About 4 or so years ago, Jamie sent me a dozen ash shafts he doweled with his new shaft making toy. At my camp-o-rama last year Dick Bernier told me he would taper them for me...boy, did he wish he hadn't!
Dick gave the tapered shafts to me at Hickory this year and I went to work making arrows with them.
I used an electric drill motor and course and fine sandpaper to smooth out the shafts, cut them to 30", and added reinforced self nocks with osage splines, and point end tapers for glue on points. These shafts are stained with some old gray shaft stain I've had for years. The crown was done with red, watered down craft paint, as a wash, and the cresting with full strength black craft paint. I scraped the black nock paint to reveal the osage spine.
Now for the brain fa*t...when I cut the osage splines for these arrows I didn't consider their grain from a strength standpoint. When glued up, the grain of the spines matched the shaft grain
and after one of the nocks blew on release, I realized my mistake.
You will notice the arrow with the white fletch as being an inch shorter
and now with a simple self nock but with sinew wrapping...as with all of the other arrows, now!
The fletchings are mismatched as I used some old pre-shaped, store bought artificially barred, shield cut feathers. For the first 4, I made the cock feather a different color(gray barred) than the hen feathers(red barred). Then I went to all red artificial barred feathers and finally I went to brown artificially barred feathers. The arrow with the broken nock got all white feathers with it's self nock. The forward end of all fletchings is wrapped with artificial sinew.
These arrows all spined out between 62# top 65#. With their tapers and extra length they are flying well from the 51# R/D I made them for. The bow was given to me by David Knight at the Tenn Classic. The physical weight is a bit more than needed at 650gr to almost 700gr but at less than 20 yards they hit where I'm looking. Here they are....
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