wow, I dont know as how ive thought about using cheap dowels, but for sure I wont think about it now. There are better hardwood dowels thought.....ok nope

It would be extraordinarily easy to carefully select a dowel that wouldn’t make his point anywhere near so clearly, but it does at least show that you do need to know what you’re doing!

You'd be amazed how good a set of arrows you can make from carefully selected dowels.

I started doing it years ago after reading a Monty Stark article.

I did back when Ramin was available at the home store. A few years ago I got the urge agian, the dowels were from China, some real soft wood. Back to the Ramin, tough stuff to straighten but even tougher to break. Most shafts spined out around 100#’s perfect for my 80# Widow. Yes, I used to get strange looks when I would be going through the box sighting down each dowel.

I did back when Ramin was available at the home store. A few years ago I got the urge agian, the dowels were from China, some real soft wood. Back to the Ramin, tough stuff to straighten but even tougher to break. Most shafts spined out around 100#’s perfect for my 80# Widow. Yes, I used to get strange looks when I would be going through the box sighting down each dowel.

What is Ramin?

Ramin is a very heavy and dense tropical wood. It is no longer available for import into the U.S.

It has nearly indistinguishable grain patterns.

Only if you make your own dowels and spine them. >>>>-----> Ken

I have built many arrows from dowels. I use the 36", "Poplar" dowels that say Made in America. I check each one for run off and stiffness, even to the point of bringing a home made spine tester and scale with me. These will weigh around 600-700 grains. I get alot of strange looks. Ive never had the problem of an arrow breaking upon release.

Ramin hands down for me. I haven't been able to find it for 15 years at least. It would only take going thru a good 300 shafts (ramin wood dowels) to find a suitable 20 or so. After which they would get spined and weighted to find a good 8 match shafts. Of those 3 or so were nearly impossible to get straight . Down to 5 give or take. Taper the last 1/3 of the shafts , sand them , stain , crest, seal... and voila ! 5 beautiful fine arrows! Test flight, and , oops! there is that one that flies all over the place, and this other one that's fine for as long as I draw just about 3/4" shorter. And then... 3 perfect arrows that fly exactly to the mark every time !!! Now those ones are pretty much indestructible, except for that one that skipped off the back of that 3D target and couldn't find after 2 hours looking for it. After winning two 3D tournaments with ONE of those arrows, I saved them for that special hunt ...... after 20+ years I still have them in my stash but I'm too afraid to take them out in the field. Cheap ? well ,... lets just say that they are beautiful!

Terrible selectively biased video designed to try to sell you their arrow shafts.

Pick your own dowels and sand them properly. Same end product.

I made a dozen or so poplar arrows using carefully selected 3/8" dowels from Lowe's. All were at least 90# spine starting out, I barrel tapered them and brought the spines down to 55-60 with sandpaper, very labor intensive.

I ended up with some really great matched arrows in the 600 gr range but it wasn't something I wanted to do on a regular basis. I would have an hour or so of sanding in each arrow, too much work, of course I stained the crown, crested then and fletched them with wild turkey feathers.

I still have one or two of these left at least ten years after I made them, the remnants are still great flying arrows.

My stumpers are 5/16 oak dowels from Lowes. I hand spine and pick the straightest ones in the store. If they don't break through the straightening process they are good to go. Heavy and extremely tough. Good enough for stumps.

I hand planed my white pine shafts from board stock. See "pine shaft hints". http://traditionalarchery101.com Jawge

Birch dowels were the choice for hunting arrows in Pope's opinion. Fewer options in those days.

My router setup easily spins out a shaft from any wood in much less time than it would take to pick one out of a rack in a hardware store.

Just occurred to me, has anyone ever seen a wooden shaft made to look like carbon or aluminum? 8-) Didn't think so!

I have made hundreds of arrows from 5/16 poplar dowels from Lowes. Usually 9-10 out of a dozen fly good, with the culls I make flu flu's with them. The 1/4" dowels make good kid's arrows.

James

It can be done, as has been talked about here for a long time. You just have to know what you are doing and select the right quality product. I think the video was talking more about just going to Home Depot and grabbing a handful of dowels and making arrows from them. Not good. Arrow shafts are nothing more than dowel rods, just well made to certain dimensions from select trees and correctly sorted. I don't have the time to invest in dowels so I buy them from arrow shaft makers.

