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There has been some discussion of the vertical spot targets and people's difficulties with the different aiming angles. I believe most of us have sometimes wondered why the hit patterns differ.
I took my target from our weekly club competition, scanned it, and entered the hits into ArrowMaster. I put the top, middle and bottom hits each in their own end. I wish I would have changed the target after the first 30 arrows, so the difference between the first and second half could be examined.
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The middle target is clearly the best, the top target contains the worst shots, and in the bottom target the hits are spread all over the gold.
During the first half, I had serious trouble pulling the first arrow through the clicker. At first, everything felt fine, but as the draw stopped, I just couldn't finish the shot. I had to apply force, and the arrows went to the left. The second arrow was much easier, and also the third gave more tens than nines.
In the second half I pulled myself together, and it paid off. The first arrow was no trouble at all (seven tens). The second arrow was mostly good, but there were more nines than in the first half. By the third arrow I was probably a bit tired, and was lucky to get it into the gold.
All in all, I think the difficulties in shooting the vertical spots are almost entirely mental. It's just because the differences can be seen so easily, people start to think the problem lies in the aiming angle, changes in the bow hand position etc.
Starting with a reasonably well tuned setup (tuned with the tiller set to 6mm), I shot eight arrow ends with different tiller settings. The tiller varied from zero to eight millimeters. Two of the eight arrows were bareshaft.
As the tiller and the nocking point are strongly inter-related, I actually should have adjusted the nocking point each time I changed the tiller, but because I use a glued-in nocking point, I didn't bother... That's one of the reasons I shot two bareshafts in each end: to see whether the nocking point was too much off.
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When the results are normalized by ends, the standard deviations form the following graph:
There are a few bad shots, which explains part of the unevenness of the bars, but after all, the differences are very small. Anyway, the 6mm setting, which I had used that far, looks a bit worse than the adjacent ones. The bareshaft shots (a bit all over the target) show that the arrows are a little on the stiff side, and that the nocking point could have been adjusted better for each tiller value.
My conclusions:
As there cannot be seen any definite minimum in the results, the tiller setting does not seem to be very critical. If it can be adjusted +-4 millimeters without any significant change in grouping, you shouldn't worry too much about it, just try to find a setting that feels good. With my current setup, with zero tiller the sight does not move upwards during the draw, which gives a confident feeling. With other limbs, the balance might be somewhere else.
As in all tuning, finding the best tiller setting is a very personal thing. You can find some rules of thumb from different sources, and they are good starting points, but if you haven't tried other possibilities, how can you be sure which is the optimal setup? My best advice is: try it yourself. And when you test, do it properly, don't fool yourself. IMHO ArrowMaster is a good tool to use in experimenting.