those are beautiful shafts!, kudos on all the work!!
i have read of excellent results with the poplar, many folk love using it with excellent results. I know PatB uses it a lot- and he may know a thing or two
arrow wood is a bit like bow wood, sometimes the best one to use, is the one you have.
one of the very positive things with poplar and birch and some of the other hardwoods, is their sustainability. a lot of relatively new wood can be used, unlike woods lik POC, where its old growth wood that needs to be harvested.
shaft making was a significant contributor to the decline in POC trees, which were extremely limited in number to begin with. The POC tree only grows in two places in the world.
its now regulated, and cannot be cut on govt land i believe, so any POC that gets harvested is from private woodlots or private land.
Additionally, they are forced to use wood today that a short time ago was considered cull wood.
i too am not that impressed with POC, i mean, its an excellent arrow wood, but there are certainly better options out there. imho!!
i also used to use one of those veritas dowellers, and they worked extremely well, but there seemed to be two key factors with them.
1. as mentioned above- blades need to be kept super sharp.
2. the shaft needs to be very well stabilized on the infeed and outfeed sides, any whip in the shaft will cause tear out.
i ran doug fir through mine with no problem- but i would keep the feed rate really slow, and the rotation speed as high as possible- i even bought a special drill- that was very high speed, specifically for the job.
in my experience, one must consider all the factors when making shafts- and the wood data base is an excellent source for a lot of the info.
However, the one aspect they dont report on is the "length of fibre" some woods just have longer fibers than others- the longer the fiber the more resilient the wood is.
the other factor is a little less well know, but all woods have a "microfiber" that runs perpendicular to the grain of the wood- its these little fibers that bind the longitudinal fibers together and help prevent the wood from splitting.
The key here, is that some woods have a higher percentage of these connective fibers than other woods.
Just like with bows, we do a bend test to ascertain how well it will perform as a bow wood, with shafts a split test reveals a lot.
1. how well the wood splits
2 how easily it splits.
if its splits well with little deviation and runout, and one can pull strings of wood off the face of the split- will help indicate the length of fiber.
if it splits super easy, that indicates that it has less of the connective fibers, if good, clean straight wood is tough to split, that will mean there is more of the connective fibers.
now of course, these tests are not very scientific and are rather subjective, as results will vary from tree to tree. However, if one does enough of the tests some common results will begin to present themselves.
my personal favourite "softwood" arrow wood, is Sitka spruce, not the cheaper German spruce mind you!!
Sika is light in mass, ( yes, softer in Janka hardness) has an incredibly high amount of the interconnective fibers, with a very long grain.
there is good reason why its considered the strongest wood for its weight in the world, and was used extensively in airplane frames, and for masts and spars on sailing vessels.
not comparing to hardwoods, but i have found it to be the most resilient of all the softwoods.
but this is just my opinion, of course
Topic: Arrow shaft production day (Read 6979 times)