From my experience (as a hobbyist shaft maker)

If I mill 250 shafts,

throw out 50 for grain issues throw out 20 that are too hard to straighten

I spine them into 6 lb groups 50 -55 etc. etc which yields approximately 2 dozen arrows per weight grouping, then I weigh them and put them in order of mass. Trying for a 10 grain difference in groups, I am lucky to get a half dozen that fit into a 10 grain grouping.

So here you are 250 shafts into production and you are lucky to yield a half dozen well matched shafts in any spine group.

so 500 milled shafts to get a well matched dozen in any category.

Yeah I am not hanging out in Lowes or Home Depot spining and weighing 500 shafts to find the 12 I want.

oz

For aKLUTZ like me, easier to buy the shafts from some of the reputable shaft dealers that I know about!

It's a very simple matter to sand the center of the dowel/shaft to match spine and taper one or both ends to match weight. And it doesn't take long when the shaft is chucked in a drill.

My experience indicates that for the majority of purposes the shooting of different diameter arrows ranging from 5/16" to 23/64" makes little or no difference in achievable accuracy.

fdp,

don't you find that sanding to spine and dealing with different diameters brings on it's own set of issues, that absorb about as much time as sorting them to find what you want to begin with.

if diameters are different, points do not fit the same, nocs do not fit the same, fletching jigs need adjusted to get similar wing rotations. not to mention Cresting them.

It would take lots of equipment and patience and parts to get a set of arrows out of shafts that have been sanded to random diameters to achieve spine.

"I think" hehe. Thanks for the dialogue

oz

No not really.

I have the 3 most popular sizes of points and nocks in the weight and colors I prefer.

I don't seem to have the nock/string fit issues that many do.

My fetching jig doesn't require any readjustment to fletch the different sizes.

And I'm probably not a good enough shot to blame a miss on the difference in diameter between 5/16 and 23/64.

But ultimately it's just all about what you want to do.

Oops! :)

I dowel quite a few arrows with a Veritas rig and do pretty well on matching weight and spine. Runout is not a problem if the board is straight grained. I pick boards for arrows almost as carefully as picking for a self bow.

All the arrows in the picture came from the same pine board. They are made purely for stumping and close up small game. I used a lot of odd leftover full feathers and experimented with some homemade feather templates. The weights of these fell into a range as close as some of the "hunter" grade Rose City shafts I've had.

They suit their purpose just fine. If I spined them they would probably be all over the place but they don't have to shoot tens at 30 yards. They are ten yards and less arrows.

My big game arrows are made from premium Wapiti shafts.

What is Ramin?

Your shootin noodles.

I don't like them they are soft ones I used the dowels. I Shot them into excelsior bales and they bent.

Ramin is by no means soft Ryman.

I made a router shaft machine years ago, I didn't have access to any good wood but doug fir from Lowes, I found some amazing boards. Out of a $6 board would get 13 shafts, of these maybe two or three would match, the rest of the spines and weights would be all over the place.

I retired my shaft machine for this reason.

I never spine or weigh arrows. I buy perfect dowels and make arrows and then shoot them from any of a number of bows I have and match them up.

If I buy 30 dowels, I get 30 arrows.

I have made them.They were heavy for sure.Required some good straightning.Not grain matched or spine matched.But they work.

I pick spruce boards very carefully. The last 1x10 I bought had two match-sized knots total. I use a router setup and find my shafts match very close in spine and almost identical in weight.

All my flu-flus are made from dowel rods...

@Craig -

Seriously??

I have seen a lot of crappy-looking dowel rods, but I have NEVER seen one with the grain running at an angle like that where the growth rings cross the full width of the dowel over the course of just a few inches, nor do I recall ever seeing one with multiple knots in the wood.

Never seen dowels sold in 7’-8’ lengths, either.

JMO, you can spend your time sorting through a barrel full of dowels, made from you’re-not-entirely-certain what, looking for a dozen that appear to be suitable for making a satisfactory set of arrows, or you can spend your money on a dozen shafts made of wood selected expressly because it is a species that makes a fine arrow, and which have been graded, sorted and matched from among many thousands of shafts by someone who knows enough about shafting to be able to make a living selling the stuff.

And FWIW, I think the Howard Hill method of sorting arrows by where they land on a target sounds like a whole lot more fun (and a hell of a lot cheaper!) than buying a spine tester and a grain scale and spending a lot of time tediously sorting by spine and weight. Of course, his method only works to the extent that you can trust your own shooting.....

Things related to archery are so often portrayed as being way more complicated than they are.

Still, selecting your own is like looking for a perfect tree or board to make a bow.

You could also just pay someone to do that too. Heck, you might as well have them make it too.

It all depends on how self sufficient you want to be.

