The Art of Arrow Making - Fletching (Chapter 5)

Welcome back everyone to the Organic Archery YouTube channel. Today's video is part five in the six-part Art of Arrow Making series and today I'm going to show you several different ways to fletch primitive arrows by hand. I'll cover the simple two-fletch, the classic three-fletch, and the eastern woodlands two-fletch. No matter which style you go with it's really your personal aesthetic preference and at the end of the day fletching serves one purpose and that's to create drag on the end of the arrow to steer it and it all boils down to surface area. So it doesn't really matter if you have a two-fletch or an eight-fletch arrow so long as you have approximately the same surface area and there's no real scientific formula for that. Just enough feather to create enough drag to steer the arrow. It doesn't really matter. Of course there are some power tools that could speed up certain parts of this process but as always with power tools you increase your risk of wasting material. For example I've ground a lot of feathers over the years on a belt sander but it takes material away so quickly that you can waste some feathers. So I've come to prefer the by hand method because it gives you much greater control over the process and it really doesn't take that much longer. So here are some great examples of different fletching styles and what I mean by increasing or decreasing the surface area. All right I've got a bunch of different arrows here to show what I mean by the total surface area affecting the number and the shape of the feathers. So this first one here is an authentic Hadza arrow and it is fletched with eight guinea fowl feathers and since it's an eight fletch they're very short in both length and height. So they're probably only about two inches long and a quarter of an inch high. The next one is another authentic Hadza arrow and this one is fletched with five guinea fowl feathers in the tangential style and all that means is the entire feather is used. As you can see when the number of feathers decreases the length needs to increase so these ones are about four inches long and half an inch tall or so. Moving on to an arrow that is more akin to the standard three fletch although this one is done in the plains indian style so it's very short and long which is how it was traditionally done and they made them extra long because of how short they were typically trimmed. So these are about five and a half inches long and a quarter of an inch tall. This is one of my personal favorite hunting styles and it's just the simple two fletch with a 90 degree helix and I've taken more big game animals with the simple two fletch than any other style. In fact this is my old hunting set from last fall and this one here still hasn't been cleaned up from taking a nice doe right at the end of the season. So it is very easy to make. It requires less feathers and it has no no fletching here to run across the shelf of the bow when you draw back so you don't get this noise when you draw which gets you busted every time because there's nothing that sounds like a turkey feather passing over wood in nature. But you can see I'm following the surface area mantra and when I'm using a two fletch I make them about six to six and a half inches long and a little bit over a half an inch tall. The next example is more of a standard three fletch with a shield cut although these are cut quite a bit larger than they need to be because these are my shop arrows and I need them to fly fairly well out of a variety of different bows. So the best way to mitigate flight issues that are associated with improperly spined arrows is just to increase the surface area of the fletching. So this gives it the ability to steer itself into a good flight path even when the arrow is not perfectly matched to the bow. So these are probably 30 percent larger than they need to be but it gives me the ability to test many different bows of many different draw weights and get good arrow flight. The last example here is the simple tangential two fletch. It's just as straightforward as it looks. Two whole feathers attached to an arrow with binding on both ends. No glue. There's a little bit of prep work that goes into the front here to make a smooth transition over your hand but otherwise just put some feathers on an arrow. Here are the tools you'll need for this tutorial. We've got a set of shears for trimming the feathers. A razor knife for splitting them. A jig that's just two pieces of wood on a hinge for holding the feathers for grinding. A block of wood with a little 80 grit sandpaper on it for grinding the feathers. Pencil of course for marking. Some artificial sinew for binding. And a little jig here that's just a piece of wood with different measurements on it. And it makes things go a little quicker. These two marks up here are just for the distance of the fletching from the nock and the remainder of the marks measure the total fletching length. Of course you'll need some arrow shafts. These are all the arrows from the other chapters in the series. We have the dowels, the hand plane shafts, the river cane, and the wild shoots. Lastly, you'll need your feathers. These are turkey secondaries and turkey tail feathers. I like to organize all my feathers in