Making A Common Man's Broadhead

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Video Transcription

I want to talk about this bow with you guys real quick like here this is probably one of the worst hack jobs for a bow now you could ever imagine this is one of the first bows that I ever made just went out in the woods with an accident in a file and a knife and said I'm just going to make a bow out of this tree and I'll tell you what this is one of my favorite bows to this day and I suppose a couple of years old now maybe three years old actually but it's got to repair in the limb right here we're how to crack a small crack so I went ahead and wrapped it and then put pine pitch glue over the top of it hide glue and pine pitch over the top of it the nock points or just hacked in there with a file it's not finished at all really I mean you can still see file marks and stuff all over the bow where it's got file marks on it it's never been sanded down or finished everything was cut into it you know with knives and ends and multi-tool saws and things like that to make it it's not by any means a work of art but to me it is a work of art because it's so functional I mean it's got a deer leg handle on here doesn't even have a good leather wrap it's got a deer leg someone on the front of it for a handle here I've sewed it's down the center and just tie it off with a piece of leather cordage and it's got a handmade Flemish to a string on it but I'll tell you this bow and you can see it's a little bit off-center shot it's not in the center it was in the center of this bow it break that's why you can't make them Center shatters was just not strong enough for that but you know as bows go I love this bow I would shoot this bow at any deer any given time at 10 to 15 yards without even thinking twice about it it's plenty fast it's about 55 pounds right now

it's almost probably by now it's probably good and dry there's no doubt about that I just put a second coat of tung tung oil on it just to seal a little bit better again when I pulled it out today to bring it out here but I'll tell you it shoots accurate it shoots great it's strong it's not going to break off shot thousands of arrows through it and as crappy as it looks and it's hacked up as it looks this is just an example of how things don't have to be perfect to be functional and that's what I want to share with you guys before we go to this next segment this video

morning guys Dave Canterbury the Pathfinder School in the last video that we shot swiped dirt on my face that's crazy

um anyway the last video that we shot this morning was on arrow mentality the archers paradox and things of that nature and I wanted to shoot a video with you guys on how to make some common man broad heads for your arrows that we discussed yesterday when we made that common man arrow out of a dowel rod so what I did was I went to Menards this morning and I bought this piece of this is a piece of 16 gauge I believe it is we look to verify that to make sure 16 gauge weld steel it's called 16 gauge weld steel this sheet was $5 there's enough metal here that probably make 50 broadheads well yeah probably pretty close to it I mean over 30 anyway so at 5 bucks I mean if you can get 50 out of that's 5 cents a broadhead now I did add a couple things to our tool kit that we had in our common man pack just to help us in manufacturing these arrows today and what I did was I bought not a hacksaw blade but a metal cutting blade for a sawzall that will fit into our vise grips in the same fashion that we showed the other day for the regular saw blade and that will give us crank get down getting tight that will give us a metal cutting blade so we can cut this sheet metal now you could use tin snips for this if you wanted to invest in a pair of them I'm trying to stay common man with this whole thing and the whole theme of this and show you guys how to do it cheaply and effectively and be able to carry these tools with you for use in the future as well so you can put this saw blade in your little tool roll you've got with your other saw blade your vise grips here for your four-way and you're good to go the other thing I did purchase today was a small rat tail file and I think this cost me two dollars and fifty cents you could probably get one cheaper somewhere else I bought this thing at Menards the saw blade itself was two dollars and fifty cents so I've got ten dollars in this kit that I'm going to use to make these broads so if I get fifty broadheads out of this sheet and I've got $10 in it you know I'm doing pretty good but I think I can at least get 30 out of anyway so we're going to show you guys today how to make broad heads out of this stuff and how to do it filled expediently right here at our camp okay the first thing we have to do is we have to figure out what the pattern of our broad head is going to be we're just going to use a triangle shape for our broad head and once we get one triangle piece cut out right here then we can just use the opposite triangle all the way down going opposite directions back and forth and we'll have a whole row of broad heads here a row here and row here so we get three rows times however many we get out of one side of this and what I'm going to do is I'm just going to take some kind of straight edge like this saw blade and I'll just grab my multi-tool out and get the all and I'll use that first scribe on here and I want this broad head to be about

two times as long as it is wide so I just put an angle on there I'm not real particular about how perfect that angle is and then I want to make an angle a triangle out of this thing and like I said I wanted to be twice as long as it is wide and I'd like to get it about you have to have in the state of Ohio it has to be 3/4 an inch wide I believe cutting surface to be legal don't quote me on that I think that's right so I'm going to take my multi-tool and just look and see there's 2 inches right there there's an inch and a half an inch and a half is a pretty good width of a broad head so I'm just going to scribe that real quick right there just like that and then I'm going to go back and follow that for my triangle going up to my line where I just made I'll put that right there

