When I started bowhunting back in the early 50's everyone shot cedar arrows. We didn't care about the arrow weight, just that they were spined correctly for the bow. In the late 50's when I joined an archery club and started shooting Field Archery, "some" people were shooting aluminum arrows but those were just for targets and not hunting. Later of coarse aluminums were also used for hunting. Then in the 60's we had the Micro-Flight fiberglass arrows and those were the craze for hunters, kinda like carbons are now. Again, arrow weight wasn't a factor...we just shot the size that worked for the weight bow and that was it.
The first time I remember that a heavy arrow was thought to penetrate better was in the mid 60's when some people were using the compressed cedars called Forgwoods. They were small diameter (5/16) and heavy. The only problem with them is they dropped like a stone beyond 20yds.
In the 70's the aluminum arrow was king. A few bowhunters stuck with their cedars but they were the minority.
In the mid 70's the archery world went crazy and the compound bow took over like a storm. I dropped out of organized archery when all my "Rowdy friends" hung up their recurves and got comtraptions. :rolleyes: I continued to hunt with my 60 and 70# recurves shooting 20-20's and 22-19's out of them.
I had shot a Hill longbow some back in the 60's and because of my disdain for how archery's main stream was going, I went back to a longbow and wood arrows. At the time the heaviest bow I had was a 70# recurve. Even back then in 1977 there was a 6 month wait for Howard Hill longbow. Betty Ekin told me she had an 85# Big Five in stock, I told her I'd take it and a dozen cedar arrows. That was the beginning of the rest of my life.
For many years I shot cedar arrows out of my longbows. My bow weights ranged from 70# up to over 100#. At one time I didn't own a bow under 80# and cedars arrows shot well out of all of them.
Like many others, my head was turned when the carbon arrows came out. I think it was when a friend killed a Buffalo with a 57# longbow and a 450gr carbon arrow that got me to try carbons. I shot them for several years and found that they made a good arrow for general shooting as well as hunting. Again arrow weight didn't seem to be an issue for good penetration on game.
Eventually I went back to my old tried and true cedar arrows. I'm shooting a lot lighter bows now days but the deer I shot last year didn't know that when the broadhead punched out the other side.
Topic: Interesting Letter from Howard Hill in 1959 (Read 1165 times)