If we all just had experts do everything for us we wouldn't do a thing.

Like I said above I hand lane my own shafts. I just enjoy it. Relaxing. While dealing with a router is not to me. I do have 2 routers. LOL>

If you check the link I provided you'll see that they are barrel chested shafts.

In other words, spine can be controlled by sanding the middle while weight can be controlled by sand the ends.

Jawge

Long time ago, I bought some 3/8” dowels and spined them. Here’s what I came up with:

Well, I was curious, too, so I ordered 50 3/8" birch dowels from American Woodcrafters. They are all straight, 36" long, and look like they would make decent arrows. Some grain runout, and a few knots here and there, but for the most part they appear to be serviceable. Out of the 50, here's how they spined out: 68-1 70-1 73-2 75-3 76-2 79-1 81-1 84-1 87-7 90-2 93-4 96-7 98-1 100-5 104-8 108-3 130-1

As far as the 15/16” dowels, most of them spine in the mid 40s.

If you decide to try making your own from dowels, remember these are dowels, not arrow shafts, and keep your wits about you. Good shooting!

Never a problem here with 5/16 poplar dowels from Lowe's. I hand select based on straightness first, then cull that pile based on grain and being knot free. I might get 6-8 dowels out of 100. If you're picky, and know what to look for, you can do well with hardware store dowels. Takes me less than ten minutes to sort through a hundred or so. I use them for stumping with my lighter weight bows.

Yes, the video is slanted based on the maker's opinion.

Jay Massey made his own arrows from raw stock and he was a dowel guy too.

Poplar makes a good shaft

Hey, JMO....

If this time that you spend turning dowel rods into good arrows is something you enjoy, then you should be willing to pay extra for the privilege. If you just want good, cheap arrows, you are better off buying used aluminum, right?

I know that Bud does a really nice job of turning 1/4” dowels into good arrows for kids, because my younger son shot them for a couple of years and we have passed the survivors along to his cousins.

So call me a Middle Grounder on this one: I am not going to lay odds, but it certainly appeared to me that the guy in the video might well have gone out of his way to find a particularly awful example of a dowel rod to compare to a Proper Shaft. And sometimes, it IS permissible to exaggerate a bit in order to make a point, especially when it pertains to safety.

I don’t imagine for one second that his video was intended to address people who know what they’re doing and are willing to put in the time and effort to get it right. I think he was just putting out a warning that it’s not worth a buck or two per shaft to dive right in willy-nilly and make arrows out of something that could end up sticking out of the back of your bow-hand.

Fair enough.

I made quarter inch dowel arrows, and used multi colored duct tape for fletching for my grand kids to make arrows when they were smaller. cheap,and functional.

The thing about actual Tropical hardwoods is that at the equator, there is no winter, so there are not growth rings. There can be figure which is pores or designs in the wood. The result is you can have a piece of wood that look great but the grain runs out in the dowel in 2 inches. In Fir etc... you would easily be able to spot the grain run out. That is why I never use tropical dowels, and I don't use tropical wood for structure when I can avoid it. There is no aircraft certification for tropical wood, it is basically only Sitka spruce that is reliable enough. And arrows are far more highly graded than aircraft wood, so if they won't use it... Aircraft wood is 1-20 I don't want light arrows (like if you had elm arrows it would be different) worse than 1-100. Often with POC you could get dead straight and perfect wood.

I have a few really nice ones I made from 1/4 inch & 3/8 inch oak dowels. They are strong & look really nice but finding one dozen dowels that are straight, have good grain and are closely spined is really difficult. Also the price of oak dowels where I can buy them (Home Depot) is not much cheaper than good grade cedar shafts we can buy online.

In the 80's Dinks feathers in W.Virginia used to sell ramin arrow shafts. They're so dense all it took was 5/16 shafts for most any weight.

Tropical wood still tends to have rather visible rings. You just have to look.

Ramin growth is pretty easy to see if you know what to look for. It's also not that dense. Surprised that's being mentioned so much. I do wish it was still available.

fdp - "Things related to archery are so often portrayed as being way more complicated than they are"

Now that is classic, and so true... Am gonna use it at times if you don't mind...

Feel free to use as you see appropriate Zbone. :)

I use the 4' dowels for Atlatl darts.

So do I Jon. They work quite well.

FWIW, current price at American Woodcrafters Supply for 100 5/16” birch dowels is $35.75.. may be worth it for a few culls.

There are sources for dowels that provide better products at a more reasonable price than American Woodvrafters.

Ok, so spill already!

LOL

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