hi I'm Adam bender with EASTMANS' BOWHUNTING JOURNAL and today we're gonna go over
ten easy steps on how to build a killer arrow the first step that we're gonna go
over is choosing your arrow there's all kinds of different arrows out there
today from manufacturers to types of arrows to the material they're made out
of but the first thing you're gonna want to do is determine what arrow is right
for you head on over to Easton's website and they actually have a chart that you
can download on to figure out the exact arrow that you need there's going to be
two numbers that you're gonna want to know your draw length and your draw
weight using these two numbers you're going to be able to make a left-right
comparison and draw a conclusion as to which range of arrows you can shoot
Easton's already mapped all this out they've done all the science behind it
now I'm granted this only applies to Easton shafts but it's going to help you
say you're looking at another manufacturer it's gonna give you the
proper arrow spine to look at now what exactly is arrow spine arrow spine is
something that a lot of guys overlook these days you wouldn't believe how many
people actually are shooting not properly spined arrows to put it simply
the definition of arrow spine is how much an arrow flexes during flight and
you want your arrow to recover as fast as possible shooting an under spined
arrow it's going to take your arrow a longer time to recover out of the bow as
it goes down towards your target which is going to also affect your accuracy
once you've selected the proper arrow for your bows draw length and draw
weight you want to mark where to cut these arrows these shafts come at a
predetermined length and they're of course extra long so you want to shorten
them up by cutting them but what you have to do is measure where you want to
cut these so they're all the same exact length to do that you actually have to
put one of these shafts in your bow draw your bow back have a buddy or someone
else mark with a marker on the arrow where the proper clearance is on your
bow so first thing we're going to do is Adams gonna put this shaft in his bow
and draw it back now everybody measures their arrows a
little differently some guys want them to come right in
front of the arrow rest I like to always have mine in front of the riser I want
to make sure that no matter what happens I'm gonna get good clearance from my
broad head and not knock it off the string if you cut your shaft short right
in front of the the rest here if you have any variants sometimes if you shoot
a little different broad head or something you can hook a blade on this
riser and it'll pop the arrow off the string and that is no way to to handle a
bull out coming in as have pullback on a big bull and have the arrow pop off the
string on you so we're gonna have Adam draw it back here and get settled in
just like he's gonna shoot of course you don't want to stand in front of it when
you mark it I use a silver marker so it marks on the black nice and clearly and
we want to mark it just in front of this riser so I give it just about an eighth
of an inch or a quarter of an inch of clearance in front of that riser to make
sure that that broadhead there's no way that broadhead could get hooked on that
riser and pull that arrow off that string so go ahead and let down now we
know we have a good accurate measurement now that we have the mark this is our
master arrow and we'll go ahead and cut a dozen of these off exactly the same
okay so now that we've determined that my arrow is 30 and a quarter inches I'm
gonna come down to the tape on the arrow saw and I'm gonna go to 30 and a quarter
inches lock it down and then you'll want to double check your measurement against
your mark there is a gap where you cannot see you're assuming that that's
exactly four and a half inches now whether or not that's exactly right we
don't know so when I line this up I can see that when that blade rotates it's
gonna cut off all of the silver mark make sure that this is tightened so it's
not gonna wiggle loose because as you do twelve arrows in a row it's gonna want
to wiggle loose so make sure it's tight so once you have your arrow saw locked
down and in place you're gonna want to make sure that when you bring the arrow
to the saw you spin it in a backwards motion and push it through the blade
another thing to pay close attention to on this is make sure that your nock is
flush against the back wall the entire time you spin the arrow if you have it
pulled out and you slip basically what's gonna happen is you're gonna have
different air links so make sure that the arrow is pushed all the way back
against the wall and as you bring the arrow to the saw rotate it backwards
until it's cut all the way through
all right so now that we determine the length that our shaft needs to be cut it
to that length now it's actually time to start building the arrow the first thing
you're gonna want to do is square the end now you do this because during the
cutting process the wheel of the saw can actually develop high and low spots in
your arrow that's why it's so important to spin the arrow backwards as you cut
so you develop as even as a cut as possible the reason being is because you
want that insert to flush up as perfect as possible to that arrow if you have
any high and low spots on any point of this while it may look like your insert
is sitting perfectly flush it may not be and where you're gonna find out that
it's not is when you go to spin test your arrows and see if they're true so
to take out any little imperfections what you're gonna want to do is get a
narrow square probably the most readily available arrow score out there is made
by g5 you can pick this up at any of your local sporting goods stores and it
actually works pretty slick so all you do is you set your arrow square down and
you're gonna bring the arrow flush to the end now it kind of sits in there and
there's a little cradle and what you do is you're gonna rotate the arrow and you
can do this to basically eliminate any high and low spots that developed during
the cutting process this is completely flat and in turn it's going to make any
little burrs that might have happened when you cut it's going to take those
out so I usually repeat this process for 10 or 15 seconds until I'm pretty
positive that I've removed any burrs that might have happened while I cut the
arrow another interesting little tip for the people that really want to take this
seriously is to put the end of your arrow in the Chuck of your power drill
kind of will require two people on this but the the theory is is that the faster
you can spin this which with my hands I can only spin it this fast but with the
power drill I can turn it a lot faster and you're gonna eliminate that much
more and that much more even when it comes to the squaring process that's
just a little tip that a lot of guys who really go to the next level when it
comes to aerial building will do so after you've got the arrow squared using
the scoring tool basically all you need to do is take a q-tip and a little bit
of rubbing alcohol and you're going to clean out the inside of the shaft
Carbon can develop down in there little birds little sand shavings and you don't
want that stuff trapped in the arrow because once the insert goes in it's not
coming back out so what I like to do is just get a pretty pretty sopping wet
you'll want to q-tips or you can use both ends and you basically just run
this down the inside the shaft and clean out any little bit and you can see on
there all of the carbon that was would have been left in there had I not
cleaned that out take the dry end clean this out and you're basically ready for
the gluing process
all right so now that we've got our squared cleaned out it's time for the
insert there's all type of glues out there the one I like is the Easton bond
all it seems to work on all the different types of arrows and inserts
that I've used there's types of glues that you can melt
and then put it on the insert and then they harden over time there's two part
epoxy I prefer just the squeeze bottle ones based on the ease of use so what
you're going to want to do is hold the insert in your hand and you're going to
want to apply an even amount of glue to the back half of the insert now the
reason you go on the back half is as you push this in it's going to bring the
glue forward so once I have the glue applied I'm going to put it into the
arrow and as I bring it forward I'm going to spin around and you can see
that that glue is moving forward with the shaft for the last step bring it
down to a hard surface press tight and just clean off the excess one thing you
want to make sure that you have is once these are set you want to give these a
good they say a couple hours to rest before you go shoot them that glue bonds
very quickly but never chance it always give your arrows proper time to set up
before you shoot them still looking to take that once-in-a-lifetime Western
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