Have you ever suspected, that there might be differences in the behaviour of your arrows? Probably you have. Have you seriously tested your arrows? Well, I had heard of arrow testing from more experienced archers. I had even tried to record the results with pen-and-paper method, but it was so clumsy and hard to analyze, that it didn't seem to be worth it.
A few years ago I finally ran into trouble with my arrows. In a competition, one of them consistently landed on seven on the left, whereas the others scored nines or tens. It took many ends before I could be sure of it. After replacing the 'rogue' arrow, the scores improved significantly.
The arrow testing clearly needed some attention. A computerized solution would be a natural alternative to the classic method. The problem of digitizing the arrow hits seemed to be relatively easy. Once digitized, the analyzing of the results would be faster and more reliable than using the manual system. However, I couldn't find any such program from the Internet or anywhere else.
I put the idea of creating an arrow test program in the background for then, because I had a much bigger project (ArcMaster, an all-in-one achery club program) going on. Now it seems to have reached a stable state, and I have had some time to program ArrowMaster.
During the development the program gradually became more than just an arrow selection tool. In fact, it can be successfully used for almost all archery testing purposes, what comes to analyzing the hits. If you don't agree, you either haven't tried the program or I really have missed something. Either way, comments and suggestions are very welcome. So far, almost every suggestion from the users has lead to some improvement of the program...
I hope you have read Michelle Ragsdale's story in May/June 2000 Archery Focus Magazine. As she points out, the only way to good scores is hard work and practising. She suggests you should spend 95 percent of your time on you and 5 percent on your equipment. I would only like to add that even the 5 percent is wasted time, if you don't use it efficiently. If you do not record the results of your tuning experiments and analyze them properly, you are only guessing.
There are many elite archers who claim they do not test at all. They do it, anyway. To get to the top the archers must have shot tens of thousands arrows each year. If they say they do not test and tune their equipment, they do it inconsciously, relying on their experince. The only exceptions might be the archers who have very dominant coaches, who always tell the archers what to do.
Even Michelle Ragsdale suggests testing your arrows by numbering them and shooting until you can see the individual patterns of each arrow. Well, that's one of the strongest points of ArrowMaster! If you try to guess the hit patterns using pen and paper, you waste a lot of time.