Arrow Making for the Common Man

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Tags: Pathfinder,Survival,Bug Out,Bushcraft,Scouts,Scouting,Primitive,Primitive Skills.Traditional,Archery,Bone,Stone,Tools,Self Reliance,Navigation,Orienteering,Tracking,Trekking,Camping,Backpacking,Hiking,Tents,Campfire,Fire,Wool Blanket,Kit,Emergency Preparedness,Spear,Hunting,Cooking,Fishing,Game Cleaning,Meat preservation,Nature,Naturalist,Trapping,Traps,Primitive Traps,Handdrill,Bowdrill

Video Transcription

afternoon I'm Dave Canterbury the Pathfinder school let's go have a discussion today a little bit about bows and archery again and I've had some questions on a couple of my discussion boards that I can answer on video pretty quick someone answer those today I also wanted to show you guys today one of the hardest things about getting into bow hunting is the cost unless you make self bows and self arrows which a lot of people do that just takes time to get the knack of it we've showed how to do that on several videos but I've got a fredbear recurve bow here that I picked up I don't know some months ago at a gun show for $50 okay and I just painted it with a textured outdoor paint I painted it solid brown then i bought a series of camouflage colored spray paints and sprayed the rest of it down camouflage now and then seal it with a clear sealer a matte finish sealer so for 50 bucks you got a good serviceable excellent buzzer lasts forever basically I mean years and years and years so now the question comes to arrows and with arrows you know being as expensive as they are to buy it's easier to make your own arrows and I'm going to show you a way that you can make very cheap arrows that are still very effective arrows out of a bow like this out of dowel rods that you can buy at any hardware store and duct tape so we're going to talk about that in just a minute stay with me I apologize for the shooting in the background my son's out here with me today my oldest son he's out practicing with this 22 caliber pistol so if you hear a few shots in the background now and then it'll be him okay so what I do to free my hands up when I'm carrying a bow like this especially Szold recurve bows is on the front of these bows there's a hole that's made to put a stabilizer on okay and they also use this hole to attach at bowfishing reel what I do is I just go by and I bolt the 5/16 I bolt from any hardware store and I cut it off till I was only about an inch of thread on there and then I bullnose it off so that will thread in and then I just screw that into the front of that bow and leave it there because you don't need you don't need that hole there unless you're going to use it for like I said for boat fishing or something like that so I just leave it sticking out right there and then I've got a piece of leather tied around mine here that I use when I'm in the woods so that after I shoot it if I let go of it when I shoot it it doesn't fall and it stays in my hand okay so I leave this I bolt attached to my bow and what I do is I just take a piece of rope and the same rope I had around my waist as the rope I'm using now doesn't have to be that rope it could be any piece of rope or it could even be paracord for that matter and what I'll do is I'll tie it in exactly the same manner that I tied it around my waist let me get my knife out from underneath it here and I just tied it exactly the way I had it tied around my waist earlier and I just threw it over my shoulder put my knife on the outside of it then I took a carabiner like the carabiner that my EDC is on and attached it to that rope just like that so it'll slide up and down now if I get tired of carrying my bow I can just hook my carabiner on to it drop it down to the side and carry it like this show you what that looks like so now my bow is down here at my side and I can walk in my hands are free if I want the bow I can just pick it back up all I have to do is unsnap it off the carabiner and I'm ready to shoot my bow again and when I'm done I can push back and keep on walking or stalking or whatever I'm doing that I need to use both hands to facilitate alright so let's talk about making a quick arrow it doesn't cost a lot of money that we can shoot from a recurve bow or a longbow can I shoot this type of an arrow through a compound bow unless you would like it shoved right through your forearm because it will split it it's not heavy enough for that you need aluminum or you need carbon for those compound boats but wood will work for any recurve bow or longbow horse bow things like that this is a 3/8 oak dowel rod you can see the label on it right there came from Menards my favorite Survival store I think it was a dollar 29 okay the first thing we need to do is we need to knock this arrow and what I mean by knock it is we need to cut a slit in it for our string on our bow so let's just take our multi-tool and I find it that saws on these multi tools are just the bomb when it comes to making notches or knocks in self arrows and we'll just take it off to the side here and all I'm going to do is see if I can Center that saw up pretty well and I'll go just slightly off-center because I'm going to cut this twice I'm going to make two cuts in here for this nock and the knock doesn't have to be real real deep but it does need to be deep enough to see it on the string well so I'll get this cut down and knocked out and I'll show you what I'm doing when I get done okay once I've cut my notch in there with my saw what I usually do is I'll take it and turn it upright and I'll just baton with one of my knife blades

