I am getting ready to fletch my first arrows. I have a few junkers I can practice on first.

I have RW feathers. I have straight and helical clamps. There are no markings on my JoJan for left/right alignment.

I have to 'eyeball' my offset? I can try to emulate the angle of some of my old arrows by looking at the glue lines on a bare shaft.

I am wondering if it is easier to start with straight offset or to set the front and back up straight and do helical.

I am doing a lot of dry fit practice. Not in a massive hurry to glue, but I have a dozen arrows coming in the mail. And I plan to fletch up ONE and make sure it flies.

And I don't want to get into a bunch of FPS experimentation...I want to find a setting that is the most consistent,

You need to know if you have RW clamps, if not you need LW feathers. Most but not all Jo-Jans I have seen with helical clamps have been left. If you need a LW clamp or two PM me. I may have a spare or two. Shawn

Helical will hide minor imperfections from release and spine issues and be a little more consistent in flight. Personally I like a slight amount of offset with straight clamp. I see every thing I do wrong right away and can fix the problem. When all is right, they fly great.

Are you saying you don't know if the helical clamp is left or right? If so put your rt wing feather in it. If the curve in the clamp follows the curve in the feather you have a rt helical clamp. If the feather bends the other way and tries to jump out of the clamp, it's left helical. MP

I have five RW Helicals but only 1 LW helical. I've been wanting to try RW anyway so I bought RW fletchings.

The straight clamps don't matter right?

You can use straight with either.

Its easier to fletch using straight clamps with an offset, you can place an arrow that you are using or the glue lines to get you where you want to be! same with the helical clamps, just more adjustments!!

The jo Jan needs to be set up for for your project AND readjusted any time you change Fletch length and/or shaft diameter.

Put a feather in a clamp exactly as you would to glue one up. Be sure to mark the clamp to the exact point you want the back end of the fletch to match to and later you will mark all the clamps to match.

Put a bare shaft in the fletcher as though you are going to Fletch it. You will, of course, need a nock on the shaft. Place the clamp in the jig and look down on it from directly above. The helical clamp is made so that it sorta follows the curved surface of the shaft. Align the adjustments both front and rear so the front tip of the feather and the rear tip of the feather wrap about equally around the sides of the shaft. IOW. the end to end center of the feather will be crossing the shaft at the center of the shaft as viewed from side to side.

It's actually easier to do with no feather in the clamp as long as you clearly mark the clamp where the front and back of the fletch will be in the clamp.

Kind of a muddled explanation. Hope it helps.

Straight clamps offset worked for me with RW feathers in the past for aluminums. Have an old JoJan or Multifletcher as we called them from years ago in storage with straight clamps and a new RW JoJan multifletcher plus a single RW JoJan. Tough long lasting fletchers. I use a magic marker to mark my set ups among arrow types. Right now, using the single for traveling as it fits in my tackle box.

I'm still working it out myself… I did find that I'm better off ignoring the right and left offset marks and eyeballing the fit of the clamp to the shaft. You can place the clamp and then open it just a bit to see how it looks from the feather's POV.

From there, I've used a marker to see how much offset that gives me, and if it looks about right, I'm pretty happy with it. I suppose a real stickler but point out that that could possibly leave me with slightly different offsets at each station, but for the time being I am more concerned about making sure that the feathers stay put.

And when I get good enough that having imperfectly matched offsets on my fletchings begins to affect my group size, I'll be happy to discuss it with you at the national championship....

LOL

All making sense. I'm going to try one. The videos I found didn't cover the setup but messing with it and now it makes sense

This may help you or not but the first picture is an old, old fiberglass arrow from the 60s with straight LW offset clamp on a JoJan.

The second picture is a helical LW clamp on the same JoJan. You can see the offset in both.

I made my first arrow with not enough offset. It looks like you've got more offset with the clamp because it is so much longer than the fletching. It shoots fine but that arrow also bareshafts fine too

Good luck for You guys using the JO-JANS (multi-fletcher or single) The feather clamps on the Multi-fletcher would NEVER set correctly for me and since I's dumb , I couldn't ever figure out the single fletcher. Gave BOTH away to different people! ROTTSA RUCK! JUST SAYING! Batman

Really like mine and had no problems with setting them up. Think GF said it best by using some good "eyeballing" along with some marking.

The 'secret' to mine is in checking the set of the nock after rotating the arrow. Some one mentioned this to me on another thread and it HELPED.

Number your clamps #1 - #6 and when going to your 2nd and 3rd round of feathers, always use the the clamps in the same position to eliminate variance.

"It looks like you've got more offset with the clamp because it is so much longer than the fletching."

That's why I suggested aligning the clamp with a feather in it or with marks on the clamp for both ends of the feather. :-)

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