Millian's bona-fide junkyard fletching

It covers tools, materials, manufacturing techniques, and simple explanations about not only the how of the process but the why. It's intended to be beginner friendly and spans the complete process from start to finish: with this webpage, you can make a functional, accurate projectile using materials in your home right now.

If you're not familiar, primitive crafting is a hobby where people try and make things using only neolithic methods. I cover some of the primitive techniques, but my focus is on leveraging commonplace tools, technology, and materials to their fullest potential. If you're making your own traditional arrows, this can definitely be a useful resource, but can't walk you through the full process.

Much of the info covered here is extensive, not intensive. If I went over every single technique for every single material and procedure, I'd be writing a book, which I really don't want to do. You'll learn everything you need to get started and start experimenting from this webpage.


An arrow's shaft is the most important part: it's the foundation you build your projectile off, and without it you might as well just throw rocks.

Unfortunately, you can't just pick any old stick up off the ground and call it a day. Arrow shafts need to be straight, at least 2 feet long, and ideally under half an inch thick. Arrows that are too short can't be drawn properly, and curved or bumpy arrows will deflect off the bow frame. If the shaft is too thick, you'll have difficulties with deep once the head goes in AND your arrows won't perform well, either. Getting serious again, wooden dowels are going to be your the go-to resource for arrow shafts. You can use sticks, though this is the hard mode. Good luck finding a good source of suitably thin, uniformly straight, 2-foot long sticks in nature. My best luck has been with shorter pine trees, but high branches and young trees have given me a few successes as well. They can be slightly bendy-- straightening is a process-- but this won't widen your prospects that much.

(Picture of a dowel arrow and a stick arrow here- yep)


ᗘDowels: Cut the dowel into 2-foot rods. On one end, cut the rod again at as sharp an angle as you can (you can do this by just cutting the dowel in half on 4-foot ones), and leave the other end flat. This is going to make the arrow pierce better than one that's blunt behind the arrowhead.

ᗘSticks: I did say this was the hard mode. First, remove all the bark from the stick, trim down any burs, knots, or buds, and then leave it fully submerged until the fibers are fully saturated. Bend it straight, then leave it in a vice to dry.

Once they're ready, it's time to get whatever woodcutting implement you've got and start sawing. First, cut a notch in the non-sharp end so you can knock the arrow. This should be a shallow, pronounced cut, and has to be as perfectly straight as possible. If you can get away with a deep cut, do so, but that opens up a lot of room for error. If you're cutting with an imprecise implement, make this notch V-shaped, as it's a more forgiving shape.

Next is the channel for your arrowhead. The cuts you make vary greatly on what you're actually putting on the arrow, so only do this step once you have an arrowhead to attach. Your priorities here are different: cut deep, cut wide enough, but still worry about angle. Perodically try fitting the arrowhead into the notch to make sure the fit works. Make sure you're cutting the point you made earlier uniformly in half.


Before we can discuss materials, it's important to establish what makes a head actually contributes to an arrow: Other ideal features are two notches near the back of the arrow to tie it on and a slim profile to make carving the arrow notch easier. With all this in mind, there's quite a few things you can easily find to tip your arrows with.
(Picture of all the finished arrows here- yep) It's sharp and everywhere, so it's got to be good right? It can be, but there's a few caveats on what shapes and kinds of glass you can use. Don't get too attached to your glass arrowheads, either: all arrowheads eventually break, but glass ones are especially fond of chipping.

(Example of a bad arrowhead- yep)

ᗘThickness: most windows and beverage bottles are too thick to easily mount on an arrow shaft.
ᗘCurvature: It's a little hard to explain this one, but the orientation of the curvature can eliminate a lot of glass shards. The point should be in line with the base of the arrowhead and the base of the arrowhead should be in line with the shaft.
ᗘSize: A lot of glass is either too big or too small. It being too big is fixable by propping one end up on a pebble (or very small step) and gently tapping it with increasing force until it breaks. Don't count on this always producing a usable result.
If you want wickedly sharp results, you can pressure-flake the edges of your glass arrowheads. I haven't tried this, so I can't attest to how easy or doable it is. Keepin' it old school's a solid choice-- bone is easy to work with and a rock-solid middle ground between glass' sharpness and metal's durability, but it can be hard to source. Should you do choose to make bone arrowheads, keep in mind that you'll want to sharpen the points and edges yourself. A dull bone arrowhead is one that's missing a lot of easily acheived potential. Furthermore, wearing respiratory protection while cutting or grinding bone is fucking mandatory. Bones produce a lot of dust that you do not want to breathe in.


