My first set of arrows (build along)

[HDF]

This thread will just be following me making my first set of arrows for my first bow. I started off by ripping up a board of douglas fir into half inch or so squares on my table saw:





I then started experimenting with making dowel makers, but could not get a good finish, a friend then lent me his 3/8 inch veritas dowel maker, which I mounted on my in progress cider press:



I used a big bosch cordless drill with a bolt in the chuck, and a half inch socket fitting over the bolt head, I held the wood in the half inch square to feed it through the veritas, it got hot, you can see the blade discolouring due to the heat on the left hand edge:



A few hours had me with 32 shafts, lots of shavings and 40 square sections left:




(Note the anvil to stop vibrations, it improved the finish!)

Here are the worst of the shafts:



I'm quite pleased with the rest of the shafts.


Tomorrow I'll finish off doweling the wood and then see how the shafts are spining.

[bow101]

Looks good so far, if you can find old growth D/F the better like 30-40 rings per inch is what I use.  I get about 4 round shafts per 10 square blanks...................

[Crogacht]

Looks great, I'll be doing exactly this with some poplar soon, will keep an eye on your thread

[HDF]

Yeah I was hoping for closer grained wood, but this was the best bit of wood I found in the warehouse that wasn't buried too deep in the big stack of timber! And a lot of the other boards had really bad run out. Why's the success rate so low? I imagine I'm going to have to reject quite a few whens straightening and spining.

I was ideally looking for poplar, but Douglas Fir is the best arrow wood I could find locally. The whole board cost me £20, and seeing that a matched set of 12 shafts is about £25 it should be worth it!

[Pappy]

Nice looking shafts,we bought a set up that is supposed to do them also,looking forward to turning some out,hope they work as good as yours have.
 Pappy

[stringstretcher]

Pappy.  That is the same one that I use on my poplar dowels.  There is a huge learning curve with it, so don't get disgusted at the start.  If you need any help, let me know and I will let you know what has worked for me.  The adjustments and sharpening the blades are the hardest part.

[Wooden Spring]

I never could get those tools from veritas to work just right.

This is how I do it now.
http://www.primitivearcher.com/smf/index.php/topic,44952.msg607764.html#msg607764

[HDF]

I've doweled all the wood now, I've got about 70 shafts varying quite a bit in ring count from about 3-4 per shaft to pushing 20 per shaft, the finish on them is ok, but there is a bit of tear out in places on the more open grained shafts, but since they are 3/8 of an inch I imagine there will be a bit of sanding to get them to the desired spine, so this shouldn't be too much of a problem.

Next job is to make a spining jig and a fletching jig, I'll hopefully make a good start on that tomorrow.

I did try to make a doweler like that wooden spring, but I didn't have the patience to achieve a good finish, but I would have persisted if my friend hadn't lent me his veritas doweler, which has worked very well for me.

Now for some questions, the shafts will need straightening, is this done before or after spining them? And I'd also like to crest the arrows, and I'm wondering whether the arrows will need to be varnished before cresting, and then once the cresting is done will they need more varnish over the top of the paint to protect them?

[bow101]

Why's the success rate so low? I imagine I'm going to have to reject quite a few whens straightening and spining.

I'm probably not holding my tongue right..............    In reality its because I'm using an electric drill which spins faster than a cordless and my jig is quite rough.  And they are wobbling to much near the end.  I will get better and use other wood. DF is not my choice.  Made a few poplar, just hard to find cheap stuff is all.

[Crogacht]

The poplar I have came from a tree that had been felled on the side of the road, it was cut into rounds a bit longer than the length of an arrow. So I took one and split it into chunks and left it to dry.

I have an easier one than that, post pics hopefully soon.........

I believe we were promised some pics

[RBLusthaus]

I make shafts similar to the way you are, although I have never had much success with DF.  Too much chip out.  Prior to straightening though, I have an intermediate step.  I run each shaft (powered by the drill) thru a 11/32 hole in a block of hardwood (RO or hick), thru and back again, which burnishes the wood and does quite a bit of straightening on its own, depending how thick a block you use.   Every half dozen or so, the hole gets reamed out, so you need to drill another.  I do not even look to cull shafts, except for the most obvious paint sticks, until after burnishing. 

Russ 

[cdpbrewer]

HDF,  Nice build along.  You should have hand planed a couple of shafts- especially douglas fir- so you'd more fully appreciate the dowel maker.   

> ... the shafts will need straightening, is this done before or after spining them?

Straighten them before splining- otherwise you'll have to fiddle with the scale on the spline tester as you rotate the shaft to determine the stiffest side and the spline.  Since you're going to sand your's down, it'd be wise to straightening them before sanding also.   It's also wise to straighten before cresting and before fletching.  If a shaft requires a lot of repeated straightening, it's a stumper.   A number on on the shafts where the nock will go and keep notes help with that.   

>I'm wondering whether the arrows will need to be varnished before cresting, and then once the cresting is done will they need more varnish over the top of the paint to protect them?

You'll definitely need a sealer of some sort before cresting, otherwise the paint will bleed outside of the areas you intended for it to be.  I apply a layer of finish (oil type wipe on poly) over the cresting to protect it- the cheap craft store acrylic paint I use for cresting is pretty easily damaged. 

A tip-  keep some reject shafts for testing finishes and cresting paints out on. 

c.d.

[HDF]

RBLusthaus, thanks for the tip, I'll give it a go soon, I've been finding straightening pretty tricky, the shafts have come out of the doweler with odd little wiggles here and there where the shafts changed angle as they were fed in I guess.

cdpbrewer, I have hand planed some pine shafts, they weren't very round... By the sounds of it these DF shafts will end up as a set of stumpers then! I've got some poly varnish that I will sandwich the cresting between then, it won't be particularly ornate but I just want the arrows to be visible in low light.

Here are some pictures of what I've been up to:

All the shafts; they are spining at about 70 pounds straight off the doweler:


The finish on the arrows; I adjusted the blade on the veritas so that it was quite low to speed up the process and reducing the heating up of the veritas, and make them easier to get out of the doweler, I wasn't too concerned about the finish because the shafts will have to be sanded down quite a lot to get to my desired spine. As you can see the surface is pretty fuzzy on most of them, and the paler shafts, which I assume are sapwood are rougher compared to the more pinkish heartwood.






I picked out 6 nice densely grained pink shafts, and after getting the worst of the wiggles out over the hob sanded the ends down to fit into a 5/16 taper tool, and taper the ends for a plastic nock and a 100 grain point.



Next job is make a couple more shafts, try and get them a bit straighter then sand them until they are deflecting by about 0.520 inches on my spining jig, which (I think) corresponds to a draw weight of about 30lbs at 32 inches.

[JoJoDapyro]

I have a question about the splining of the shafts. Isn't the spline going to be more stiff against the grain? In that case if you put your knocks on that make a "T" with the grain and your string you would only be 180 out. Am I missing something?

[HDF]

The spine of the shaft is measured on the stiffest side of the arrow, which is bending along the grain, so the nock is orientated so that the string is perpendicular to the end grain on the arrow, this picture gives a bit of an idea: