Rangeball

Are feathers always helical? Right wing right helical, left wing left? How much helical? Does it depend on the install?

How do you tell if the feathers on your arrow are right or left wing? Which wing is preferred so that your tips don' t unscrew?

ijimmy

Range , right wing with a right offset will tighten your points as they go into the target .

Arthur P

Feathers all have a natural curve to them and so they are perfectly suited for helical fletching. Putting them on straight or straight offset is forcing them into an unnatural shape. I' d be willing to wager that' s why some people say feathers are noisier than vanes.

To tell if a feather is right wing or left wing, hold the feather up and look at it from the leading tip end. The back end of the feather will bend to the right if it' s right wing, to the left if it' s left wing. What determines if a feather is left or right wing is if the feather is taken from the left wing or the right wing of the bird.

I' ve shot mostly right wing ever since I' ve been shooting bows and my tips unscrew often enough. The easiest way to keep it from happening is to work some bowstring wax into the threads before screwing the tips into the inserts. It also keeps the metals from reacting with each other and fusing the tips into the inserts.

Rob/PA Bowyer

Rangeball, you' ve been here long enough to know, there are never dumb questions, just dumb answers....., of course the above doesn' t apply. Nice job.

Rangeball

Rob, thanks for letting me off the hook

So, how can I tell by looking at fletched arrows if they are applied helical or straight offset?

Also, ijimmy and Art seem to be in conflict. ijimmy says right wing will tighten points, Arthur says he uses right and tips unscrew. Which is it?

Arthur P

Right wing spins the arrows right direction to tighten the points, and I' ve heard it said often enought that it should be true, but for some reason I' ve never seen it actually work in real life.

Rangeball

Art, that' s what I always heard and thought, but my tips are unscrewing in the bag target, so I thought maybe I had left wing, but had no clue how to determine it. I just checked, they are right wing, just like me


Any idea how to determine if my feathers were applied straight offset or helical?

burniegoeasily

I play dumb (easy for me) and have the pro shop guys give me the right feathers. I set my fleatching jig years ago to the twist I like, marked it, and havent changed since. Thats how I tell.