ᗘBad bones: Chicken bones are a step up in material from the sponge that's been drying under your sink for several years and that's it. Similarly, ribs of most kinds are too frail and spongy to work with. This is a general rule of thumb-- you want to work with the hard outer walls of bones.
(skinny and fat arrows)

ᗘGood bones: Bones of any kind that have thick walls or are long can yield decent but very differently shaped arrowheads. For a long bone, grab a hammer, put one some fucking safety glasses, and give that bad boy a good smack in the center. The shards you're looking for are 2-3 inches long and a point you can easily sharpen. For thick-walled bones, saw it into little 3-inch cylinders, then saw those into quarters and saw points into those quarters.
(picture of a bone I've cut an arrowhead out of)

ᗘVery good bones: Long bones with flat surfaces you can saw into are the premium sources for arrowheads. And I mean premium . These are going to be the sturdier, sharper, and more accurate than any other bone arrowheads. I'll mention that if you don't have a dremel with a circular sawing head, it's probably not feasable to make these kinds.
ᗘMystery bones?: Never tried using vertibrae. They're common, and seem dense, but the weird shape has scared me off thus far and I can't imagine they're very easy to work with. Similarly are antlers, which were popularly used in the neolithic.
(image of clear arrowheads)
You might be a little surprised to find out that certain kinds of plastic make good arrowheads. They can't hold up to abuse like bone or metal, or rip through targets like glass, but will nonetheless reliably poke holes in things. The best kind of plastic stand at around a 9 on the pliable to brittle scale. It's the stuff that bows a little before shattering: they put it into headlights and blue recycling bins. You can find about a dozen appropriately sized bits of this plastic just by walking down the road for a few minutes, and sawing notches into them is trivially wasy.

Bad plastic is anything that's soft, or not fully dense. This is basically everything else: bottles, toothbrushes, cups, car panels, phone cases, et cetera. (Image of the bottlecap arrow- yep)
ᗘBottlecaps: a great, easy, and quick way to make arrowheads. Just pry it flat with a pair of pliers, then hammer it until it's a pancake, fold two edges inwards, then hammer it flat again. Saw two notches near the back to hook your string around, and you're done.

(pic of the bottlcap arrow - yep)
ᗘSheet metal: another great option if you have an easy method of cutting it into isosceles triangles. I don't, so I can't say much on the matter.



ᗘ Store-bought arrowheads: It might be a little odd to see this in a guide about making your arrows from scratch, but there's absolutely no laws saying you can't go to the store, buy arrowheads, and then shove them onto your own handmade arrows. Or if there are, I haven't been arrested yet. They are a little hard to attach, though-- unless it's got a sharp screw on the back, you can't just drill a hole down your shaft and twist it down like you would a store-bought arrow. If they're flat, cut the plastic off and haft them normally. Otherwise, get ready to spend a frusturating amount of time drilling, gluing, splinting, and tying things until they're sufficiently grafted together. ᗘ Coins: With enough patience, hammering, and patience, you can pound a quarter or similar large coin into a flat disc around 1 and 1/2 its original size, then cut that down. Don't use small coins. I can't reccomend this method. There's so many better ways. ᗘ For the single most popular arrowheads material in history, I can't truthfully recommend stone. Knapping needs specialized tools and a lot of time to learn, with reading suggesting that one flint arrowhead taking about half an hour to make. I've done a little experimenting with carving non-sedimentary rocks, though it's similarly laborious and the results were all too fragile for me to feel safe hafting them.

