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The Witchery of Archery Part 3 Arrows and Arrow Flight

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Tags: Dave Canterbury,Archery,Bushcraft,Survival

Video Transcription

Morna gosh they've cadbury the pathfinder school back out here with another video in our basic witchery of archery series we've talked a little bit about bows we've talked a little bit about shooting form in general and I'm still getting a lot of questions about arrows so I kind of wanted to cover a little bit about arrows and things like that today an arrow flight in general different types of arrows that you can use what you shouldn't should not use with your traditional bow and then we'll do a little bit of a demonstration hopefully on what your arrow will look like if you've got the wrong arrow versus the right arrow in a target so let me get this camera moved around here so you get an up-close look at some of these arrows while we talk about this stay with me guys guys real quick before we get into a discussion about different types of arrows and fletchings and things like that let's discuss arrow lengths and we talked about how to set your bow up with a knock point on the string a little bit above center line so that your arrow has a little bit of a downward angle we talked about the clearance being the brace height between the string in the Shelf and what that's supposed to be now let's talk about how long your arrows supposed to be or should be for optimum performance obviously the longer your arrow is the more weight you have the more weight you have number one the more resistance you have to flight and number two the heavier it's going to be and you're gonna lose accuracy over distance faster so the shortest arrow you can get away with is really what you want and you want your arrow so that when you pull your boat to full draw that you have about one inch of arrow sticking out the back of the bow with the point attached to it so it should look similar to this that folds raw now you'll notice when I put this arrow on the table it will be much shorter than the other arrows on the table and that's because my draw length is short compared to a normal standard arrow most arrows that you buy come standard length to 31 inches so that they can be trimmed down or made smaller for anyone's actual draw length but 31 inches is a standard length arrow that you would buy blank somewhere for archery so the arrows that I'm going to show you some of them will be a little bit longer than the arrow I just showed you and that's the for that I want to explain it to you beforehand because that primitive arrow was made by me hand cut hand flushed hand hafted and made for this bow at my draw length for hunting so it is a shorter arrow it's about 27 and a half inches long my draw length is about 26 and 3/4 to 27 inches depending on the bow I'm using okay so now let's discuss what is the right arrow versus what is the wrong arrow for your bow and there are a lot of input factors to that answer but the very first one that you need to understand is if you're shooting a traditional bow as we spoke in the video prior to this one in part two you really need to have feathers for fletchings okay and these are the fletchings on the back back here these are considered vanes and they're plastic most of your compound arrows arrows that you buy on the market today are going to have these plastic vanes you don't want that you want feathers you want feathered fletchings we won't get into right helical left helical straight helical or not helical we won't talk about all that stuff because it's really not gonna make a big difference for you at this point let's just get our basics down first so once we get our arrow fletching correct then we need to know what type of arrow we need for our bow it doesn't really matter whether you see wood aluminum or carbon as long as the bow or as long as the arrow is matched to your bow well and the way you match your boat to your arrow is called spine weight and spine weight means how much the air of flexes when it's shot out of your bow at a certain weight for draw length and we talked about before standard draw weights that are set at 28 inches this bow is a handmade Hickory bow that I made some years ago it is 60 pounds at 28 inches at my draw link it's about 56 pounds somewhere in that general neighborhood so I need a an arrow with a spine weight in other words the flexing weight of that arrow

