Compound Bow Strings: When to Replace & How to Choose

Fletchwise guides are independent and hype-free – we are not sponsored by any archery brand.

• Fraying or fuzzing along the string or cables.
• Separating or broken strands.
• Serving separation – gaps in the wrapped serving, especially around the nock or cam.
• Peep rotating or moving, or your peep no longer lining up – a sign of stretch.
• Draw length or let-off feeling off as the string creeps.
• Wax gone / dry, dull string.

As a rule of thumb, plan on a new string and cables every 2-3 years with regular shooting, and sooner for heavy use or any visible damage. Strings stretch and wear with every shot, slowly shifting your tune – so even a string that looks okay benefits from replacement on a schedule if you shoot a lot.

• Quality fibers (e.g. BCY material) that resist stretch and creep.
• Pre-stretched, well-served strings that hold tune out of the box.
• Correct length and strand count for your exact bow model.
• Matched set – replace string and cables together for consistent tune.

Wax the string regularly (not the served sections) to keep the fibers protected and resist fraying, and inspect it before each session. Good maintenance extends string life and keeps your bow shooting consistently. Replacing a string requires a bow press and a re-tune.

“Resist stretch and creep” gets printed on every string label, but they are two different problems and only one goes away. Stretch is recoverable elasticity in the braid – it is why a new string needs roughly 100 shots to settle, as our peep sight guide covers, and a bit of it is not a flaw; it is part of what makes a string shoot quiet and fast. Creep is different: it is permanent, non-recoverable elongation of the fiber itself under sustained tension, and it keeps happening slowly for the life of the string, not just during break-in. Creep is what shows up months later as a slightly longer draw length, a shifted let-off, or a peep that has rotated again after you thought it was settled. This is also exactly what “quality fiber” is actually buying you: blends built around low-creep materials such as Vectran (used in blends like BCY’s 450 Plus and 452X) hold their length under tension far better than cheaper braids – the real reason a name-brand string costs more than a generic one, not the color options.

Creep happens slowly over months regardless of temperature; heat can shift your tune far faster than that. Modern string and cable material is ultra-high-molecular-weight polyethylene, and under tension it stretches measurably more at high temperature than at room temperature – which is why a bow left in a hot truck bed or a car trunk in direct summer sun can come out of storage shooting differently than it did going in, even with a string that is nowhere near due for replacement. Archers who sight in during summer and hunt into near-freezing weather sometimes see the same effect in reverse. The fix is not a different string – it is keeping the bow out of extreme heat when you can, and re-checking your sight tape or group after any big temperature swing rather than assuming the last zero still holds.