The Perfect Peep Sight Setup

We love shooting our bows! So, when the weather is bad in the winter, we spend time shooting indoors.

Some of us are trying to stay sharp for hunting season and some are shooting competitively. Either way, we use this time to make improvements to our shooting form and equipment.

One of the things we learned while shooting indoors is a new aiming technique. We learned at f ull draw to center our pin guard inside the circular hole in our peep sight. Centering the pin guard worked well, but the aiming still seemed a little sloppy. Part of the problem was that everyone’s draw length and anchor points were different, so the peep hole needed to be a different size for each person.

So, one of us got clever and put a small-holed peep into his bowstring. Then, he used a set of drill bits and enlarged the peep hole by hand one drill size at a time until at full draw he could perfectly align the pin guard inside the peep hole. In no time at all, he was shooting the best indoor scores he had ever shot. We all followed suit and began to hand drill our peeps. A word of caution, though — don’t use an electric drill as it can grab and turn the peep, cutting your bowstring.

As for the results of our handiwork, we enjoyed our newfound accuracy all winter. However, when spring came and we began shooting outside we found that our peep hole was way too small to center our pin guard housing in. But, when we went back inside, our peep hole size seemed to be fine.

Our peep hole appeared to change size with the varying lighting conditions. Whether this was caused by light bending through the peep hole or our pupils dilating to the different light, we’re not quite sure. But what we found was that in the bright sunlight the peep hole appeared to shrink in size, and in lower light it appeared much bigger in size. We could see this just by shooting in the sun and then shooting in the shade.

With the peep hole varying in different lighting conditions, how do you know what size to drill your peep out to? Well, we found that to maximize our accuracy we needed to be able to see our pin guard in all conditions. So, we go out in the sunshine and enlarge the hole in our peep sight until at full draw we can just see the inside edge of the pin guard. Since we know that in darker conditions our peep hole will seem larger, we know we will be able to see our pin guard in all conditions. We just need to make sure that in those conditions we center the pin guard in the peep hole the best we can.

In darker conditions, we're able to see the pin guard and some light around the outside of it; it’s really the gap of air that becomes visible around the outside of the guard when we look through the peep at full draw. We always try to have an even light gap around the pin guard, but this can be hard since you often can't see the whole guard due to the riser. If we don’t balance out the gap on all visible sides, we won’t hit what we aim at.

Nowadays, we all have our peep holes adjusted to the proper size and watch our centering carefully in the different light conditions. This gives us maximum aiming accuracy.

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