This collecting tale gets BETTER…although it may be something that only long-time collectors who have been engaged in the activity of gathering old archery stuff for 20 or 30 years will be able to fully understand.
Special Note – Because the maximum number of photos per post is eight, I’ll finish this complete post in three parts.
This all began when Wade Phillips recently posted a photo of an unusual grooved self-nock arrow. Something about the photo kicked loose an old memory in the back of my head, and I began digging through dusty arrow boxes and looking closer at arrows in bowquivers affixed to display bows around our home.
What I initially discovered were three old arrows with very similar grooved self nocks, and I posted photos of those arrows on Wade’s thread. Strictly as an afterthought, I also included a hastily-shot photo of the broadheads on those three arrows. And almost instantly I began to get private messages from broadhead collectors fascinated by and interested in those broadheads. What were they? Could two of them be among the very earliest of Zwickey’s, dating all the way back to the late 1930s?
More information and better photos of those broadheads were requested by many.
And that’s when things got even MORE INTERESTING.
I set about to better photograph the heads in question, and weigh and measure them for all concerned. But that old memory kept nagging me. Something was missing.
I returned to the dusty boxes and bows, and in due course discovered FOUR MORE arrows from the same set!
I told you that only a long-time collector with a lot of “stuff” could truly appreciate re-finding something amidst the clutter of things already gathered.
One of the newly RE-discovered arrows had no point. But the three others were glaringly equipped with what appears to be early Zwickey Barbed broadheads. You’ll recall that all of the arrows had the name of the owner or manufacturer (Walter N. Molzen of Newton, Kansas) ink-stamped on the shaft. It would appear that Mr. Molzen may have been quite an experimenter, trying a variety of then state-of-the-art broadheads on this particular set of arrows.
Here are four of the arrows from the set, with four different broadheads, all attached with some sort of black goop that apparently passed for glue in the late 1930s or early 1940s.
Wade has already tentatively identified the broadhead on the left as a 1942 Ben Pearson 6x6.
The second head from the left appears to be a Barbed Zwickey. I’m not sure on the date. One of the barbed heads was loose and I removed it from its shaft and weighed it - 114 grains on my digital grain scale. That big head measures 2-7/16 from the end of the ferrule to the head’s tip. The barbs extend another ¼ inches back beyond the ferrule. I measured its maximum cutting width at 1-1/8 inches.
Here’s a 360-degree photo tour of that broadhead:
Topic: Can Anyone ID These Broadheads? (Read 1243 times)