these ziploc bags to keep them separated in right and left wing containers. If you don't already know this, you want to make sure you fletch your arrows with all left wing or all right wing feathers. And I'm omitting anything that has damage. So those get set aside. But I'm basically just looking for two clean ones that are from approximately the same area on the bird that look kind of closely matched. And we'll start with the easy two fletch with a 90 degree helix. So we only need two. If you look at these feathers, they've got a curve to the left and there are veins on the inside of the curve and on the outside of the curve. So I'm just going to strip away the veins on the outside of the curve. Next, I'm going to trim them to length with my jig here. This dark sharpie line is where the feather trimming measurements start. And you can see I have marks for four, five, six, and seven inch fletches. But an important note is each of these measurements is actually three quarters of an inch bigger than it needs to be. So you can see that the five inch mark is actually at five and three quarter. The six inch is at six and three quarter and so forth. That's because we're going to leave a little extra on either side of the feather that we cut away for binding the arrow to the shaft. I'm going to start my trim where the quill has some mass and not out here in this really thin area. Set it up against my six inch mark. Now we need to split the quill to prepare it for grinding. And I use a razor knife because it's really thin and it gives great control. And I prefer to start from the small side. You can see a line that runs right down the center of the quill. If you can get your knife to find that groove it'll just split beautifully. Obviously if you don't feel comfortable cutting towards yourself, don't do it. I'm not going to say I haven't cut myself before. But hey, put a bandaid on it and carry on. Now I like to examine them to see if there's any extra material that needs to be trimmed off. It's pretty thick in this area so I'm just going to take a minute to whittle this down. You could grind through this extra material but anything that you can get with the knife is going to make grinding a lot easier. Next comes the handy little arrow grasping jig. Just do a little bit of grinding. Get everything evened out. I'm really squeezing this clamp hard so that the feather doesn't get wrinkled or damaged. That one's done. One quick thing to add when you're grinding these feathers is you do not want to breathe in a bunch of this feather dust. Bone dust and feather dust is quite toxic. And that's another reason I like to use the hand method instead of power tools because power tools just dust the entire shop up full of feather dust and I have to wear a respirator. But when you're doing it by hand, as long as you don't go crazy, the dust just kind of falls onto the table and you don't have to worry too much about breathing it in. So you can see with a little bit of time spent on the knife making sure everything's nice and thin and cleaned up, it takes no time at all to grind those. Now we need to take a little tab off the front and the back to help lash the feather to the arrow. I like to go for about three-eighths of an inch. I should just be able to strip the front, trim the back. That's the reason you make your your jig three-quarters of an inch longer because now that I've taken three-eighths off this end and three-eighths off that that end, it's three-quarters of an inch shorter and now I have a perfect six-inch fletch. Don't worry about making these you know super precise because once you get them on the arrow you can fine-tune them. All right I've got my jig back out. These two marks right here for the knock end, I put the end of the arrow right here. This one is three-quarters of an inch from the end and this one is one and a quarter inch from the end. The three-quarter mark is for plane style arrows because the planes, Native Americans, tended to fletch really close to the knock. The one and a quarter mark is for more of a standard fletch that gives you plenty of room to get your fingers in between the feathers and the bowstring. So I'm going to mark these on the flat side of the knock for a two fletch. All right time to attach these feathers. I like just a thick basic super glue. There are many different fletching glues out there but I don't like extended dry times and I've never had any issue at all with super glue so that's what I go with. So I'm going to put a little bit just on the tab on the back end of the feather. Now I'm using that mark as a reference point for where the veins actually start and I'm lining it up with the center of the flat portion of the knock. Just hold it for a couple of seconds. You don't have to worry about those special fletching glues that take like half an hour to put a single feather on and nobody got time for that. Next I'm going to take a piece of artificial sinew and one of the biggest mistakes I see beginners make is they use the entire strand to fletch their arrows and they end up with this big bulky binding that it just doesn't look like it's very smooth over the hand and it wastes a lot of material. These strands actually break apart into five smaller strands and you only need one tiny little strand to do your