I'll scribe it out alone and that triangle right there will be cut out and that will give me my broad head now I want to make sure that those angles are the same it doesn't look to me like they are I'm going to have to widen that out a bit to get a good triangle out of that because that angle doesn't look the same and that's important and this is all trial and error you have to look at it so I'll scribe another line down through here real quick and look at that and see if that looks better and that does look better so that's what we're going to use that's a little bit wider that's okay now all I'm going to do is take my metal saw now I've got my scribe lines here and I'm just going to cut that blade out of the sheet of metal and this if I take a few minutes like I said if I had start milling or so all right so we'll get this cut out and we'll get right back to you okay I went ahead and finish this up with a pair of snips and that was tough enough let me tell you I cut about I don't know an inch and a half took me about three or four minutes cut an inch and a half of this metal the 16 gauge metal is heavy so if you're going to do this by hand with a handsaw it's going to take you a long time for sake of this video I want to get it done quick but when you cut this stuff with snips you get this bent up looking thing here we'll have to hammer this out with our axe and straighten it out and then we'll start working on it but you could take this sheet home if you have a band saw or a skill saw or something like that and you can cut 20 Arrowhead blanks out of this thing in just a matter of minutes and keep them in your pack for later use as blanks like we've talked about in many other videos as far as utilizing resources but I wanted to show you how you get then in the next one obviously you're just going to cut from here and then opposite all the way down and it looks to me like you could probably get 20 or 20 of these in a row off of here probably so you're talking maybe 60 broadheads off of this so let's get back to this bad boy and get it straightened out and bang down make sure it's even we'll finish it up okay now I just pulled this flat rock out of my spider shelter here that I've been using for my hearth in there and I'm just going to treat this broad head out by pounding flat on this rock and I can see that my angle is a little bit off so I'm gonna have to trim it a little bit I'll do that before we finish this up we've got to get a straight flat edge looks like we do and now we can start to work on it so we got the basic shape of our broad head now right here now we need to start working on this thing and getting it to where we want it so that we can use it for an actual point on an arrow to kill an animal with and what I'll probably do with this first of all is I'll just turn these two corners off real easy just like this

and the reason I'm doing that is so that if I put these in a quiver in a basket quiver they don't hang up coming out just little things that you learn over time of doing this stuff if you've got real sharp corners there it's going to hang up on you're coming out of a quiver and you don't want that and you don't really need those two points there anyway

they don't really serve a function all right so now we've got our basic shape that we want now we've got 1/2 this as well so we have to think about an area where we can wrap this for 1/2 thing and I'm just going to go down into here somewhere and that's why I've got the rat tail file and I'll take this and I'll just stick this in my vice grips that I've got here and crank it down in there and I'll use this rat tail file to mill out

a knotch and I just want to put that in there straight like that crank that down and then just go to work with this rat tail file right now spot and again you've got to get yourself to start there it takes a little bit of time once you get a start then you can start really going after the reason I use this rat tail follows it just kind of makes it round indention in the broad head right there it doesn't make a square it off edge so it's not going to cut my binding and this doesn't have to be real deep either it just is needs to be deep enough for my lashings to go around it eyelashes to my arrow very much you can see that knotch and that's probably just deep enough but now what I'll do is I'll go to the other side exactly opposite that and I'll make another one okay once we've got both of our notches cut into it what we're going to do is we're going to put it in our vise grips just like it would be half that onto the arrow get our four in one tool and I'm just going to start filing one side down one edge down the sharpener and I'm only going to sharpen one edge I'm not going to do a double a double bevel here I'm not going to bevel both sides I'm going to do one angle here and one angle here on opposite sides for my cutting blade I'm not worried about making razor blades here all these all these things have to do is cut through an animal and that points going to help it do that but once that point enters the skin I want to make sure that there's a little bit of a cutting surface here to help the arrow in and this is not perfect and it doesn't have to be like I said it we're not making razor blades here we're making tools that will kill an animal knees will definitely do that so we'll sharpen this side and then we'll flip it over and we'll sharpen this side on the opposite so our angles are going in two opposite directions for cutting and we just got to walk through that until we get what we want then we'll be ready to have it okay now once I get that work down pretty good with that four and one on both sides not worried about getting the final sharpening on this yet I'll go ahead and half this point on the arrow then I'll use my multi-tool file for the final sharpening of this thing but now we have a serviceable arrowhead that we can mount I'm going to show you how to do that

