Arrow Fletching Close Up

I fletched another arrow tonight. I think it is twice as good as my first two. My brother told me to try peeling the feathers instead of splitting them with a knife. It definitely made the feathers nicer to work with and took a lot less time to prepare them. A peeled feather has little to no quill which makes it less bulky and hopefully less noisy in flight.



I've been practicing shooting in preparation for the hunt. I have some rifle targets that have 8 inch diameter black circles in the center. This is the approximate size of the vitals of a deer. I've been practicing hitting within the circle from various distances, positions and with various arrows. So far I'm best from the sitting position. I like this position because it is comfortable, stable and I think it will be easier to stay hidden.

My New Arrow

Over the weekend I fletched my first arrow. Besides a little glue, everything on the arrow is natural. The shaft is Autumn Olive. It is one of three my brother sent me from the D.C. area. It is an invasive species there that outcompetes other native plants and trees.

The feathers are from a turkey. I used elk and emu leg sinew to bind the feathers to the shaft. The dark brown substance near the middle of the picture is pitch which is mostly made of tree sap. I used it to prevent the sinew from unraveling. I burnt in rings around the shaft for style and so the whole shaft wasn't so bright. I have yet to haft a point into it. I shot it and it was pretty accurate so far.



This is the finished bark cordage that I wrote about in my earlier post. You may notice that the cordage is thicker than the picture in my earlier post. I ended up reverse wrapping it all again, which basically doubled the thickness and halved the length. This was necessary because it was too thin to be much good and I didn't do a very good job of keeping the strands of even thickness. This is now a little over 22 feet of 1/4 in rope. I'm amazed at how much I got out of the materials I gathered.