fletching. So you can see just how small these break up. So I'm going to pull out a single strand. Now you can make your life just a little bit easier if you trim the tails of these kind of haphazardly here just to get them out of the way so you can bind a little bit easier. One of the frequently asked questions from this series is, will I be reinforcing the knock area? And the answer is yes. It doesn't matter which wood species you use. If it is a self arrow you must reinforce the area below the knock. So I save it for the fletching process because I can just bind the back of my feathers down and reinforce my knock all at the same time and it saves extra steps. Just applying a really thin coat here. It's proving to be a little bit difficult to do this all on camera. It's not my usual body position here. I'll just hold that thread for a second to let it grab to the super glue and start winding. I'm going pretty tight but you know not white knuckle tight or anything. You want to secure those tabs on the quill but if you pull hard enough you could just crush them. Now once I get about half a dozen wraps or so I'm going to trim that loose piece off and finish going all the way up to the knock. Now I like my knocks to be double reinforced so I'm going to bring it right back down to right there the top of the quill so that that little quarter of an inch or so is double reinforced. Throw a simple overhand knot in it tuck it under. You want this to be coated in super glue so it's nice and secure. Sometimes there's a little bit of extra squeeze out there and all I have to do is run that squeeze out across it but this one's a little bit dry so I'm going to put one more drop especially where it tucks under. I'm going to do a quick dry run for you guys because once the super glue hits the feather it's game time but if I were to go flat side to flat side that would be your standard straight fletch and there's nothing wrong with a straight fletch. I like to add 90 degrees of helix so my tail is on the flat side. My front end I'm going to spin around to the knock opening. It's going to give you a nice aggressive helix. One mistake I see people make is they do a full 180 helix. That is pretty much a barber pole spiral and in my opinion that's too much drag and that's going to make your arrows fly slowly kind of like a flu flu so I think the sweet spot is 90 degrees. I'm just going to put a couple drops of super glue along the length of this arrow or along the length of this feather rather. You don't want a ton. Then I'll take a little toothpick and evenly distribute it along the length of the quill. Make sure to get right up under the wrap there. Now take the tab pull a little bit of pressure on the on the feather so you get a nice tight bind to the shaft. Bring it around to the knock opening and hold it for 10 seconds. If you get air gaps right here you're just not pulling the tab hard enough. Rinse and repeat. You're going to get some super glue on your fingers. Don't worry about it. It comes off in the shower. A nice even two-fletch with a 90 degree helix. Now with the front end of the feather being in line with the bow string, when the arrow is rested up against the there's no feather to contact it so you get a nice silent draw. We just need to bind the front and we're done. Before we finish binding the front you need to address this sharp piece of the quill right here where it's square. I just take my razor knife and very carefully smooth that out. You want a nice smooth transition so when the arrow passes over your hand you don't get any injuries. Same as before a little bit of super glue. Start winding. Simple overhand knot. Now you can see how beautiful of a transition that is. It's almost perfectly flat to the arrow. If your knock point is set correctly you're never even going to feel that cross over your hand. All that's left to do is trim the feathers to shape and I saw a video once of a Japanese master fletcher who had some really long scissors that let him cut the feathers in one sweep and I thought that was really cool so I bought myself a pair of Alex Japanese long scissors here. Pretty easy to find online. I think they cost like 40 bucks. Right before I trim these I just want to make sure my veins are in really good shape. Really nestled nicely together. If your veins look crazy and they're all wavy or damaged all you have to do is roll them over a pot of steaming water to get them to look like new. So keep that one in your toolbox for ruffled feathers. Now to make room for my fingers. There you have it. A simple and effective two-fletch. It's basically just a long and tall shield cut with a 90 degree helix. The next set of arrows is going to be the split timber shafts from chapter two and I'm going to put a straight three-fletch on them. So I'll speed through the prep here. It is exactly the same prep as the two-fletch. I'm just doing three this time. With a straight three-fletch I'm going to use the same measurement and go one and a quarter from the end of the arrow. Here's a pro tip for getting the feathers perfectly aligned every time. The first one will go right down the center of the flat side of the nock and then you just put the next one right in line with this edge of the nock and the next one in line with this edge of the nock. That's going