Acquiring, Manufacturing, and Straightening Wood Arrow Shafts
For raw fresh wood, don't use soft woods like spruce saplings; even though they are generally straight, they are weak and light.
When selecting a raw shoot, keep in mind that there are several obvious reasons why you want shafts to be sourced from relatively straight wood; however, a less obvious reason is that every time a shaft must be straightened, micro cracks are formed (an effect exacerbated by the severity of the initial natural bends of the wood), and these cracks will ultimately weaken the dried shafts.
Heat treating wood, to fix a bend, is also made brittle; this makes a weak spot in your shaft, which will reduce service life.
Select saplings of the right diameter and ones free of many bends and sharp kinks before they're cut down. Waste is something we avoid when taking a life, and we know the waste if the tree finishes unsuitable for the shaft.
You want a strong, robust, heavy hardwood shaft with few branch knots on the shaft (like cherry, saskatoon, or ash); this will reduce the necessary diameter of your shafts—a quality you want. Knots will be areas of extreme weakness.
Select more overly mature shoots than "just right"-sized ones, which at this point are still wet, bark-covered ones that thin out when water is removed. After harvesting, delicately bend the harvested wood shoot using a shaft wrench (which is a stick, bone, or section of antler with a hole drilled through; this hole should be big enough that it can accommodate the diameter of the nock end of a finished arrow) without heat. Take care not to break the delicate fibers of the raw shoot much.
Generally, a tipped arrow can come from a younger shoot; however, always use the narrow end as your nock and the heavier end as the tip. I used to knock on the root end to save a more mature tree, but now I choose these more mature saplings for my shafts and knock on the leaf end, as you should have a front-heavy arrow; avoid practice where it is easy to lose an arrow shaft. If you don't lose these shafts, they will last a very long time, through tough hits; believe me, they aren't anything like delicate cedar shafts you buy online.
A less realized reality of front-heavy, root-end-first shafts is the ability to stay true with small sharp tips, whose weight may not be enough to maintain a front-heavy shaft otherwise. In other words, use the wood to add mass to the front and overall weight of a shaft.
Rough cut to length, then debark if you have time before the next step. Hone a good blade, and train your hand to slice away the bark. I have tried a potato peeler and moctocun but prefer the knife for debarking. Work down the wood on the fat end so the full length of the shaft is the same (or fat only in the middle) and just wider than the desired finished diameter through the length. You can save the bark for tea, bark-tanned liquor, or shavings for a fire or smoke for hide smudge.
If you don't debark the shoot before the next step, the shoots will take quite long to dry. Worry about making the shaft perfectly round when debarking and reducing with your slices; it will be less easy to round later, when dry.
After debarking AND reducing, you MUST carefully straighten the shaft by rubbing apex bends over a hard corner. Straightening (and all other work) BEFORE the shaft dries from green will make pre-fletch straightening far easier. You must use a corner here. The anter bender below only works when the shaft is dry and heat is used.
Neatly and tightly, spiral wrap the bundle of shoots with a great number of spirals. Store it like this; to do this, make one end flat, even, and tight of the bundle, and tighten this with a strong cord. Wrap the cord around your foot once to provide enough tension but slide when you need more slack. As you wrap the bundle up, lift the shafts up, or "untangle" and align them in their place in the bundle. The more bendy shafts should be on the outside of the bundle to avoid messing up the others.
It is important to always spiral wrap an unfinished arrow shaft. At all steps, particularly after debarking and during any time the wood is drying.
Ensure that the shafts are true up the length of the bundle (straight, not overlapping).
Typically, you reduce the wood to just near the desired end diameter with your knife. Later, when dry, the shafts are rounded with a rasp, then a 90-degree knife is run over the whole shaft to round it. The notch is cut into the narrow end, then the base of the groove is smoothed with a thin, round, fine file.
The diameter of the shaft will determine the arrow "spine." Too thin (or under-spined), the shaft will bend and wobble if there are any imperfections in your cast and/or the straightness of your arrow shaft. If the head is too heavy, these imperfections will be exploited to a greater or lesser degree. If the shaft is "over spined" or too thick, the previous imperfections are no longer an issue; however, the shaft will be detrimentally and unnecessarily heavy and thus lose range potential, speed, and penetration and make manipulation of multiple arrows unnecessarily challenging.
The reduction of the wood for your shaft is a focus of importance. You need to find the sweet spot based on the natural characteristics of the shoot, bow strength, and weight of the arrow tip.
A note on grooving, which is to carve three or four lines down the shaft from end to end: My current position is to not bother, as this will only make your practice arrows, which must be tough, far weaker, as it damages the wood fibers the length of the shaft; however, of the grooved arrows I do have, they do appear to be very straight—further exploration required. If you choose to try this, do it AFTER you force bend your green shoots straight and befor bundle drying.
A final surface finish step is to use your arrow wrench and run it down the shaft vigorously, multiple times; this will "burnish" the surface and give it a smooth shine. Not necessary for practice shafts.
The key to making your own effective arrows is the ability to make straight shafts.
When spiral wrapped, if they were not wrapped straight before drying, soak the shafts overnight or for a few hours, bend them a little, gently straighten them, and spiral wrap them again true. Bend the bundle straight, and let it dry in the sun, over a fire, or in the air for a few days—they will dry straight. Like leaving a shaft in the rain—a way of soaking your shafts—a resoaked shaft becomes extremely easy to bend and straighten.
To make the shafts perfectly straight, heat them from a minor heat source (oil lamps are great for this), then use a solid stationary rock with or without a groove. Apply pressure to the apex of the bent area counter to the curve, putting a gentle rub into the bend.
For the tips or as a preferred alternative to the option above, drill a shaft hole into the butt end of an antler with a very long handle. The hole must be shaped large enough for heavy shafts and angled heavily so the bending will not mar your shaft. If you take archery seriously, the application is worth the antler piece, though a stone, as mentioned above, will work too.
Getting a straight shaft is not a problem if you have a hole like that to stick it in.
Hold the bend over heat and gently bend out of the curve as the wood softens. Hold the bend straight until the wood will hold itself.
When heating, do it slowly. Apply heat two inches from the flame for half a minute or more. You want hot throughout, not scorched on the surface and cool in the core.
Heat applied responsibly in the above way should be used all the time when fixing the minor bends left from straightening. Heat not only makes bends last longer but also softens the wood so bends can safely be made without damaging the wood.
If you happen to harvest a shaft with a sharp kink, just straighten the rest and leave the kink.
Re-spiral-wrap the shafts until ready to use.
If you are making shafts in the field, the process is somewhat different. First select, cut, debark, and rough shave to begin drying immediately. Rough rasp and wrap with a rag or cord. After two days, straighten with a fire; the shaft should still be pretty wet at this point. You can cut the knot now too. I have a saw to cut a V shape, then use the side of my rasp and the thick finger choil I made in my knife to saw into the deep notch groove in the V. Wrap again until dry and finish as above.
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