Good find in my own basement. 85+ POC shafts.

[Tedd]

I found some premium 85+ spine POC shafts in the basement this morning! I think they could have been there since 99 or somewhere around there. At least 15 years being conservative. I must have put them aside because they are parallel, using tapered shafts instead at the time and then forgot about them. It's always hit or miss trying to find POC in that spine.
 These are all marked 86 thru 89, matched weights. Every shaft is perfect! The basement has a dehumidifier set at 35% and works well so the shafts are in great shape. Lucky find. I have no idea why they went un-tortured (by my shooting skills) for so long but I am going to take care of them now when I turn them into arrows.
  My bows are all around 60lb@30" which makes it hard to consistently find wood shafts. I use carbon for many reasons, hard to find high spine wood is one of them.
I guess these would have come from Rouge River?
 I'll make some up as parallel. But might try to rear taper some. I have seen on Tradgang ways to taper the back. What works best? How much spine do you loose?
 I feel like I need lower draw weight bow so I can get back to shooting some wood shafts occasionally.
Tedd

 

[Homey88]

Great find!

[Sam McMichael]

What a neat discovery! I see you have your chief arrow inspector checking out the quality of those shafts. Be sure to show us pics of the completed arrows.

[Alexander Traditional]

That is a good find! I love it when I'm cleaning up,and find something neat that I've forgotten about.

[M60gunner]

Back in the 90’s I would have loved to have those. My BW loved heavy spine woods. You have a good find there. As for tapering you shouldn’t loss much spine unless you start tapering in middle of shaft. I use a taper jig that makes a 10” taper, I might lose a couple pounds of spine at most. I check mine after I taper.

[Pine]

  Like gold   

[Tedd]

M60, I know what you mean! My bows loved them too. I also recently recalled some great tapered ash arrows I had then too. I would lose them all at an alarming rate. Hunting ground hogs would really use them up.
 I think I'll try the plane method to taper them. Somewhere on here is a tutorial on how to taper with a sharp hand plane.
Tedd

[Fletcher]

Wow, that is a great find, they look really nice.  Spine loss to a taper depends on the original shaft spine and whether 11/32 or 23/64.  I do a 10 inch taper and a 11/32 60 lb spine shaft will lose 2-3 lb.  With your higher spine shafts you can plan on 3 lb, maybe 4 if a 23/64 shaft.  I taper with a belt sander.  You can also use a 12" or larger disk sander or use a block plane.  The plane is slower, but can do a good taper.

[Tedd]

Thanks Fletcher. Thats what I needed to know. I just sharpened my little plane and did a sample taper on cull shaft by making progressive passes at 3-6 and 9 inches. It came out great. I'll take care and go slow on the good ones. (They seem so fat at the back the way they are now, but they would probably fly just fine.)
Tedd

[fujimo]

Hi Tedd, awesome find 
 i did some taper measuring a while back, and as fletcher indicates- there are some rough guidelines that will get you pretty close- my findings are very similar to his.
i find doing an 8" back taper wont lose much spine, and i find for every inch over 8" you lose approx 1# of spine.
like Fletcher said, this depends a lot on the starting shaft- but that should get you close.
I find on sitka spruce shafts, 11/32 to 5/16 over 8 or 9" will lose about 10 gr in mass
The poc is a bit heavier- so results may be a wee bit different, but maybe not too much.
there was a very good write up about why tapered shafts work so well, and how they improve performance significantly (especially a much  quicker recovery from "paradox"), and its not just the inadvertent improvement in Foc, but the tapering has an even greater effect on the harmonics of a shaft, and plays the bigger role by far, anyway i will see if i can find the write up.

[Raminshooter]

Tedd,  instead of tapering:  a long time ago a well known bowyer (passed) discovered that reducing the nock end of the shaft wasn't what made the shafts fly better.....rather it was the simple reduction in weight from the back end of the shaft.  This bowyer found that by simply drilling a hole in the back end of the shaft did the same thing as it reduced the wt of the shaft back there.  3 rivers used to sell a jig that you could slip over the shaft and then use certain sized drill bits to drill a hole accurately in the center of the shaft.  This may be worth checking out.