Ammunition

Been busy since my last post.  The bow is complete and it looks and works great. But let's continue where we left off.

What good is a bow, unless you have something to shoot.  Every bow needs to be 'shot in'.  What that means is that you need to fire some arrows through a bow to get a feel for the bow and how it is performing. There is also a safety factor involved.  Until you put the bow through the stress of shooting arrows you won't know if the bow is safe to use.  I have not had a catastrophic failure of a bow yet, but it is not something you want to have happen if you are selling the bow.  Anyways I am getting sidetracked here.  To shoot in the bow I need some arrows.

A few weeks ago I had purchased some 3/8"  poplar dowels from Lowe's.  I spend a good deal of time looking for straight ones with straight grain.  These are cheap and work well as primitive arrows.  My shooting would be more accurate if I measured the spine bend of the arrows, but seeing as I am doing this on the cheap, I won't for this batch.  Google is your friend right now if you need to learn how to spine your arrows.

My daughter purchased a new couch from Ikea and I acquired the box to use as a paint booth.  I drove the shafts through the top and spray painted the shafts.

After letting the paint dry overnight, I selected 3 of the shafts to complete for this bow.  I cut them to 32" because I have a 27 1/2" draw length and you want the point of the arrow to extend past the bow a bit.  Again, this may or may not be the correct length for accuracy, but I am not really concerned about that right now.  I just want some ammunition for the bow.

Now I need to taper the ends of the shaft, one end at 5 degrees and one at 11 degrees for the point and the nock.  There are several ways to do this.  Some people spend money on fancy sanding jigs or those pencil sharpener like devices.  I came up with a solution, that works pretty good.  I took a piece of card stock and drew 2 lines at those angles from the edge.  I then taped that to the table of my sander and clamped a piece of wood to it along the line for the angle that I want to create.  That's just me being cheap again.

angles drawn

guide clamped in place

Simply keep the shaft pressed firmly against the guide as you rotate and create a nice taper.  Don't sharpen it to a point but make sure the taper is long enough to fit into your point or nock.

Nock tapers at 11 degrees

point tapers at 5 degrees

Once I had the tapers done, I took them inside and used a hotmelt glue gun to attach my field points and plastic nocks. (both quite inexpensive from the Calgary Archery Centre) I have just used the hotmelt glue that I had on hand.  May not be the best for the job, but my points stay on nicely.

Now comes the challenging part; fletching.  As my goal here is to do all this as cheaply as possible, I elected not to buy proper feather fletches from an archery supplier.  Instead I bought a bag of craft feathers from Walmart for $2.99.  Buy the biggest feathers you can if you go this route.  I chose red and yellow feathers again to go with my Ironman color scheme.  Simply split the feathers down the middle of the spine with a utility knife

Go slowly, try to keep the spine even on
both halves.

After I have the feathers split I glued them on with the hot glue.  I then took strips of colored duct tape to fasten the ends of the feathers and put some stripes on the shaft.

3 completed arrows

There are plenty of videos on making arrows on YouTube.  Have a look at them.  At a later date I will make some properly spined and bare shaft tested arrows tuned to the bow.  For now these will work.

Back to the garage for some fun shooting.

Turns out these arrows shoot pretty
straight and I was able to get a nice grouping.