Arrow selection tool--Choosing the right wood for your Arrow

[hurlbri1]

Hello all!

This is rather feeble attempt at a thank you to all who post here on Primitive Archer.  I am working on my 3rd working bow, a White Oak Mollie that I hope to get over 50#.  I asked Santa for some arrow making supplies and have been scouting Home Depot, Loews, and Tru Value for cheap wood dowels.  There's a bit to choose from.  But which arrow wood is best for my new bow?  Which diameter?

So I made an Excel spreadsheet that lays out total grain weight per length of arrow per type of wood at a given diameter of dowel.  My thought is that I want to get an arrow that is around 10 grains per draw #.  So I made this spreadsheet to help me!

There are two worsheets in the file--Facts and Arrow selection.  It should pop up on Arrow selection.  Facts are the dimension conversions and how I did the math.  Arrow selection is the one that has each wood type at dowel diameter.  If someone would like me to add a different wood type, let me know!

I hope this helps someone!  Let me know what you think...I am open to criticism/suggestions--I have a very thick skin!

Cheers,

Brian

[bubby]

that's too much thinking for me, for dowels i get them at lowes 'cause they have better quality around here and use poplar, they make some nice arrows, bub

[JackCrafty]

Wow!  Lot's of work there.

I think the decimal point is in the wrong place on the 3/8" birch dowel rods on the arrow selection page.

Looks good.  I would have rounded everything and dropped the numbers after the decimal points, but that's me.

Is the bamboo actually dowels?  Or is that ramin dowels?

[Pappy]

WOW. Lots of time in that.
   Pappy

[Stefan]

Nice spreadsheet...I don't care that much about arrow weight and I always buy spruce or cedar arrow shafts but then agian I don't hunt.

I find spine the most important factor when trying to figure out which arrows I want. Concering spine I think you can rule out everything thicker than 11/32. If your talking about bamboo I think 5/16 is sufficient.

Have you seen this thread --> alot of inof on spine and dowels

http://www.primitivearcher.com/smf/index.php?topic=9135.0

[carpentertimw]

Um, if u can rule out everything larger than 11/32, can u find me some 85 spined shafting in 11/32 please? Cause I couldn't find any and had to use 23/64 . :-)

[Stefan]

For a bow that draws 50# I think you can rule out anything thicker dan 11/32. That is what I meant.

[hurlbri1]

First, I want to say thank you for all the replies.  Like I said, I am really just trying to be a contributor to this awesome forum rather than just a heat sink of knowledge.  Maybe it'll help?!  Who knows... 

Yes, lot's of work, but I am kind of a geek like that and I actually like doing stuff like that--I am a phyiscs teacher afterall!

Jackcrafty--Excellent catch on the 3/8th--the spreadsheet I multiplied by Bamboo's grain, H column, instead of by the length, column a, so I changed the formula. Thank you!

Rounding is a good idea...nearest whole number huh?  Definitely makes more sense.

As far as I can tell, it's for the solid part of the bamboo, as in hardwood flooring-type.  I've found a website that sells bamboo dowels at mastergardenproducts dot com and, based on the Engineer's toolbox, I'd be willing to bet the densities of the dowel's on that website are fairly close to the density numbers I've researched...then again, I do not know that for sure.

Stefan, thanks for the link-I'll check that out.

Spine is my next "spreadsheet" whenever I learn how to make arrows (X-mas presents!).  Spine is correlated to density due to a wood's moment of inertia at a given length, but I am not quite there yet, so you might have to wait a bit for that spreadsheet carpentertimw

Thanks for looking and thanks for the feedback!

Cheers,
Bri

[DavidV]

I don't think spine is directly correlated to density. I may be wrong but if you ask people that make their own arrow shafts you will find that alot of hardwoods tend to spine very low for their weight and density, like osage. While a pine or fir arrow will spine higher.

[stickbender]

      I couldn't get it to open, even tried the micro soft download, it wouldn't download either.      But certainly sounds very involved, and neat.  I don't get along with math.  Nor computers.  I have a gap in the processing gear for mathematics !    I think a few cogs are missing in some of the other processing gears also, or at least clogged up, with random thoughts, that seem to wander in and out, I guess some of them fell in the spaces, and just built up.  Mostly the random thoughts are where the heck did I set my beer?  Mostly along that line, then some are well ....... any way, I wish I could see your work, but it isn't meant to be it seems, but being math and all, I probably would just get confused, and go back to the old usual way, of comparing weight, spine, length, etc., and then matching as closely as I can a set of arrow shafts from a given batch.   But I do like to see a more intelligent form of scientific data now and then, even if it does have numbers in it.

                                                  Wayne