Single feather fletching
Posted: Wed Aug 17, 2016 7:10 am
Ok, my 12 year old and I love the single feather fletching tip on page 10... more info please.
You can use anywhere between one and three to achieve essentially the same result...the trick is, the fewer feathers you have, the closer the spirals really ought to be. If you do a very shallow helical with only one feather, it'll fishtail a great deal. Thus, with only one flight/primary feather, you'll use the WHOLE thing, not just a small piece cut out like we normally do, and wind it around enough times to have wind resistance evenly distributed around the shaft.
If you have two, put them across the shaft from one another, and they can be wound in less tight of a spiral. Same moving on to three. The more feathers you have, the shorter the length of each used can be, and the closer it can be to normal fletching practices.
They won't hold up forever...make them at home, with glue, and you'll have more permanent results. As it stands, I can make a glue-less arrow in the field with one feather, and be dangerous enough to shoot a squirrel or sitting bird, and get maybe a dozen shots out of it before it *might* start to come apart. Depends on how thin you scrape the quill, and how well you lash down your ends, with what material. Play around with it!