More Wooden Arrow Questions

[ThePushArchery]

In all the research and and practice of building cedar arrows, I have learned a lot about the small things when building these. I am diving into hunting and shooting only wood arrows.

I stumbled across a post on here that talked about grain run-off. I never paid attention to this, or heard anyone talk about this before today. How significant is this and how many of you guys actually pay attention to this while building arrows you are going to be shooting in practice and huntig??

[moebow]

Depends on how extreem the grain (annual ring) runout is.  I pay attention to it simply because I feel that the mark of a good arrowsmith is to attend to the little details other don't bother with or worse, don't know about.

I think it's a little like gun shooter's phobia about hang fires.  They can happen I guess -- never seen one personally.

The idea is if the shaft breaks it will break away from the hand not into it.  Like hang fires -- never have seen it happen but is "theoretically" possible.

[Killdeer]

I pay attention.
Looking at the grain lines in a shaft, runout reflects a weak spot in the shaft. Ideally, your grain lines would run the full length of the shaft. Often, they don't. That is just how they are made, natural variation running through a machine.

I can tolerate a little. But what sets me off is a grain line coming from one edge and traveling off the other edge. The closer together this happens the antsier I get.

For one, I worry about breakage. When you visualize the fibers of the shaft bending under the impact that I just inflicted on the shaft when killing a not-quite-dead stump with a 175 grain blunt mounted on 505 grains of ash, or cedar, or Sitka... that is when the thing will break. Or almost break. It might just fracture, not get noticed in the heat of the moment, and break on release the next time off the shelf.

For two, I just don't think that such runout indicates a stable grain, meaning I doubt its capacity for maintaining the hard-earned straightness that I inflicted on the shaft before sealing it.

So, I cull the shafts that exhibit such runout. If it is at the very end of the shaft, I can maybe trim it off when I cut to length. If not,and it isn't too bad,I put it on the point end of the shaft, and use that shaft for target or stumps. Only the finest shafts are used to hunt animals. I put the grain voted most likely to warp on the point ends, because the fletched ends are so dang hard to straighten.

If the runout occurs on both sides of the shaft within a span of a foot, I reject the shaft and relegate it to support functions in the garden, or use it to test stains and finishes. It is just not worth the worry.

Killdeer

[ThePushArchery]

Thanks for all the input here. Anyone else have some advice as well??

The more the merrier!

[jacobsladder]

Killdeer offers great advice....also how the nock of the arrow is oriented with the grain is critical......the rifts >>>>>>>>>>>> should be facing away on the top of the arrow when the arrow is nocked and <<<<<<<<< toward you on the bottow of the arrow...

[Orion]

Killie's got it right.  By the way, when vendors let customers go through their shafts and select those they want (sometimes at big shoots/rendezvous, for example), I'll often reject 200 or more shafts to come up with a dozen or so that have the straight grain I'm looking for.

One more tip.  Put the straightest grain on the nock end of the arrow.  Once the shaft is fletched, it's difficult to straighten on the nock end without mashing the feathers, maybe bending the nock.  Pretty easy to straighten anywhere else.  Good luck.

[Don Stokes]

Right on, Killdeer. Any shaft that has grain runout that goes all the way through the shaft should be culled and not shot. That's especially true of wood with an abrupt transition between the earlywood and latewood, the light colored and dark colored parts of the growth ring, like Douglas fir. Any shaft with lots of "points" will likely fit this description. It's called "slope of grain", and with a ratio of 1:10 or more it significantly weakens the shaft. The steeper the slope, the more likely the shaft is to break under stress, like being shot from a bow!

I've personally never seen one break when shot, but it's a chance you don't want to take! I've seen some scars that made me a believer. It should be standard practice to check your arrows after every shot to make sure it they are still sound, not matter what material they're made of.