fire harden tips

[sound maker]

  So can I just fire harden my shafts tips to use for target shooting or no???
I'm using wooden dowels right now so I can how some target arrows for a campout I'm going to while the wood I harvested dry . Can I also fire harden the tips of the wood I'm harvesting too??? (the wood being maple, cotton wood, and other types from around )
   Also since I'm fire harden the tips do I leave the lengths long?? (I draw about 28" 3/4" so they would be about 31"-34" long???)

   Still relatively new to this and haven't been making bows and arrows for very long now so thanks for any advice you guys can give me.

[burchett.donald]

      Fire hardening will make them a bit tougher, but what weight bow are you using or what weight arrow? Seems you may be dry firing the bow? Most archers use some form of weighted tip of their choice. Some sort of FOC makes for better accuracy to.

[Ifrit617]

I have some flu-flu's with fire hardened tips that I shoot out of a 40 pound bow... They are 32" long and I draw 24"... their weights range from 330 grains to 375 grains, about 8 to 9 grains per pound... They shoot very well...


Jon

[JW_Halverson]

Ifrit's whooptey big flu-flu feathers would help counterbalance the lack of weight forward. 

A weighted point on the arrow literally drags the arrow behind it toward the target.  If you put the weight at the nock end, the back would want to pass the front end, causing the arrow to do highly erratic things.  So a neutral balanced arrow like he is proposing would be somewhere in between, the fletching having the final say in what happens.  If the shafts are light enough spine, they should fly just fine, but most production shafts are spined to accept a 125 grains of weight forward. 

[sound maker]

 I just got some dowels from home depot that are for a birch bow that I am making and since its light weight one I didn't want to make it too heavy that they just fall to the ground. I got some and when and made them into the arrows without fletching (haven't gotten the feathers due to not able to conflects) and I haven't really weighted them since I don't have anything. So far all I have done was match them to an arrow that I shot from the bow and tryed to get them near that and so far it seems to work.

[crooketarrow]

  It pays to have weight forward. I've for someone else drilled a hole and incerted a cut off nail. But drill deeper so it's not even with the end. Or it will push the nail down and split your arrow. I incerted mine 1/4 deeper than the end.
  Buy some glue on practice tips.