In my opinion, if you see a lot of deflection difference from shaft to shaft, or even by rotating individual shafts, you have a massive quality control issue.
About 15 years ago I got a dozen carbon shafts and couldn’t get them to tune consistently. When I finally put them on a spine tester what I found was that my dozen shafts were mislabeled. Half of them were the next spine group up. That was the last time I bought shafts from that manufacturer.
A few years later a buddy of mine bought three dozen high end carbon shafts from a manufacturer/retailer that hyped them up as the be-all end-all for traditional archery. He had huge tuning issues, so we weighed and spined each of his shafts. As I recall there was over a hundred grains of weight difference and .150 spread in deflection (about 17#). After quite a few conversations with the retailer and some persuasion from his credit card company, my friend eventually got his money back.
That being said, for the past 14 years my hunting arrows have been almost exclusively Beman ICS. Every time I get a dozen I check them for both spine and weight. I couldn’t begin to tell how many dozens I’ve bought over the years—at least ten—and I’ve never seen the amount of variation some folks have posted about here. I can pick up any two I have, no matter if I bought them last year or 14 years ago, and they will weigh and spine the same.
For target archery my daughter and I have been shooting Victory VAPs and VX23s for the past couple years. I’ve never seen any weight or spine issues with them either. As a matter of fact, they are even tighter in tolerance than my Bemans, and that’s saying a lot.
Last night, just for grins, I took two dozen Victory VX23s (my daughter’s and mine) and checked them on my spine tester, rotating them each ¼ turn at a time. Out of those 48 measurements the high and low were only separated by .015” of deflection, or less than 2# of spine. I’ll take that consistency any day.
Topic: Spine variation with carbon shafts (Read 4162 times)
