Crossbow Inaccuracy By Improper Cocking Of Your Crossbow:
 Why is it that all crossbows just don't seem to have the same accuracy potential. Mechanically speaking they should be extremely accurate, this has puzzled me to the point of disassembling more than a few crossbows to look for any mechanical defects that they could possibly have. The accuracy problem is not in the immediate mechanics of the crossbow itself it is only the human error factor.

 A lot of research went into our crossbow accuracy study to identify it, throughout history up to modern crossbows we researched looking for possible obvious answers, after much study it is more than apparent that this issue had been dealt with in the historical past.

 Some crossbows, this issue was cured by the simple installation of a sled which is a guide attached to the center of the crossbow bowstring to lessen string wear and insure exact centering of the string when cocking, the sled acted more as a exact nocking point much like that of a handbow.

 Assuming you are using the correct arrow spine for your crossbow with the correct amount of fletching, with the correct F.O.C. and correct nock as suggested by the manufacturer of your crossbow, your crossbow should be extremely accurate "period".

 There is one major cause of crossbow inaccuracy, spanning, thats it spanning, cocking the crossbow no matter how good you think you are doing it, if you have an accuracy issue, it is most likely when you cock your crossbow.

 The severity of this problem was very noticable when I took various shooters to the range and allowed these individuals to cock and shoot a lot of various crossbows I had accrued for this study, the results were stunning, as to how very accurate crossbows went from tack drivers, to crossbows that wouldn't be good for any distant shot beyond 20 or so yards.

Fixing The Problem:
 Now that I had identified the human error in crossbow accuracy and or inaccuracy it was time to find a fix for this problem that would work for all crossbow owners. A little more research started to reveal other fixes to this problem that was not apparent as a fix to the accuracy problem as they were fixes for using leverage to cock the crossbows of old.

 Cocking an extremely high poundage crossbow was made easy through the use of various mechanical devices not only did these devices reduce the draw weight of the crossbow they also increased the accuracy as well.

 For each .001 of an inch that the string is cocked from its exact center point will show some variation of accuracy loss down range, the further down range the more apparent the loss of accuracy becomes. On long range targets we were able to record very noticable accuracy losses.

 While it may seem that this measuring down to the thousandths of an inch is a bit extreme, it was these measurements that were more able to tell us just how accurate a crossbow can be when cocked true and square. Using a bow square then adjusting the string after the crossbow was cocked, we were able to all but stack arrows on top of each other at 50 yards.

 The odds of any cocking device to equal this much precision is not all that high, however we achieved better accuracy using a rope cocker as opposed to hand cocking and even better accuracy with crank cockers that were built into the crossbow as opposed to rope cockers.