Primitive Archery Innovation

Working with bows and arrows has been a slower process than I would like.  While I have gained knowledge and experience pretty quick it could go faster.  The problem comes in when I want to find the absolute easiest way to do things.  With building bows there's a lot of grunt work that I must do and I accept that but when it comes to arrows there are more shortcuts that can be made.

The fletching is the part of the arrow that is made of feathers and stabilizes the arrow in flight.  I use a two fletch style which uses less feathers and takes less time.  At first I tried the eastern two fletch style, which is a native American style that was commonly used but I kept having a really hard time with getting it perfect and there was a fair bit of feather preparation before I attached the arrow.  Below is an example of that style:

  

 Finally I allowed this style to evolve with an idea I had.  I thought I could just split the shaft, which is hollow cane, and insert the feathers into the middle with just the feathery part of the feathers sticking out and the vane of the feather on the inside of the shaft.  I tried and I liked it a lot!  It was easy and quick.  I just stuck two identical feathers in the shaft facing away from each other.  It looked something like this:

I shot it and it flew straight and I liked it.  It was durable, strong and fletching never shifted.  This was great but I was missing one key element to a good arrow.  When shot, the arrow didn't spin.  Like a quarterback, an archer wants a good spiral on his/her projectile.  The evolution was not done.  I made a few arrows like this and shot them.  Finally I cut the two feathers in half down the length of the vane and only put half a feather on each side.  This way the two identical feathers weren't cancelling out each others tendency to force air over one side of the feather.  Now the two sides were working together to spin the arrow in flight.  I ended up with something like this:

You'll notice that the left side of the feather curves up and the right side curves down.  These curves force more air to one side of the feather than the other.  With the curves arranged facing in opposite directions they will be forced in opposite directions causing the entire arrow to spin.  I'd use a term like centripetal force but I'm about sick of that kind of talk for the day. 

So this is the latest development in my journey to make easy fletchings.  I am not the first person to come up with these methods but I didn't find that out until after I had done it.  If you make arrows with cane you should give it a shot and see how you like it.  Of course wrap on either side of the fletchings with sinew (especially the nock).