Primitive Archer
Main Discussion Area => Arrows => Topic started by: Kidder on May 04, 2021, 09:15:46 pm
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So I have the fortunate circumstances of being friends with a hunting guide. I’ve asked him to save me his turkey wins. So far I have about 25 pairs of turkey wings he just dropped off with possibly more to come (I could imagine another 10-20 pairs). How many feathers should I expect to get from each wing for fletching? I’ve got them in my freezer currently. Aside from cutting them off the wing and separating them between left and right wing, is there anything else I should be doing prior to processing them? Finally any good videos on how to process them into fletching? Thanks
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If you look at my fletching post that's one wing and one tail. You have enough feathers for prolly 900 arrows
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Good trade stuff! Dust them with borax, gets rid of the creepy crawl things. Definitely keep right an left wing separate
Hawkdancer
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Buy a bag of 1 gallon ziplock plastic bags and a box of Moth Balls. Take one wing at a time. Use side cutters to remove the feathers from the wing. Put the Primes and the larger secondary feathers in the bag with a couple of moth balls. Put a paper note in the bag with the date and where the feathers came from. Throw away the rest.
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I store my feathers in plastic totes with borax in the bottom of them. I use a side cutter to cut the feathers from the wings and keep them separated by right and left wing. I have a lot of friends that give me their wings so I have a pretty big supply to. I recently bought a great northern feather grinding jig. This works pretty well and i have been able to get better consistency in grinding with this. Prior to that I used a clamp and a belt sander. That works well too but consistency lacked.
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Great advice guys - that’s exactly what I was looking for. Approximately how many arrows can one fletch with a single wing? Thanks!
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A wing will have about 9 primaries, depending on how long you cut them you could get 12 fletchings from the primaries. Again, depending on how long you cut them, you should be able to get 2-4 fleatchings from each secondary. That is good trade material FYI. ;)
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And the smaller feathers(4") work well as 3 or 4 tangential fletching.
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Learning something new(old) every day! Got to get the darn "do" list shorter to get some PA type stuff done!
Hawkdancer