Making trade points?

[stringstretcher]

If you were going to be making a lot of trade points, which do you think would work better for the job.  A band saw with a good metal blade, an abrasive chop saw, or an angle grinder?

[Kituwa]

I dont think you will be able to cut much with a bandsaw.The angle grinder or chop saw will but dont get it too hot or it will loose a lot of temper.You wont have to cut it completly,,just part way and you can break the piece off with a hammer.I assume you are making them from a old larger circuler saw blade?In the long run the cheapest and easiest way to make them would be to buy some new untempered steel used for making knife blades.You can cut that with a bandsaw easily but it will need to be hardened and tempered afterwards.If you know a knife maker you may be able to do some sort of deal with him to harden your points for you.There are a lot of good steels you could get that would make good points and some of those would not be the real expensive ones, something like 1095 or O1 should work well.You could also score a saw blade with an angle grinder and break it into strips and have a knife maker anneal it so its soft and easy to work with.Beware of newer sawblades.Many of them will have relativly soft steel with carbide or other hardend tips and the body of the blade be not much as far as holding any kind of edge.An old crosscut saw would make some great points if you can find one.They were made of a more simple steel  so would not be too hard to work with and about right to hold an edge for a broadhead.

[Kituwa]

An old crosscut saw blade would be something like 1060 or 1095 carbon steel and you could soften or harden that with a cutting tourch and a bucket of cooking oil.

[Sharpend60]

Have someone water jet em for you.

There are local services that will do it.
Call em and see how they want the template drawn up.

Not that expensive.
They are all the same and have as many as you want cut in an afternoon.

[KHALVERSON]

i whipped these up using and old buzz saw blade and a die grinder from harbor freight  with a 3 inch cut off wheel
it takes longer to belt sand the bevels than it does to cut them out they were tempered to approx 40-45 rc to sharpen easily and still remain fairly tough
 

[stringstretcher]

Khalverson, did you use a template to mark them and how did you get the lines cut so straight?

[KHALVERSON]

i made the first one slightly over size and ground till i was close to the weight i wanted and then used it as a template to scribe around

[2treks]

Them heads Kevin makes are great. I have a bunch.
CTT

[barebow17]

Water jets work great.We had a Flowjet at the shop I worked at.If you don't know someone who works with one it's like a $150 an hour to have them done.I was lucky I had a bunch of knife blanks and points done when I was working.

[tippit]

Hammer...forge them.  Kinda like a water jet $150 an hour  

 

 

 

[stringstretcher]

It would be nice to have the money to spend to get some made, or a forge and set up to do that.  But until I hit the lottery or something, I will have to stick to the hard, cheap way to make me some.  I have a whole lot more time than I do anything else....LOL

[ti-guy]

[SEMO_HUNTER]

Charles I've been down this road myself and I made some very nice trade points out of an old crosscut saw blade. I traded for a big chunk of the blade from a member on a different site. I used a 2 blade 125gr. Magnus Stinger as my template then cut them out with a thin cut off wheel on my 4 1/2" angle grinder. Then cleaned them up on an abrasive wheel retrofitted to my bench grinder. You can actually get suprisingly straight lines with the cut off wheel. I cleaned the heads up on the abrasive wheel until I got the weight I wanted. Then sharpened the blades with a hand file, I went with a single RW bevel on the blades. I was able to get them shaving sharp with just the file. My end result was a handful of heads that only varied +/- 1gr.
If you have ever seen any of the heads that ArtB makes, mine look nearly identical. I'll see if I can get a few pics of them for ya.
Hope that info helps.

[stringstretcher]

Thanks Semo.  I have a couple of Art's heads on arrows that he has made, but have not seen an unattached head.  His are the ones that I want to duplicate, and use.  I just went and got a couple of the thin metal cutting blades for an angle grinder.  I have a concrete saw blade that I am going to cut up, and tried a hack saw blade on it and it just laughed...lol...not even a scratch.  Have to get one cut out and see if a file will work on the edges.  And yes, please post up all the pictures you can or email them to me.  I would love to see them and get some ideas.

And by the way, I have two full length cross cut saw blades just hanging in my garage.

[Matty]

Doc. Why must you tease me with those, every few months those pictures pop up.
   :mad:    :mad:

[stringstretcher]

Like you Matty, I would love to own some of Doc points, but I can not afford $150.00 an hour for one....lol

[tippit]

Matty & stringstretcher,

I'm kidding about $150 an hour.  It's just not an efficient way to make trade points.  It takes me almost as long to forge a point as it does to forge a knife especially to hit weight on a matched set of points.  That's why when I give them away or donate to St Judes, I only give One!  But I do believe the hammering does put a certain amount of mojo them though    

[stringstretcher]

I totaly understand Tippit.  And such a wonderful jesture.  For sure it would take more than the $150.00 to get started in forgeing just for an anvil...lol.  But I can still admire you work from afar.  Awesome, just awesome.

[SEMO_HUNTER]

I found my pictures of the crosscut saw blade trade points, but sadly I cannot locate the actual points I made. I recentely moved and I know they are here hiding in a box somewhere.    

I left a tab at the bottom of the head and actually used that tab to fine tune the weight of each one. If I remember correctly I made mine around 170gr. not sure on that till I can locate one and weigh it on my grain scale, but it's fairly easy to achieve near perfect matched weights this way.

 

 

 

 

[stringstretcher]

Thanks Chris.  Those look just great.