to give you a perfect 120 degrees separation every time with no guesswork. Now's your chance to even the veins up if they're not quite perfect. Trim the leading edge for a smooth transition. There you have it. The tried and true traditional three-fletch with five inch feathers. Obviously the feather shape options are endless. You can do shield cut, parabolic, low and long, pretty much whatever your heart desires. The next style I'm going to show you guys is one of my personal favorites just because they look so cool and they fly so well. That's the Cherokee two-fletch or the Eastern Woodlands two-fletch. I've got my bag of turkey tail feathers here and turkey tail feathers have a natural bend in them just like the wings so make sure you match these as well. You can see this one bends in this direction and this one bends in the opposite direction. So I'm going to get two tail feathers that are matched in bend and what better set of arrows to put a Cherokee two-fletch on than these river cane arrows that we built in chapter three because cane was widely used along the eastern seaboard by the Native Americans. The feather prep for this style of fletching is a little more complex so I'll cover it from start to finish. Just like with the wing feathers we want to maintain all the veins on the inside of the curve. The difference with the Eastern Woodlands two-fletch is we also want to save some of the veins on the outside of the curve. So the first thing I'm going to do is come right down here, oh pretty much right to the bottom of the black and I'm going to establish where the fletching actually starts. So that's where my fletching will start. I want it to be six inches long so I'm going to use my jig here. Now make sure you're on the inside of the curve because that's the one we want to be six inches long. Now that I know which one of these is my primary fletch I'm going to come halfway down and this this can be a guess we can fine-tune it later. Next I like to do a little trimming while the feather is still off the arrow because these are a little bit more difficult to trim once they're attached. With this style you only have to split and sand the part of the quill that's exposed and I like to leave this long stem on here because the only place that's going to have glue is a little dab under here and a little dab right here. So this extra stem gives you a lot of material to pull on to get your fletching nice and tight and neat. It's the same method for grinding except I'll grind a little bit past my fletching area. I'm going to go one and a quarter down from the end of the arrow again and I'll orient them in the same way as my simple two fletch so there's no feather to contact the handle of the bow. So we're going to start by attaching them to the flat side of the nock and you have the option to put these dull side facing out or vibrant side facing out. There's no right or wrong way but the reason I like to go dull side out is because there's a very pronounced ridge on this side of the feather and if you place that against the shaft it tends to roll around and it makes it very difficult to get a neat looking fletching. But on this side of the feather it's very smooth so if you go dull side facing out it lays nice and tight to the shaft and you get a very tidy application. These can be a little trickier to get adhered because they're kind of slippery so I'm going to start with a little bit of a wrap here. Sometimes these eastern woodlands fletches just take some some fooling around to get them just right. Now if you try to pull the thread too tightly the quills will roll on you and ruin your application so firm pressure but nothing too crazy. Now the only other place we're going to use glue for these are right on the front side of the vane here where the tab will actually be connected to the arrow and I like 90 degrees of helix. You can experiment with whatever you like but I'm tugging on this pretty hard. Keep in mind if you really try to hulk this thing you'll probably break the quill right here. So nice and tight but don't go crazy. That's all there is to it for the eastern woodlands two fletch. These are six inches with 90 degrees of helix. So the prep work for the feather takes a little bit longer than the other styles but the application is pretty straightforward. That's it for today's video guys. I could show you how to do the tangential fletch but it's very straightforward. Just take two, three, four, however many feathers you want. Leave them whole. Do zero prep work basically. Lay them dull side facing up and trim them to your liking. I'll close out the video with some tight shots of the three fletching styles we covered and don't forget to check out my website OrganicArchery.com. Be sure to sign up for our email newsletter over there so you can be the first to get notified of any new workshop openings, product availability, and so forth. We will never spam you. It will always be related to Organic Archery workshops and product drops and we will never sell your information. I'll see you all again in chapter six where we will finally close out this Art of Arrow Making series and I'll show you how to make broadheads from repurposed tool steel and we'll also cover applying some of the commercially available glue-on points. Thanks for watching.