I'll baton and a V to get that notch widened out a little bit and then I'll take my file on my small tie tool and I'll start to work that knotch now the one thing you want to watch out for is you don't want this thing to be too slick or too wide when it goes on the string you want to kind of lock on the string but you don't want to be so small that when you push it on the string you force the split now you can tie this off or put some duct tape around out now we'll help that situation and we'll probably do that but right now let's just get this knock file down a little bit and look at the fit that we're looking for in our string and discuss that first and I just kind of waller it in there a little bit to widen it out any edges and dome it just a little bit on the inside not much the good thing about these multi-tool blades this they're about the right depth or width so that you know when you get down to the bottom of it that's about as deep as you want to go and it just happens to work out that way but it's part of the reason I love these multi-tool so much okay let's see what we got on a poster so what we want is we push this on our bowstring we want it to go in over our serving but we don't want to have to be forcing it so bad that we're going to split the dowel so you can see what we've got is we need to go a little bit deeper with this it's just not it's not wide enough at the bottom so we're gonna have to file that out a little bit more and test it again but it's close okay now when you hear this things you can hear this if you listen real careful you can hear a pop when it goes on that's exactly what I'm looking for cuz I know what's gonna hold on there good even if I let go of it it's not gonna fall off and that's you're gonna want that when you start bowing now you can see where I've got these nock points set on my bow string and these are just brass sleeves you can buy these any archery shop but you can see that this nock is too wide compared to a commercial nock so I'm going to go ahead and shave this down a little bit so it'll fit in between that because I don't want to shoot it up here because the bow is already set shoot in between these two nock points so I'll just take a knife on my multi-tool and shave this down a little bit so that it fits in between those nock points and I'm not gonna go very much further back than the notches with my carving okay you can see I went back about a quarter of an inch from the end of that nock with this carving to make this thing narrow and I want to stay as straight as possible with that as far as the angle I want to make sure that I'm not getting off to the side of the nock I want to make sure that I'm staying straight there

so I knock stay strong and I'm just kind of pointing it and narrowing it as I go so it'll sit good now I'll round it off just a little tad right here we're I've created of square corners

we'll check it again and see what we got there we go look at that okay we've got a perfectly knocking arrow in here now now we're ready to move to the next step okay now we need to put some feathers on the shaft move this bow I'm away from it here it just camera for you guys to see what's going on now I'm gonna take the piece of this duct tape about oh four or four and a half inches long and I'm not really that concerned about exactly how long it is at this point and I want to turn my Knock sideways and I want to put this first piece of tape about halfway the diameter of the arrow just a little bit below the nock and I want to keep it even and just press it on the edge just like that

so it's hanging off there like a flag then I'm going to take another piece of tape the same lengths that are close to it as I can get it and I'm going to go on the opposite side of the arrow 180 degrees away and I'm going to do the same thing I'm going to just tack it down in the center making sure where my knocks at paying attention to make sure I've got knocked in the same place and now I've got two flaps basically on this arrow and you can see that and all I'm gonna do is wrap from the bottom and put those together if I get a little bit of a wrinkle in there I'm going to pull out apart get that wrinkle out if I can I don't want that wrinkle in there and get that as flat as possible we're going to trim this but for now that gives us basically the equivalent of one feather and now we're going to do the same thing 180 degrees from that on the other side of our nock so I'll just grab another piece the same length and I'll put it right beside the first one and overlap it just a little bit just like that so now it's a flag on the other side and then I'll do the same thing I'll grab another piece of tape and do the exact same thing again that's the same size or as close to it as I can get it to the same and I put it right on the edge just like that overlap it just a little bit and then work it down now I have two feathers on this arrow they just need to be trimmed on a flat surface with my knife to the shape I want them now I could do this with two feathers three feathers four feathers it doesn't matter if I want to I can trim these and I can come back and put another set of feathers here another set of feathers here making a four feather arrow and I'll show you how to do that after we trim these off okay so now I'm just going to lay this down on the foot on a piece of wood here and I'm going to cut this feather to the shape I want and all I'm going to do is come back here little ways and cut straight down with my knife

