posted on May 20, 2010 09:50
A whole lot of energy is expended in the consideration of which of the hundreds of broadhead choices has the best flight consistency, shortest blood trail, or toughest construction, but in my experience very little thought goes into the delivery package that puts that broadhead where it needs to go. By “delivery package” I mean the arrow itself.
Not that many decades ago there was only one choice for a crossbow projectile, and that was wood. My very first crossbow came equipped with 6 dandy wooden-shafted custom arrows that stretched 16” in length and where tipped with good-old Bear Razorhead broadheads. They were of a pretty hefty diameter, probably about 23/64 or 24/64 as I remember. Back then my Daco Hornet crossbow didn’t have half the “smoke” of today’s equipment and this rather questionably package stayed together quite nicely. That said I was lucky because the downfall of wooden shafts was simply their tendency to fail explosively along some grain defects when subjected to the huge forces of crossbow acceleration. If I had used a longer shaft or a stronger bow those wooden shafts could easily have shattered upon firing; not a pleasant thought. Within a very few years the use of wood for crossbow arrows pretty much ended as aluminum tubular shafts became the vogue among crossbow shooters. Sure, there were a very few people who used fiberglass shafts back then, but in order to have sufficient spine they had to be pretty heavy, and before they caught on, aluminum shafts ruled the roost!
Aluminum in 2117 size was pretty much where it was at back in the early 80s when Excalibur started out, and they were the very pinnacle of things projectile back then. They weighed around 320 grains without the point, were relatively straight, and were immune to the “blowups” on acceleration we had seen with wood. As time went on the 2219 aluminum shaft, which was a tad heavier and tended to be better for some crossbows, became the standard of the crossbow industry and that is why every crossbow made today has it’s deck designed around a 22/64” diameter arrow. As the years went by aluminum shafts became better and cheaper until, as often happens, new technology came along to eclipse their shine.
That new technology was the graphite composite shaft. The first efforts with this new design were pultruded shafts that required “outserts” which were a larger diameter than the shaft to strengthen the ends. These were not useable on crossbows because the decks wouldn’t allow the use of outserts. Some very heavy walled pultruded graphite shafts were used back the as the thick walls provided enough strength for “insert” use, but the real explosion of graphite use in crossbows came with the onset of the mandrel wound, thin walled shafts we use today. Unlike pultruded shafts these shafts have fiber that runs radially around the tube and reinforces it so that it can be very thin walled and light weight, but also very strong, and the walls are tough enough to allow the use on “inserts” which don’t interfere with the crossbow’s deck.
These new shafts are presently considered the ultimate projectiles for our sport. They allow very light weights to be used in order to either reduce total mass weight for maximum speed or to allow increasing front of center balance without massively increasing arrow weight for better broadhead flight. They are also pretty much bend-proof as they can’t be bent by impacting a hard surface the way aluminum can be, but beware as a hard landing can shatter a graphite shaft in ways that are difficult to see, and I have had several explode on the deck after they were damaged.
So what’s my take on the whole arrow thing? Well, it’s a little known fact that I’m kind of conservative by nature and my opinions will always reflect this. I’m still stuck in the 90’s where shaft choices are concerned. In my opinion there was nothing wrong with aluminum. It was light enough to give flat arrow flight, could be straightened easily if it was required, was way easier to get good internal component adhesion than graphite, and could use hotmelt glue for easy tuning of the broadhead. On top of this, my pet peeve with graphite shafts is their tendency to weld themselves into a foam target on impact, melting the foam and gluing themselves into the target like that proverbial sword in the stone. If graphite shafts had never been invented our world wouldn’t be a bit poorer for it. The reality though is that graphite is here to stay and I guess that I’m a part of the problem because for all their shortcomings I still regularly hunt with them because of their toughness and that little bit of extra speed.
I hope that you’ve all wintered well and that your PDHD (post deer hunt depression) is long over and you are well on your way to putting the next longbeard in the freezer. Practice hard, hunt safe, and most of all have fun…………..Bill