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Feathers on carbon?

Firedude

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Sep 2, 2015
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432
So I've been using Behman 2 inch vanes on my Gold Tip XT HUNTER 340 shafts. I have never been able to pull the accuracy I used to have with aluminum shafts and my old bow. I've tuned the bow and had my local bow shop look it over as well. So now I'm experimenting with the arrows more. I shot 300s 340s and 400s. 340s shot best. I've tried straight 3 fletch, helical 3 fletch, and straight 4 fletch. The best so far was the helical 3. Followed by the 4 fletch. I'm considering going back to feathers and doing a 4 inch slightly offset instead of helical. I feel like going helical would be to much drag. F.O.C is currently 12.28%.

Has anybody else tried this or similar?
Did it improve accuracy?
Other ideas?
 
I've put 5" shield-cut feathers in a helical on Goldtips. It worked well, actually. I prefer feathers to vanes, I think you can just do more with them to stabalize the arrow, but they always wind up getting wet and deteriorating. For that reason I'm leaning back toward blazers, slightly off set.
 
I switched to bohning heat vanes and will not go back to blazers. They are a lot more stiff and about twice as quiet. I am currently shooting 4 fletch with about a 2 degree helical. My FOC is 20.4%.
 
I won't ever put feathers on arrows for a compound bow again. They were loud, not good in weather, and easily destroyed. They are good at steering and are light though. But I learned to tune my bow and set up my arrows properly and shoot with proper form and once everything is dialed in you don't need the huge steering of a big feather for good broadhead flight. Unless you are running giant fixed blade broadheads you shouldn't need a big feather or vane. If you need a little more steering I'd look at longer vanes such as: blazer heat vanes, aae stealth vanes(my favorite 2.5" vane), and q2i makes some longer vanes.

Also a vane won't really make you more accurate. With a properly tuned bow and good form you can shoot field points on a bare shaft 30 yards and stack arrows. If it were me I would pay for an hour of instruction long before I went messing with the equipment I was using. If you get a lesson and see an accuracy improvement them keep working on that. Once your form is correct and consistent then focus on tinkering the little things.
 


I’m a helical guy myself. They stabilize faster, which is a factor in accuracy when shooting broad heads.

Personally, I’d just go with something like AAE 2.5” vanes, put a helical with some offset on there and shoot away.
 
I won't ever put feathers on arrows for a compound bow again. They were loud, not good in weather, and easily destroyed. They are good at steering and are light though. But I learned to tune my bow and set up my arrows properly and shoot with proper form and once everything is dialed in you don't need the huge steering of a big feather for good broadhead flight. Unless you are running giant fixed blade broadheads you shouldn't need a big feather or vane. If you need a little more steering I'd look at longer vanes such as: blazer heat vanes, aae stealth vanes(my favorite 2.5" vane), and q2i makes some longer vanes.

Also a vane won't really make you more accurate. With a properly tuned bow and good form you can shoot field points on a bare shaft 30 yards and stack arrows. If it were me I would pay for an hour of instruction long before I went messing with the equipment I was using. If you get a lesson and see an accuracy improvement them keep working on that. Once your form is correct and consistent then focus on tinkering the little things.
I guess I should have quantified the issue a little more. My bad. So at 20 I'm cracking arrows and blowing feathers off if I shoot at the same spot. 30 they are stacked but not perfectly parallel when you looked at them. That's why I've been tuning and tuning. But as distance they spread more than they should. 60 yards to 80 they just weren't consistent. By that I mean sometimes 1 ft group, sometimes 1 1/2, sometimes bigger. We used to group under 6 inches consistently. The arrows were still not parallel in the target. That's why I checked the F.O.C. It was not great but not bad. It's like the arrows were "floating" or wobbling slightly in flight. I just couldn't get over the arrows not being parallel. I surmised that had to have something to do with it. That's why I've been messing with vanes over the last year. I shoot a PSE supra max. It's a relatively slower bow than most so I think I'm not developing the drag faster bows do. Then tried to make up for it with helical. With lighted nocks I could still see a slight wobble at distance.
 
I have the same reservations about feathers as the previous posters.. Have you tried modifying your FOC? Also, what does the paper test show?
 
I guess I should have quantified the issue a little more. My bad. So at 20 I'm cracking arrows and blowing feathers off if I shoot at the same spot. 30 they are stacked but not perfectly parallel when you looked at them. That's why I've been tuning and tuning. But as distance they spread more than they should. 60 yards to 80 they just weren't consistent. By that I mean sometimes 1 ft group, sometimes 1 1/2, sometimes bigger. We used to group under 6 inches consistently. The arrows were still not parallel in the target. That's why I checked the F.O.C. It was not great but not bad. It's like the arrows were "floating" or wobbling slightly in flight. I just couldn't get over the arrows not being parallel. I surmised that had to have something to do with it. That's why I've been messing with vanes over the last year. I shoot a PSE supra max. It's a relatively slower bow than most so I think I'm not developing the drag faster bows do. Then tried to make up for it with helical. With lighted nocks I could still see a slight wobble at distance.

Gotcha! Have you tried video taping your release on the shot? (You can with a new iPhone) I had basically the same problem and it turned out I was twitching at the shot ever so slightly. At shorter distances it was not noticable but at further distances I could definitely tell. Just a thought.

I do still think that with field points you do not need a 3" feather for stabilization though. With field points and blazers an arrow should typically be stabilized 5-10ft fro the shooter. So I would shoot bareshafts at 20 and 30 and see what they are doing. If they are angled worse than with feathers you know that the vanes or feathers were correcting a flight issue in that short distance. Then it would be a form issue or a tuning issue. Also at long distances a big feather will catch a cross wind easily and puss the back of your arrow sideways. The bigger the vane the less the crosswind needed to push an arrow sideways. And as long as your foc is in the 12-15 range you'll be fine. If you really want to push into the extreme foc that's cool too (as I shoot 20% foc) but it won't solve a shooters problem.
 
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if you’re getting poor arrow flight with helical fletching I doubt it has anything to do with the fletching itself.
 
So. An update. I really looked at my old fletchings. It turns out on every single arrow 1 fletch is just slightly more curved than the others. What I mean is 2 are offset/helical looking and 1 is helical. To be fair I did not fletch these but my fault in not scrutinizing something that flies that fast. If I were a guessing man I would guess than before the glue was completely set these arrow where laid flat on a table putting a slight bend in a fletch as it dried. I picked the worst of the worst for pictures and shot them into a target. This was at 40 yards. Feeling dumb for such an obvious problem eluding me for so long...
 

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