expediently right now okay to have this arrow head on here we're going to have to slip this arrow now you can do one of two things you could just split this thing which I don't like to do that that makes the arrows a week if you do that I like to actually cut a notch in there this 16 gauge steel is about the same thickness as a saw blade for a multi-tool and that makes them ideal for making these cuts and we need to cut that o bow down to right there so I'll go ahead and just mark that real quick with a tick my saw right now part I'd burned then I'll know how far I've got to cut that down to notch it get my saw out and we'll go after that I get to you when I get a cut out okay to finish this up I'm just going to get a small fire started here

I'm going to bring my components I'm going to use over here including my Arrowhead and all I'm trying to do now is I want to get this hot hot glue melted a little bit and put down into my notch and I want to get that notch heated up with the glue that's in there and you can see how that's starting to melt now and go down into that notch that's what I want okay now I'm going to melt this down a little bit get my knotch

heat it up seat this Arrowhead exactly where I want in this knotch just like that let that glue set up for a minute okay now I've got my arrow head seated the knotch

I'm going to go ahead and take some of this Bank line that we use the other day this stuff works pretty good like I said I'm just going to unthread it this like the last time I did so I get it down to where I've only got one piece of thread that's only thickness I need I don't need two of these or three of these for sure I'll pull out a piece about a foot long that's what I'm going to use to wrap this arrow and since I get this unbound and get this piece out of here and cut off you'll get this there we go almost got it okay now this we're going to use to wrap our arrow what I'll do is I'll start by dragging a piece down in through that notch and then I'll just wrap it around this way a couple times and then I'll go crossways a couple times down through here come up the crossways a couple times to here go around the bottom a couple times and I'll end up down here on the bottom and I blew that and this end down with some of this Ballu that i've got in this glue stick right here get this melted in our fire a little bit put some of it right on top of that just like this and then we're going to melt this on our lashings okay now you can use pine pitch for this you can just use regular hot melt glue this just happens to be our cheese glue like I said it works pretty good I just want to smear this all over my threads and I can melt it down later and make it look ready right now I'm just trying to get a good coating on my lashings of this stuff and it's going to be

not going to be real pretty at first it's not going anywhere now guys now we got to do is final sharpening shaping of our point what's that dries okay now that our resins dry that thing's not going anywhere it's on there it ain't coming off and then ain't moving now we take our fine filer multi-tool and we can start working this edge on this point and this is where we make our final sharpening to get this thing to the edge we want now this is a this is not a high carbon steel or anything that's going to hold an edge for a long period of time but it really doesn't have to all it has to do is pierce the skin of an animal and drive into them so as long as we got a good sharp point on here and a pretty good edge the best edge we can get that's why I said only file one side of the edge don't try for a double edge just make your edge on one side here and one side here and you'll get plenty of cutting power to get into the animal that way and that will give you a good inexpensive broad head very cheaply very effective very efficient or very little money now we can make probably 50 anyway broadheads now and it's not costing us hardly anything to make these things it's just taking time but that's how you make and half a handmade broad head - blade broad head - an oak shaft and now we have a usable hunting arrow beyond the shadow of a doubt for bigger game okay one little tip or trick at the end here what I usually do is I'll take my file and I'll just bevel that point at the top on both sides just a little bit just like this just to give me a little extra cutting surface right there at the tip where I'm going to get penetration into the animals

and it's just a very slight little bevel and I really trying to sharp anything just trying to bevel it I've already got my edge here I've already got my edge here I'm just trying to bevel that down just to give me a little bit more cutting surface right there at the tip I'm gonna go back shoot this block in 20 yards

all right god that's 20 yards bull's-eyes here got an 8-inch kill zone in a dear easy enough look at the penetration that block target that's heavy duty cry well my name is Dave Canterbury pathfinder school making a common man's broadhead for your heroes we shot a few demo shots into this video for you out of this old self bow but you said it's got probably 50 52 pounds of draw but we got plenty of penetration all these targets we shot at no doubt my mind is thing with killing deer so I hope you guys enjoyed this segment and I appreciate your support I appreciate your views I appreciate everything that you guys have done for me and I'll keep making videos just long as I keep making them guys thank you very much

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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