at an angle toward the bottom of this arrow just like that and then peel it off and now I'm going to do exactly the same thing on this side trying to keep exactly the same angle that I started with on this side and just cut it straight down at the same angle to the bottom of the arrow and pull it off just like that now I'm going to put two more feathers on here now I'm going to do this exactly the same way I did the first time with the same length piece of tape except this time I'm going to put it right against my first feather just like this on this side and seal it down and then I'm going to turn it over move that flap out of my way get another piece the same size and put a flap on this side right at the edge of that right there on that fold seal that down just like that now I'm going to come over and trim it off the same way I started about the same spot I did before and come down at an angle and cut straight down on it to the edge and peel it off and now I've got three feathers on this arrow and I've overlapped this side and now if I overlap this side I'll have a four feather arrow okay so once I've got the fourth one on there I'm going to do the same exact thing again I'm going to cut it the shape I want right down to the edge just like that pop it off and now what I have is I have a four fledged arrow right here these happen to be camouflage and I can trim this area up in here too if I want to it's not totally necessary but I could do it if I want to just make it look a little neater I could just come up here cut that corner off of that one cut the corner off of that one cut the corner off of that one in the corner off of this one and that gives me a little bit neater looking Fletch that way now I've got two fletchings here that a little bit shorter than the other two are so I think what I'm going to do is I'm going to turn that up a little bit it's not a big deal it's not that hard to do just come back and do the same thing you did before with the trimming just make it a little bit narrower these trim it off just like that not a big deal got a good sharp knife this is pretty easy and I'll cut that corner off just like that

and that gets that one evened up and this one right here it's still just a little bit wide so I'm going to cut a little bit off of it same way just like that

and then turn that corner off right there and now I've got four fletchings that are about the same size on this arrow it's like that all right let's go to the next step okay now we've got a good four feathered NACA bolero here just like that now we've got to figure out how long we want this arrow to be the easy way to do that is it measured against another arrow if you want to try to make it the same size the other arrows of your quiver and you would just match it up against one of the other ones cut it to length if you're on the fly trying to make these arrows you don't have any other arrows the best way to do this is to hold it in your hand just like this just like you were drawing your bow go ahead and cup the nock just like you would in the string and pull it back right to the corner of your mouth stick your index finger out on the arrow just like this where your index finger ends up is how long you want that arrow okay once you figure out your length get your multi-tool saw back out cut it off toss the XS for right now now we're ready to put a taper on the end of this so that we can put our point on if we've got a glue on if we're putting a point that we napped are made from bone on here we're going to split this very similar to the way we did the nock at this point I'm just going to taper this thing down for a gluon broadhead and all I'm going to do is just take my knife and taper this thing down just like I was sharpening a pencil anything like that and I just want to taper it down too and I'm gonna take my time and do it slow I'm not trying to get in a hurry I don't have to be trying to keep it as even as I can so the point will be centered when it gets on there okay so we've tapered our point now and we could put a glue on broadhead on here if we wanted to I'm going to show you something that you can get a hold of or that you might already have to make this into a small game-type arrow very easily very effectively very cheaply so stay with me for a second okay what I've got here is I've got an empty 410 shell

357 Max 44 mags are all pretty close to this diameter close not exact you've got a three-eighths inch dowel right here you can see this 410 she'll slides over it with some friction but it's a little bit loose it's not a perfect fit but it will definitely work so all I'm gonna do and it's got that heavy piece of brass on the front of it for blunt-force trauma you can take any kind of a hot-melt type glue here this happens to be an archers hot melt glue but it doesn't really have to be and I'm just gonna heat this up a much cigarette lighter

and rub some on the shaft a little ways down from the end and then once I get it on there I'll heat it back up now this heat that back up to get it nice and gooey again and then I'll slide my fork in shell right over the top of that to seat it you can see I push that glue right to the bottom and sealed that thing on there then I was heat that up again and smooth it out and I've got a small gain thumper arrow right there let's see how she works

alright guys so there's a small game arrow we made in about ten minutes and it cost us a shotgun shell was free I'm not saying you can find one free but you might be able to dial rod was probably a dollar and fifteen cents and duct tape five dollars for a role and the role is probably enough to make fifty arrows so you know you've probably got I'm going to say five probably less than less than a dollar fifty in this whole arrow compared to seven or eight bucks an arrow if you put a broad head on it that's manufactured by a company like ones a woodsman or somebody like that Tusker you're talking about adding at least $4 $5 per broadhead to be put on here and we'll talk about making some broad heads out of metal yourself later on down the line as well if we can but I think I demonstrated very good that this is a very effective hunting arrow for this recurve bow for small game and it's just as effective if you were to put some type of an arrowhead on here so for a cheap effective small game arrow this is definitely the way to go like I said the only improvement over this would be a solid brass shell I had some for tens empty laying around 44 mags will work as well as that 40 caliber worked me to be a little bit short I'd go with 44 mag or 3/8 specials depending on the arrow diameter you have those are the best so I hope you enjoyed this segment I'm Dave Canterbury with the Pathfinder school and I appreciate all your views and I appreciate your support thank you very much