A sheet for plotting your arrows in pencil

This tool tells you where your arrows land, and in what order, when there is no phone on the field or you would rather not use one. It prints the 122 cm face to scale on a landscape A4 sheet: at each call you mark the arrow's position in pencil and write its shooting order number beside it. One millimetre on the sheet is seven millimetres on the target. Choose how many arrows and ends you need, check the preview and print. Below the form you will find a short comment on the choices you have made, then the working set out step by step with your own numbers; below the sheet you will find how it is built, how to read it and where it stops working.

How it works

The sheet is drawn in millimetres: a landscape A4, 297 by 210, with an 8 mm margin. On the left is the 122 cm face with a small border around it: 1,260 mm of target fit into 180 mm of paper, which is a 1:7 scale. Each scoring ring, 61 mm wide on the target, measures 8.7 mm on the sheet; the 10 has a diameter of 17.4 mm and the X, the inner circle of the 10, of 8.7. The rings carry the colours of the face, but in very pale tints, so the pencil mark shows up clearly.

Two axes run through the centre, with a tick every 50 mm of target and a number every 200. They are real millimetres, with x to the right and y upwards, as printed at the top left of the face; the numbers along the diagonal give the value of each ring.

Below the face and beside the table there are two check bars, one horizontal and one vertical, and each must measure 100 mm on the printed sheet. They are there because printers rescale without telling you: "fit to page" often prints at 94-97%, and a sheet printed at 94% shifts every coordinate by 6%, which at the outer edge of the target means more than 3 cm. With two bars you check the scale in both width and height.

On the right is the arrow table. Each row is an end and each box an arrow, with its shooting order number already printed: with six arrows per end the first arrow of the first end is 1, the first of the second end is 7, and so on. An arrow's number is (end − 1) × arrows per end + position in the end: the third arrow of end 5, with six arrows, is 4 × 6 + 3 = 27. Later sheets carry on the numbering, so a 72-arrow round fits on two sheets without repeating a number. At the top of the sheet there is space for the archer (under a pseudonym if the sheet is going to change hands), the date and time, the distance, the operator doing the marking and the wind.

On the field it works like this: at each call you mark the dot on the face and write its number beside it, then in the box with the same number you write the ring read on the target. The score is still the ring, while the dot carries the shape of the group. An arrow that leaves no dot to mark, a bounce-out or a pass-through, does not go on the face: in its box you write the ring and a B or a P. Numbering while the arrows are called is what the sheet gives you over a photograph of the target, where the shooting order has to be pieced together afterwards and often cannot be.

How to read it

To get an arrow's position in millimetres on the target, measure its distance from the centre of the sheet with a ruler, horizontally and vertically, and multiply by seven. A dot 20 mm right of and 10 mm below the centre of the sheet sits 140 mm right of and 70 mm below the centre of the target: in coordinates, x = 140 and y = −70. For an estimate by eye the axis ticks are enough, because two neighbouring ticks are 50 mm of target apart, a little over 7 mm of paper.

You can also copy the dots onto the tap target on this site, touching the face in the same shooting order, and there the centre, spread and score are worked out for you. Either way the coordinates are a reading of the sheet, and a reading can only be repeated while the sheet still exists: that is why the sheet is the raw data, which is not thrown away and not corrected, only annotated. Keep it and scan it at 300 dpi with the bar inside the frame, because the bar lets you bring the scan back to the right scale even years later.

The order numbers, finally, let you read the group back arrow by arrow: by end, by position within the end, or from the start of the round to its finish.

Limits

The precision of the sheet depends on the eye of whoever is marking, and nobody knows how far off an eye is until it has been measured. If you want to know, mark a few points whose position you already know as if they were arrows and compare: you will see how much you miss consistently in one direction and how much you miss at random.

For measuring the size and centre of the group a ruler on the sheet is enough, and with it you can describe an archer's group, compare it from one day to the next and see how it changes with pressure, fatigue or distance. For millimetre-level work the sheet is not enough: separating the shift the wind gives to several archers shooting together from technical dispersion, or measuring how much an archer corrects after a known shift of the sight, needs a photo or scan of the target, or an electronic target.

The rest are practical limits. The scale holds only if the sheet is printed at 100%, and it is the bar that tells you so, not the printer. The face is the 122 cm one only: with a different face the measurements do not add up. Beyond 36 arrows per sheet the dots overlap and the numbers can no longer be read. And the sheet calculates nothing: score, group centre and dispersion have to be worked out afterwards, with a ruler or by copying the dots into the tap target. If the ring counts are enough for you, the group size calculator estimates the size of the group without the dots.