I've been contemplating taking some feathers and cutting them into new designs and testing them out.  You know, there's the typical shields, parabolics, pope and young, etc.. feathers, but they way i think about it, these came about through people just fooling around and making prototypes and them some of them seemed to work and took off into what we use today.  So, has any one else tried such a thing?  Any pictures you can share of your creation?  Any bits of knowledge you can share?  What "rules" one might need to consider, the defenite "do's" and "do not's" of feather fletching designs?  ... Just curious.

Yup I have made a few different designs.  I make cardboard templates and then cut the feathers with scissors.

Not sure about dos and donts but I make my own. There was a how to thread here a while back. A guy showed how he made his own feather burner from scrap wood and used a torch to burn his feathers. I use his burner and came up with my own banana fletch. It is cheap and easy to build and make adjustments to. Someone here better at finding old post might help you find it.

After reading Dr Ed and making fletchings smaller for FOC I am going to trim my fletch down some more.

thers is a feather chopper that uses different cutters and they have about 50 different styles.  It is some European cutter I can't think that there is any different then the ones they advertize but maybe??