[Padgett]

Overall, I can see your cam lean in the picture also.

Keep in mind that your bow can produce the same awesome arrow flight with many different tuning methods so your cams can have different amounts of cam lean and your arrow rest can have different placements left or right etc.

This is why when I tune I have fundamental goals that I want to see in my "End Result"!!!!!!

1. I want my arrow rest to be centered on the shelf in a optimal position, I do not want it way off-center

2. I want the least amount of cam lean

3. I want my cams perfectly synced at full draw

So there are the main fundamental things that I always require my bow to meet, I have many more secondary ones also but for this thread I am going to stick with the big dogs.

 

[Padgett]

So, with your matthews your top cam is leaning right. I do not know what your bottom cam is doing but let me know because depending on how it is leaning changes how I approach this issue.

But the first thing I do with a bow like yours is I set the arrow rest centered on the shelf in that optimal position where I really want it to be in a perfect world and I lock it down and will not be moving it. I am going to tune this bow by moving the powerstroke of the bow left or right by shimming the cams. Now start shooting through paper and if you need to fix some vertical tear move the d loop up or down but absolutely do not even think about the left or right tears. Just move the nock height and clean up the vertical tears.

Now that you have the vertical tears done you can now make the decision to change top hats, we are now ready to move the cams but first lets talk about the fundamentals.

If you are lucky your bow has a left tear because your top cam is leaning to the right, The reason your top cam is leaning to the right is that it is shimmed to the right and putting extra stress on the right limb so by moving the cam to the left by changing top hats you are going to correct some of the cam lean and you are also going to correct some of the left tear.

Now here is where it gets cool, you need to lay a arrow against both of your cams and see if they are both leaning to the right or if just one of them is leaning to the right. Because if only one of them is leaning to the right that is the one you want to change top hats. Do not move a cam that is perfect or already leaning to the left more to the left because it is going to start leaning to the left if you do that. You want to move the cam that is leaning to the right first and play catch up with it. Now once both cams have the same amount of lean then I totally move both of them at the same time.

So it is your job to study your cams and choose which one is needing to play catch up first or my cams are identical and I can move both of them at the same time.

So if you are lucky and the bottom cam is already perfect with no cam lean and you top cam is leaning to the right you can fix your left tear and clean up the cam lean by just moving the top cam over to the left a little with the top hats.

 

[Padgett]

I am pretty happy with how I typed up that concept, I have typed it out hundreds of times so I am getting better at it. This simple approach can give you a very clean final setup for your bow, like I said you can leave your cams alone and end up with awesome arrow flight but to me anytime you ignore cam lean and just move the arrow rest as your method it is just a lazy choice.

 

[Padgett]

Now, with this bow once you have gotten rid of some of the cam lean and both cams are freaking sweet and you have cleaned up 95% of the left tear then to finalize and nail down perfect arrow flight if you want to bump the arrow flight a fraction of a inch then bump away, yes you can mess with the top hats and get there also but in the end making that last micro adjust either by shimming the cams or bumping the arrow rest is perfectly fine.

On many bows before I bump the rest I will as a final attempt I will change the cable guide and see if that does the job so I don't have to bump the rest.

Actually, that brings up a couple things I like to do when tuning a bow that is cam shim only. With a yoke tune bow I don't because yoke tuning is so freaking easy compared to shimming. But when I am tuning a shim bow I will turn my nock on the tuning arrow and correct as much of the poor arrow flight with the arrow as possible because this decreases the amount of shimming or arrow rest moving I have do do to hide the arrow issue. Secondly, I have found that by moving the cable guard so the fletching has very little clearance from hitting the cables on the way by also decreases the amount of shimming or yoke tuning I have to do. If you have a quarter inch or more of clearance between the fletching and cables that means they are being pulled over a long ways and this tension is causing you to have to tune heavily somewhere else.

 

[Padgett]

So, I was guessing. What poor tear are you seeing? Left or right etc.