### Test Equipment

The restorative-lift protocol was run on both the standard-speed and
high-speed component test sets. The two sets share every piece of equipment
listed below; only the bow setup differs.

- **Bow:** Hoyt AX-3 33, run in two configurations:
  - 28″ draw length, 70 lb draw weight for the standard-speed vane test.
    (~290fps)
  - 29″ draw length, 80 lb draw weight for the high-speed vane test.
    (~325fps)
- **Indoor facility:** Easton Salt Lake Archery Center (Easton Foundation),
  Salt Lake City, UT.
- **Shooter:** Easton Archery's custom shooting machine, used to ensure
  precise, repeatable shots and eliminate shooter variability.
- **Mass measurement:** Last Chance Archery Pro Grain Scale 2.0. Every
  arrow was weighed and per-build averages were used in downstream
  calculations.
- **Fletching jigs:** a left-helical Bitzenburger jig, a right-helical
  Bitzenburger jig, and an Arizona E-Z Fletch were used to fletch arrows
  across three deliberate helical conditions per vane.
- **Environmental measurement:** Kestrel 5700 Elite. Density altitude
  averaged 5670 ft across the test sessions.

### Overview

Restorative lift refers to the aerodynamic forces that help stabilize and
re-align an arrow's flight path following a disturbance or initial
misalignment (e.g. an out-of-tune bow or torqued shot). Direct measurement
of aerodynamic lift in free flight is extremely challenging, so this study
uses controlled horizontal misalignment to quantify each build's ability to
recover (or not recover) from an imposed angular deviation. The result is a
practical real-world proxy for restorative lift based on observed group
position at distance.

### Lateral Torque Setup

For this protocol the bow was set up with a consistent lateral torque about
its vertical axis, applied via a pulley system attached to the shooting
machine. A 1.25 lb weight hangs through the pulley and pulls horizontally
on the bow at a point 6″ from the stabilizer bushing, rotating the bow
roughly 2° and producing a paper tear of approximately 1″ nock-right at 15
ft. Every torqued shot in 2026 sees the same induced launch error.

### Arrows and Points

For each build, the following arrows were shot through the torqued setup
at the 70-yard target:

- **6 Gold Tip field points**
- **6 Iron Will Wide fixed-blade broadheads**

The 2026 protocol increases the per-group sample size to n = 6 for both
field-point and broadhead conditions (vs. n = 4 in 2025). Larger per-group
sample sizes give the per-build mean point of impact (and its 95%
confidence interval) more statistical power for the lift-proxy comparison
described below.

### Photo Capture

Every group was photographed at the target with a Panasonic Lumix S5IIX
paired with a 70 mm lens, mounted in a consistent position relative to the
target between sessions. Each frame includes the floor / tape / pin /
background reference annotations described in the photo-analysis pipeline
so the image can be levelled, scaled, and origin-corrected to a common
inch-space coordinate system.

The full annotation, coordinate-transform, calibration and statistics
workflow is documented separately on
[Photo Capture & Analysis](/research/arrow-study-2026/methods/photo-analysis/);
that page is the canonical source for how each impact photograph is
converted into the (x, y) coordinates and 95% t-distribution confidence
intervals used here.

### Lift Proxy (New in 2026)

#### What we did

For each build (vane × fletch helical × shaft) the shooting machine fired 6
torqued Gold Tip field points and 6 torqued Iron Will Wide broadheads
through the same induced lateral bow torque, at the same target, on the
same arrows. We then cycled through the full vane lineup and repeated. On
every build the launch disturbance is the same; what changes between the
two groups on a build is only the point, and what changes across builds is
only the vane.

#### What we measure

The 2026 restorative-lift proxy is the lateral drift between the torqued
broadhead group and the torqued field-point group on the same build:

[Figure: Equation]