I am thinking about getting a dowel cutter, I would like to start making my own shafts. Mainly because I want to make hickory and ash arrows and they are hard to find. Here is my question for those that do this. How can you tell how an arrow will spine by the wood? Is it weight of the stick you will make it out of? There has to be a way to make an educated guess. I just want to try and avoid making 300 shafts to get a dozen keepers. Please enlighten me.

Basically you'll have to make the 300.....

That's what I was afraid of.

Shaft the ones with the straightest grain, allow only one run out. If possible. No way to tell spin until you test it. However to save you some time usually shafts from the same board spine the same, as long as you keep the standard the same.

Agreed Mississippi/dustin

well the way i do it cause i don't have a dowel cutter is i cut the wood to about 1/4" sq and then take a small plane to it un till i got a round shaft. then i pass the shaft through an 11/32 hole drilled in a deer antler and thats about it.

Theres a bunch of ways to turn dowels but like mentioned grain run out, spine and weight come into play and you'll have to make a load of them.  Its fun though.  I've also done hand plan method early on and decided it was more of a headache.

Buy shafts for now and save some headaches (and get hunting lol)...Alleghany sells good hardwoods they are not hard to find or expensive!