Making Primitive Traditional Style Archery Arrows!

All right you guys wanted to know how to make arrows. So the first step is collection. So I'm going glossy privet. This width is what we're looking for. We want them a little less than a finger's diameter. Kind of about like that. Try to get maybe 36 inches so that you have some play on both ends. I know a lot of these look pretty thick for arrows but I have to take the bark off. They're going to be a lot thinner. It's spring it'll come off super easy. Okay we're just going to keep scraping and keep adding to that far left hand pile. At this point I still have a pretty good stack of privets in the middle. I'm sorting through those putting the ones on the to my left that I think are too thick to make arrows and to my right that I want to scrape off and add to our finished pile. All the remaining designated arrows are then scraped down and added to our final pile. As far as we got today we narrowed down kind of the ones that we think are going to make the best arrows. We got rid of the outer covering using the back or the spine of the knife. They're all varying uh circumferences and diameters and that's the first thing we're going to take care of. So how are we going to do that? We're going to make a jig. Get two two by fours just laying around. Drill them together and make a tee. You're going to need some clamps. So you see this lip clamping on right there. If you look at these the big part is too big and then this part is just about right. So I'm going to find a drill bit that matches up with the just about right part. Just about right drill bit is a little bit smaller. You don't want to drill your hole in the middle. That's not going to do anything. You want to drill your hole right there at the top. So it's like if you drew a circle if the circle's here right at the top of the circle should be the top level of this. Okay now you're not going to get it so that the top of the circle is exactly planar with the top of your uh jig. So what you use is a rasp. This next part's actually like legit cool. We're just going to rasp it down and then you put a jigsaw file blade on top. Your drill is going to rotate clockwise right? So you want it to rotate into the teeth. Oh one of the ends goes in. Quick work of this. That's right what's going through. We tried this one first uh it wasn't big enough so we went to this one. It's working great. So once you have everything set up it's pretty much rinse and repeat for all the remaining pieces of privet that you desire to make into arrows. Use a knife to shave down the end if it won't fit into the drill. Check out the friction burn marks on the inside walls of your jig. So tomorrow I'll show you um the next steps. If you want to continue to follow along with what we're doing be sure to like and subscribe and I'll see you tomorrow. This is day three of how to make some wooden arrows. Now we're going to take one that we're already pretty good with and we're going to line it up and we're going to find the straightest portion. It's about right here. So I'm going to mark just to keep uniform length. Method one is doing the end cuts with the knife only. You just score kind of making those little wedges in. That's what it'll look like when you're close to being able to snap it off and clean up that edge. That is very time consuming so I'm not actually going to do that on the rest of these. I'm going to grab the saw and just cut them all to length and then we're going to move on to the next part. Be sure to use the cross cut teeth and not the rip cut teeth. It makes it way easier. Here I'm just measuring out equivalent lengths and finishing up the rest of the cuts. All these are now cut to length. The main difference between this file and this file is that there are no score marks or tool marks left on the ones in my lap. If you can see these you can see all these jagged marks that's from me uh shoving it through the jig and the jigsaw teeth leaving little score marks. So we want to get rid of all of those. So how are we going to do that? The cabinet scraper is undeniably your best friend for this part. For removing tool marks always think cabinet scraper and if you have a shape horse handy it just makes the process even easier. A bonus for doing all the carving is you get some really great kindling to start your fire. Here's all of our shafts unified about the same size. All the score score marks removed. Takes a while. I hated making arrows but this has actually been pretty rewarding so I hope you guys decide to go out cut some privets down, make your jig, start your initial circumference and then do the cabinet scraper to get rid of the tool marks. So then you're all caught up with me and then you can see me tomorrow for the next part. This is day four making arrows and it's all about how to get them to spec. If you look from this end it's zeroed out and most of these go right to 34. Now 34 is way too long of an arrow. On this end we are going to cut all these down to 31 now and then we have the grain scale out so that we can unify all the weight. I'm going to weigh each one of these. I'm going to find the lightest one. I'm going to set that one aside and then I'm going to weigh each of the other ones and I'm going to go over to the shave horse and shave on it with cabinet scraper and then come back and check the weight until it's within five to ten grains of that lightest one. Now let's start taking the weights. Zeroed out. 729. The first one that I write here I'm just going to set on top so we know which is which going through. 760. 807. 640. 670. 792. 632. 751. 665. 643. 714. 632 is the minimum. So this is the goal for everything else. 6. 665 now. Let's see. 629. Okay let's see how close we got. 629. Keep going. Okay the weight on that last one was 616. I overshot it just a little bit. 616. 617. 614. See how close we are. 633. A couple more scrapes and we're there. 613. 616. 602. One more. 618. They're all 31 inches. 618 is the max. So from 602 to 618 the majority of which the vast majority is pretty much 616. Now let's see how much weight they lost. 577. We have a 576. Almost all of these are 576 or within plus or minus five. Okay that's as far as we got day four. Be sure to like and subscribe so you don't miss tomorrow. Exciting part comes soon I promise. Start now by using a coping saw and a rat tail file to cut some of the knock grooves. Doing the initial cuts with the coping saw really does expedite the amount of time that you have to use the rat tail file. All 10 done lickety split right there. Use a spokeshave for tapering the limbs towards the knock ends to increase FOC. The more weight towards the front of the arrow the better. These are our arrow weights after the initial taper with a minimum of 522 and a max of 560. The cabinet scraper will be used to get all the shaft weights very close together around 516 or so. Time to see how we did tapering the arrows while keeping them similar in weight. 517. 515. 517. 514. 513. 516. 516. 517. 515. 516. Okay I'm gonna call that good. Use the heat gun to help straighten the arrows. All right nice and straight and ready for fletching. After waiting me a lot of time remove your arrow from the fletching jig and you have a fletched arrow. All right now you're just going to repeat that process on the remaining nine arrows. Now why do some of the feathers have these little cutouts? Well first let me show you how they got there. You just use an exacto knife to kind of carve out that area. Now you're probably thinking what's going to go there? Now the answer is something called sinew which is effectively animal tendon that can be very effective rope when activated with saliva. So you chew it up it becomes malleable and then you can put it in certain areas to strengthen them. I chose the beginning of the feathers and the back of the nock and then I apply Titebond as a seal and add some string. Be sure to like and subscribe so you make sure not to miss any future hunts with the arrows that we spend so much time building. Not bad.