 2 or 3 mark sight-in methods, you can verify the marks by aligning your printed tape with your sight-in tape, ensuring the marks align perfectly.

As mentioned above, we offer a sight-in printing mode that prints tapes using slightly different mark measurements than what was supplied during the sight-in process. These are intended to be used to compare to your shot-in marks and finely tune the sight-in measurements if needed to get a perfect match. Note that these sight-in tapes should be printed for the same density altitude (air density) as the sight-in process was performed at.

Tip

If the sight tape is generated for the same density altitude as the sight-in process, the marks should line up perfectly with the sight-in marks.

For example, if the distance between 40 and 80 on the sight-in tape is 0.737 inches, the distance between those marks on the printed tape should measure exactly 0.737 inches.

If it does not, and the print scaling is correct, this is most likely due to error in the caliper measurement itself. Use the sight-in mode shown above to fine-tune your sight-in measurements by comparing each tape to your sight-in marks.

Note

If you're generating a tape for a different density altitude (air density) than what was used during the sight-in process, it's expected that the marks will not line up perfectly with your sight-in marks. This is due to the change in air density.

We suggest verifying a tape at the sight-in locations's air density first, and then generating a new tape for the desired density altitude (air density) once you're sure the printing is working properly and your data was entered correctly.

If you utilized target sight marks during the sight-in process, a quick method to verify accuracy is by aligning the tape with the scale on the sight. Alternatively, mount the printed tape to the sight and ensure each sight-in range aligns with the corresponding target sight mark you input during the sight-in process.

Step 3: Shoot It!
Once all the above steps have been completed and everything checks out, it's time to mount the sight tape onto the sight and test it out. After mounting, shoot several arrows at different ranges. This will allow you to adjust your indicator for accuracy and validate the other marks on the tape.

Tip

When putting a fresh tape on your sight, we always recommend 'zeroing' your tape as far as possible.

For example - get your bow hitting perfectly at 60 yards. Then, put the tape on your sight so your indicator points to 60 exactly. Then, you know 60 in reality is 60 on the tape. Then, work your way in and out from there to validate the other ranges.

If you set your tape and indicator at 20 or 30 and then work your way out, there's a high likelihood that there's some error in this closer mark that will show up as you move to father distances.

Troubleshooting

We have a thorough list of troubleshooting steps here!