is 55 to 60 pounds somewhere in that neighborhood will give me the best Aero flight what you need to understand with your arrow is that when you see your arrow out of a bow traditional whatever the case may be recurve longbow reflex deflects the back of that arrow has got greater momentum in the beginning of the shot than the front of the arrow which causes the arrow to flex and that flex is called your spine weight and that dictates your arrow flight because when your arrow wraps around like this and flexes on your bow it will straighten out in flight if it does not straighten out before it reaches a target because it's spine waited too weak and you've pushed that flex too much then you're going to end up with an arrow of study sideways and a target like this instead of straight like this if you have too heavy of an arrow and it can't flex it's going to do the same thing or the opposite it's going to be off-center it's not going to be centered correctly because it cannot flex when it seems to know so it's going to deflect the only way it can and it's gonna usually be sticking in the target this direction if you're shooting a bow right-handed a properly spine weighted arrow will hit the arrow will hit the target straight and be sticking out of the target straight every time so that's a really good thing you can look at with your bow very easily with the equipment as you have are your arrows hitting the target straight every time if they're not you probably have a spine weight issue now with a fishing arrow with a fishing arrow and I should go back and say that carbon and aluminum are much more forgiving spine weight wise than wood what is the most picky as far as spine weight goes you can get away with a little bit more to looming them you can get away with a lot more with carbon because carbon flax is really really good it doesn't stay flex it's got a lot of reflex to it I guess is what I'm trying to say so it springs back faster even if the spine weights not exactly right so get better flight out of a carbon and it'll be faster because it's lighter then you will out of wood most of the time if you've got an unmatched if you don't have a perfect match between your arrow and your bow as far as spine weight so back to flexi for a second there's no fletchings on a fishing arrow most of the time because the fletchings merely stabilized the arrow in flight over distance if you're fishing you're going to be shooting distances of probably twenty feet or less you don't need fletchings for that because you're not trying to stabilize that air over distance it's already weight forward because it has a heavy broad head on the front that's made for fishing or a heavy fishing barb to tip on the front for fishing so it's going to fly fairly straight straight out of the bow at that 20 foot distance one thing that you can do if you're making your own arrows to check spine weight is you can shoot the bear shaft at about eight nine yards somewhere in the five to eight ten yard range and see how it hits the target if it lands on the target straight without any feathers on it you've definitely got good spine wait for your bow so that's just one little thing that you can do to check your stuff if you're building your own arrows okay going back to fletchings for a minute this arrow as you can see is different than the other arrows that are sitting here that feathers are much bigger and that's called a flew flew arrow and really that arrow was made for shooting targets that are aerial because it slows the arrow down very quickly and doesn't allow it to travel as far so they're harder to lose I prefer a lot of times to achieve flew flew arrows even at small game because again they don't go as far if you miss and I like that if they skip off something they don't tend to go as far as a normal arrow but that's just a personal preference now for anyone who's asking about making arrows making your own arrows hafting arrows with points hafting errors putting feathers on arrows making feathers out of duct tape all of those things are in my archery playlist all you have to do is go through the playlist everything is there from collecting shafts in the woods to straightening shafts to making feathered fletchings making duct tape fletchings hafting stone points making stone points making metal points on the fly making small game points out of spent cartridges all of those things are on my archery playlist I would encourage you to go look through that before you ask the question can I do this or can I do that or can you show how to do this because I've probably already shown how to do it at least and I'll go through that playlist and make sure that they're all there for you guys as I'm posting this video as well so let's take some of these arrows out and shoot them out of target and see if we can tell some spine weight differences out of this bow now this arrow is straightening the target this arrow is straightening the target these two arrows are both cocked off to one side this one is because I was shooting feathers probably are shooting plastic veins instead of feathers

this one is due to a spine weight issue that arrow didn't hit that target straight because of the spine weight problem too low or too high if I had to guess I would say too high because the arrows cocked this way which means it probably never did flex correctly coming out of the bow because the spine weight was too heavy to let it flex and because a longbow or traditional bow is already off-center in other words the shelf is not centered in the middle of the bow like a compound bow it's off-center you're already shooting that arrow at an angle coming out of the bow and if it can't flex to make up for that angle this is what you're gonna get okay fellas just a couple more quick answer system questions before they arise a lot of people ask me where can I get good traditional wood arrows that have feather fletchings the best place on the Internet is Three Rivers archery they sell good arrows I've hunted with their arrows for a long time and shot the arrows and tournaments for a long time they make great arrows if you're looking for a good carbon arrow that's got fletchings on it there's not a lot of places making those Beaman only makes one model that I know of that has feather fletchings so they're probably going to be hard to find and once you go to a custom archery shop but if you're looking for a three-piece takedown model that has fletchings on it you can get them on our website again you can also very shortly you'll be able to get the titanium insert on our website to create that three-piece arrow as well and we'll be selling those hopefully within the next couple of weeks we've been going through our D on different adapters for about two years now on everything from just all thread to machine threadings to parts that are manufactured in different supply houses and we have a surgical company right now making us a titanium insert that seems to be just absolutely perfect and I think that's we're going to go with but we're still in the testing phase of that right now I'm sure that I'll update you guys that on that when the time comes I think I've answered most since I've been getting as far as strings go I've had a couple questions on strings what kind of string can I use on my bow I would not use paracord you can in emergencies but I would not use it on a regular basis I would use bank line make number 36 bank line reverse-wrap two-ply cordage so it's double the thickness string that on your bow anything up to sixty pounds that stuff would be good to go what you're looking for in a bow string is tensile strength of ten times the bow in other words if my bow is sixty pounds then I want a string that has a breaking strength of six hundred pounds so if I take reverse-wrap two-ply cordage that's thirty-six number 36 that's three hundred and sixty pound test and I double it I've got more than enough it gives me the right thickness you're not going to wear that out very easy and you can serve it and that'll make it last longer the other thing that I have used many times on bows up to 50 pounds is artificial send you or you can buy commercial bow strings like places from like Three Rivers archery we can get the arrows from made out of be fifty or fast light fast flight is a little bit it has a little bit less stretch to it than be fifty does but you really need at least a reflex deflects a recurve bow to shoot fast flight well otherwise I would go with a be fifty Dacron I hope that answers a lot of questions that I've had so far in this basic archery series I'm Dave Canterbury at the Pathfinder school I thank you for everything you did for me from my school for my family for all my sponsors and supporters and we'll be back in another video as soon as we can thanks guys you

About the Author

wildernessoutfitters

wildernessoutfitters

From the lore of bushcraft to all things related to self-sustainability, the Pathfinder vision is to pass on the knowledge of outdoor self-reliance. Providing basic to advanced self-reliance training and survival gear, our goal is to offer both practical knowledge and survival gear that will stand the test of time. From emergency preparedness to sustainability, the Pathfinder way is to share and educate.

Here you can explore the world of survival knives, survival kits and simple tips on outdoor self-reliance. We are always learning and enjoy passing on the knowledge we acquire.

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