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breaking tooooo many

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jape:
Well I am fed up, I didn't mind blaming my bad aim for most of them but too many wooden arrows break with the smallest off-centre impact or if they hit the wooden supports and miss the hay bale! I have lost or broken two dozen POC or Victorian Ash (fine grained eucalyptus) in a year. Now I know what I am doing a bit more I just made a dozen POC arrows and two broke in the first hour! OK one hit the support but one just broke in the hay bale! I spent three days fletching and painting them, got them slightly over spined (45-50 for a 45 bow) and spent HOURS tuning them individually.  And the money wasted is adding up. I think maybe arrow wood might not be all that good these days, I dunno, not so tight grained or something? I was given two, twenty year old very light weight arrows, look like beech or ash, for mucking around and although badly spined they have hit everything from a tin shed to a number of trees and survived while POC and VA seem to shatter behind the point, sometimes across the shaft and twice in the bloody bow as I fired!
I have read many posts here and a lot of you say bamboo is very strong. Will I be wasting my time going for that next? Or should I just get some allies like my mates tell me too? ::)

Cromm:
Hi, What kind of bow do you shoot? And what kind of points? Do you  taper the wood to put the points on or are they the parallel sort,because I've found that the parallel points work better for me because there being more wood at the tip when hitting something there's less chance of it snapping.

jape:
Hi Cromm, I am using both a boo-backed eucalyptus longbow at 35# and lately a Chekmate Longhorn at 45# (it is far smoother to shoot than the lighter bow). I use VA or POC shafts of correct spine, tapered at the tip 5 degrees for tapered glue-on field points. Shafts vary from 400 to 500 gn finished and I select carefully to use none with grain runout after I got splinters in my hand from a commercially purchased 'exploding' POC shaft first time I used it.

I am fed up with throwing away three or more out of every dozen shafts for either faulty grain or excessively light weight even if spined correctly. Just getting too expensive and even the so-called premium priced 'selected' shafts were poor value. In Australia here, when I posted about the faults on forums, I got told off because no-one else it seems has these problems! But I am not that bad at making arrows, just maybe too particular about selection. For example, I bought a dozen POC at 45 to 50# spine and the mass varied from 240 to 450! I also bought 24 VA shafts and half, seriously, half of them were so bent that even heat straightening doesn't work well. I don't want to say names because so many others support these guys and they do indeed work hard at supporting traditional archers.

I also had problems with the first longbow I bought from a local maker (I was green and excited), badly gouged finish, overweight, handle popping off, glue starved boo joints etc. and got flamed for stating that on forum! So I don't want to get a reputation for just being a whiner but I truly think standards are low. Another example, I just got fifty fletches and four of them are badly creased, one or two have a quill split. Maybe that is another thread to post but my money is very tight and I expect perfect or near perfect when I buy! The Longhorn is second-hand and was quite expensive for me to buy on my pension but it is brilliant to shoot so I would love to match some wood arrows for it.

I just don't think, although I can be grumpy at times, I am that bad at working shafts. Even taking into consideration my own mistakes and the learning curve for a beginner, too many get rejected by me and of them, too many still break.

It is quite possible that a couple of unhappy coincidences and my own lack of skill have added to the woes but I just want to find a good source of shaft wood so I can carry on happily making, tuning and experimenting with different fletches and arrows. I found that ordering shafts from USA means doubling the price including postage, well out of reach thus. So ...... bamboo?

Hillbilly:
Yep. Go with cane, bamboo, and hardwood. I can go through a dozen POC shafts in no time, but so far, I have never broken a cane/bamboo arrow. Hardwood shoot shafts are tough, too.

jape:
Thanks Hillbilly, just found a stand of bamboo on next door's block! That is the sort of coincidence I love, after thinking about it just today so I will ask if I can have a few, the locally available shop ones for gardening are crap. Will read up the posts in this section about bamboo treatment and get to work! I assume you scrape away the shine for fletching and nock glueing. How do you add field points to them? I assume they are hollow, hmmm I best go and get some and find out!

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