What would you concider a heavy hunting arrow for a 50lb. bow?Wood arrow?

600-650 gns.

I like to stick to the 10 grains per lb. of bow weight.  Above that we start getting heavy.

QuoteOriginally posted by Bjorn:
600-650 gns.

yes, that would be heavy.

What Bjorn said. 600 grains is 12 gpp.

Mine weigh about 625 out of my 50 lb'er and I consider them heavy.

QuoteOriginally posted by Bjorn:
600-650 gns.

X2.... Mine are 650-800grns out of My 50# bows.

Wow! SO PROUD OF YOU ALL......no arguments and "why you need that crap" posts......nothing.

   

God Bless

Anything over 600 grains. Slowbowke, this is the kinder, gentler site.    

For me anything over 500gr for a 50lb bow would be too heavy.

I shoot 700's from a 48#. My hunting bow is 58# that I shoot 740's. Love the momentum when they hit big bodies, not saying that it's right but I like it.

I would consider a 600 grain arrow a little heavy and slow but I only hunt whitetails and hogs

I have around 418 grain chundoo shafts plus 190 up front shooting from a 53# longbow. Thwack!!

How about 800gr Sweetland Forgewoods 80#-85# spine weight. Tradgetory is a little more arching at 20yds out of my 56#@28" Blacktail recurve. They hit about 3" lower than the 585gr Surewoods I usually shoot. But they sure do smack! the target! haha

Around 1990 I made some compressed yellow poplar shafts generally following the Forgewood process. The hunting arrows weighed in between 800 and 900 grains. Wish I still had some of them.

I agree with Bjorn, 600-650 is fairly heavy for a 50# bow.  But 12 gpp quiets a bow nicely and still provides decent trajectory.  That's what I shoot out of my 50# and 52# bows.

Snag:  my 600-650 grain woodies are Sweetland forgewoods.  Some are 5/16 parallel shafts, others are 9/32 tapered to 1/4 inch. A while back, I managed to acquire some 11/32 shafts tapered to 5/16 that spined well over 100#.  The 30-inch raw shafts weighed 800 grains, plus or minus a few grains.  Too heavy for anything I shoot so I traded them.  Wish I would have kept them and doweled them down to 5/16.  They're hard to come by.

Oh.........you guys, don't be talking about Sweetlands and your compressed ones Don, either.

"Wish I still had some of them" to sell ME, lol!

Grumble, Grumble.

Compressed 5/16 shafts I recall from " awhile back" that I coulda bought then...grrr.

Grabbed a Herter's Farbenglass with Herters two blade (195 grain with glue in insert) on it today and threw it on the scale.

Hmmmm......626 grains (finished with scale tared....662.5 grains). Fletching one of them up to see if I can get a decent flight from something. LOOK OUT, DEER! lol

Heaviest thing I have over my hickories (700 plus) are some 2440 eastons made for GKF. I think I figured out once that they were "around" 37 grains per inch, LOL.

'Cept I "aint man enough" to pull anything they would spine for!!!!

Ive got some ash arrows that are too stiff. Half thinking of playing with them sanding them down to see what they would spine in something less than 23/64. Not like I can use em AS IS.

I've had a few arrows that took LOTS of hand work to make shootable. I guess I can identify a bit with those that make em "from scratch" because those arrows are "SPECIAL" and successful hunts with them are just that much more satisfying.

So, sorry to get a bit side-lined, 3Feathers. Heavy arrows are of BIG interest to me....if you cant tell.

Don?
How many times DO I have to run over shafts before they are "compressed"?    

hehe

God Bless

Orion, I don't know if you can dowel Forgewoods down...? They are compressed and it might cause some problems when you sand off the outer layer...don't know though.

Snag:  I talked with Bill Bonscar (sp?) at Allegheny Mountain Arrow Woods (after I had already traded the shafts), and he said he thought he could have doweled them down. Too late.  Aaarrrgh.

Forgewoods don't really have an "outer layer".  They are compressed throughout. Entire cedar boards were compressed under heat before being cut into squares for doweling.  Some folks today run shafts through a die to compress a shaft from 23/64 to 11/32 or 11/32 to 5/16.  This process only compresses the outside fibers of the shaft and does not compress the entire shaft.  Better than no compression at all,  but not as good as the originals IMO.

Slowbowke, I did mine like Forgewoods, as Orion described. Using a University-scale hot press, we compressed yellow poplar boards that had been treated with a stabilizing chemical brew, to half their original thickness. The compression was even throughout the boards, just like Forgewoods. The finished product was stable enough to sit in water for 24 hours without expanding. Good stuff, just too expensive to manufacture.