Compound distance adjustment for slopes

hallso

New member
Hi everyone.

Having started to shoot more and more Fita field competitions recently im having difficulty getting my head around adjusting my sight to compensate for gradual and severe uphill/downhill shots, and as a result this is costing me crucial points.

My understanding is that on all downhill shots you take off distance and on uphill shots you add distance up to a certain gradient before taking off distance again.

As my club is mainly a target club, I dont have access to a field club to practise these types of shots and can only experiment during a real competition

I understand that this depends on your setup and arrow speed etc but i would be interested to hear how experienced field archers, especially compound shooters (like myself) cope with these types of shots and what their practice and experience has shown them.

Finally can anyone recommend a book that would explain "field craft" especially judging distance etc?

Thanks for your repies,
Rob
 

Fox

New member
Mathematicaly, the most distance you will ever add is about 10cm on a 60m uphil shot between 2 and 4 degrees. As you can imagine, in the real world this is absolutely meaningless and pointless so the general rule is always, "Never add, always subtract". IN THEORY

Now if you are a perfect shot and all you shots go off with your sight bang in the niddle of the gold you will only ever subract distance for either up or downhill shots. Depending on technique and bow reaction on steep shots you may find the odd occasion where you do need to add but it is completely down to the archer, their setup and technique. At one time, I used to aim poorly uphil in particular and my sight was always sinking out of the gold on steep shots, I therefore used to subtract less than i should have needed to for a perfect shot but this was a particular problem. So unless you have a problem, ALWAYS SUBTRACT.

As a general rule of thumb, and BELIEVE ME, arrow speed is a small variable in this! Try the following.

Uphill, up to the following angles, subract this percentage of distance.
5 deg, 0%
10 deg, 0%
20 deg, 3%
25 deg, 6%
30 deg, 10%
35 deg, 14%
40 deg, 20%
45 deg, 25%

Downhill,
5 deg, 1%
10 deg, 3%
15 deg, 5%
20 deg, 7%
25 deg, 12%
30 deg, 16%
35 deg, 21%
40 deg, 27%
45 deg, 33%

These figures are a rough rule of thumb and are mathematically representetive but not exact and I have just rounded the numbers but all things being equal, if you adjust by somewhere near these amounts and Make a GOOD SHOT, you have no worries, you will be close!

Most FITA Field courses in the UK are flat and not many have that many challenging shots so up to 10 degrees, slope is negligable if you make good shots, whats more important are very goos sight marks and 3rd axis setup if it gets steep, you wont find many long shots that are very steep so the distance cuts are correspondingly smaller but srill work out as a percentage and a lot of the close targets, at compound bow speeds are very forgiving of distance error anyway.

Learn the cuts for the bigger angles, learn to cheat the targets well and learn to shoot good shots on the slopes. You will only get big cuts at Pentref and Kendal and you will learn how to shoot at either of those courses!
 

Stylisht

New member
I agree with Fox mostly - you might find for long slightly uphill shots you need to shoot them on max or add one metre on.

Shot at Pentref this weekend. There was a 42m downhill off the top rock - I took off around 7 metres I think; the real nice one was a 60m stupidly steep downhill far out into the steep slopes - had to take off 10m, some people took off 12m!

Just practice as much as possible - you won't need to think about it after a while, just get to know how your equipment behaves.
 
Adjusting for slope.

Many years ago(everything is, these days) Don Stamp, in his book Field Archery, suggested that one should take off for both uphill and downhill shots.
When I queried this with him, he said it had been tested at various angles and measured; I still disagree but have never worked out how much to take off/add on. Take off for downhill,add on for uphill, avoid steep uphill shots- these are often dangerous, in my experience, if any distance! They don't occur very often. :duck:
 
I

indy

Guest
or rather than all the mathmatical solutions,when aiming at said target through a pin sight or scope,just put the dot above or below the spot, works for me on field.
 

MikeD

New member
As always, Archers Advantage is your friend :)

Once you have used it to get an extremely accurate sight marks tape you can then print charts showing angle, distance and the amount to add or take off. It will also print charts that allow you to estimate how far you are out (that is a 3 at six o'clock, needs you to drop your sight 2.5 metres say).
 
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