How to mount your recurve sight for the first time, do the rough zero, and why this exact part is what separates you from barebow.
“I've got a sight on now — why am I still not hitting the center?” The honest answer: a sight doesn't replace technique, it just makes visible how consistent your technique already is. The sight is also the component that most clearly separates you from your neighboring discipline, barebow — there, any sight or marking on the bow is banned entirely. In target recurve, by contrast, it's standard gear: a small sliding pin on a rail, mounted on the left (right-handed) or right (left-handed) side of the riser.
The basic idea is simple: the pin moves up or down (elevation) and left or right (windage) until the line from your eye through the pin to the center lands exactly where your arrow actually hits. The trick isn't the sight itself but the initial setup — you'll re-touch that for every new distance and every new weather condition, but the first adjustment lays the foundation.
Train Smart. Play Hard. — a sight never lies: if your group drifts, you move the pin there, not your body.
Screw the sight onto the rail so both elevation and windage sit roughly in the middle of their adjustment range. That gives you enough room in both directions for fine corrections, whatever direction your first shots drift.
Shoot a small group of three to five arrows from 5–10 meters with a consistent anchor (more in Guide 6). If the group lands left of center, move the pin left; if it lands high, move the pin up — the sight follows the group, not the other way around.
Only correct one axis at a time: height first, then side. Adjusting both at once quickly loses track of which change caused which effect. Small steps, reshoot, recheck.
Once the short distance is set, repeat the same procedure at 18, 30 or 70 meters — wherever you mainly train. Every distance needs its own pin position; you'll log these values (more in Guide 10 on sight marks).
Always adjust your sight at the shooting line, with the bow pointed safely toward the target — never with an arrow nocked while facing another direction. Check before every adjustment round that everyone is behind the line. And loosen the sight screws only as far as needed — a fully loosened sight can shift on the next shot and throw off an entire training session.
After every adjustment session, immediately log the exact pin position (often a small scale on the sight) for every distance you shot, in a notes app or small notebook. It costs twenty seconds — and saves you ten minutes of re-zeroing next session, because you start from your last known value instead of zero. Some clubs even keep a shared table where members log their pin values — handy if you ever end up on a loaner sight.
Beginner sights are usually simple rails with one pin and coarser adjustment steps. Competition sights offer finer micro-adjustment, longer rails for more distance coverage, and often a vernier scale for exactly reproducible values — for starting out, a simple model is completely enough.
That's purely a World Archery rule definition: barebow bans sight, stabilizer, clicker and kisser button to deliberately keep the discipline "bare". Target recurve allows exactly those four aids as standard.
Every distance change needs a new pin position. Within the same distance, the setting stays stable as long as your technique doesn't change — but bigger form changes require re-adjustment.
Correct one after the other: height (elevation) first, then side (windage). Changing two variables at once makes it nearly impossible to tell what actually worked.
No, a single sight covers every distance you realistically shoot through its elevation adjustment. You just log the matching pin position for each distance.
Recurve: Understanding the Archer's Paradox and Choosing Arrow Spine