ᗘ Replica stone arrowheads (the kind you get from sovenir shops) genuinely will function if you seat them in an arrow. Get the thinnest one that you can, or or be willing to trim it down with a cutting implement. Attempts to break it down with a hitting implement will land you a lot of itty bitty shards. ᗘI know what you're thinking: Wouldn't that just get the same results as sharpening the shaft of an arrow into a point? Not really-- take another look at what an arrowhead provides. There's nothing a bone arrowhead can't do that an equivalently-shaped chunk of hardwood can't poorly emulate. Still, this is a "can" kind of thing, not a "should". The quality you get just isn't worth the sheer amount of work. ᗘ You can make some good arrowheads out of seashells. Ones that are too laminal, thin, or curved are bad, but their sheer abundance means you'll get no shortage of good ones. Treat them like you would an oversize shard of glass: tap with gradually increasing force until it breaks, and go from there.
There's two main steps to affixing an arrowhead: seating (or hafting), and binding. Seating is where you fit the arrowhead snugly into the notch carved into the arrow, using glue to secure it, and binding is the act of actually tying the damn thing down. Both are equally important-- an arrow with glue and no string will fall off when it hits something, and an arrow with string but no glue will have too much give.


Hafting materials: You'll want a very fine saw, some kind of glue, and sandpaper. Any kind of glue works, though I'm partial to elmer's school. It's cheap, easy to get one's hands on, and the nozzle helps with fine applications.

Binding materials: You'll want something you can cut with, and something to tie the arrow with. The thinner, the better- thread is cheap and excellent, but a thin enough metal wire works as well. If you can't get thin enough, cut very deep notches to compensate. Too much bulk on the arrowhead's surface is very bad. Before you glue or tie anything, make sure the arrowhead actually fits in the shaft. There should be at least a centimeter of contact between the arrowhead and the wood, and it should be tight enough that it doesn't fall off when you let go. Don't worry too much about overdoing things, though-- friction isn't be what's going to keep the arrowhead attached, but it sure does help. If you're working with a softer arrowhead material (bone, primarily), this process should involve taking little bits of material off the arrow and the arrowhead.

After you've got a good fit, take the arrowhead out, and sharpen the business end of the arrow's shaft with your sandpaper and saw. It should already be a little sharp from the angle you cut the shaft at, but that's the bare minimum requirement. Squirt some glue into either side of the arrowhead notch at the very back, insert the arrowhead, make sure everything's straight, and then add more glue to all the points of contact. You're now ready to bind!

Note: If there's a little wiggle or the notch is a little deep, don't worry: the glue should fill things out. If there's a lot of wiggle or you cut the notch too deep, cut down toothpicks or matches to fill in the empty space.
Start by cutting two notches in the shaft just behind the arrow's head, around three times the gauge of your string. Tie your string twice around the arrow's shaft behind the notches, and then hook it through one of them on the second go.

From here, the binding process is both very difficult to explain in words and differs wildly from arrow to arrow. I've included a little graphic to detail the most basic, boilerplate wrapping pattern, but as long as you're tying it tight and alternating, you're doing it correctly.

(diagram explaining the process - yep)

Note: If your arrowhead doesn't have notches (i.e. it's just a shard of glass), wrap the string directly around the arrowhead.

Once you're done and the string is tied off, it's time to glue again. You're going to want to use a lot this time-- any points of contact between the string, the arrow shaft, and the arrowhead should be liberally coated. This'll stiffen the strings, fill in gaps between the string and the arrowhead, and add a continual point of contact. When you leave the arrow to dry, make sure the arrowhead isn't contacting anything, but don't point it upright. This is going to make the glue run off the binding and down the arrow shaft. Instead, hang it over the hedge of a table or balance the arrow on a small, raised block of wood. You'll want to do this for when you fletch the arrows as well.

(pic of arrows drying - yep)
Like with arrowheads, there's a lot of things you can use for fletching if you understand what the point is. So let's talk about stabilization.

Fin stabilization is what occurs when you have a flat, bladelike object that has air traveling towards its thin edge. If the direction of the object or the direction of air flow changes, the air runs along a greater surface area, and it pushes the object back into the streamline. This is what airplane rudders do, this how rockets stay straight, and this is what feathers are for at the back of an arrow.

Drag stabilization is similar to fin stabilization, but the stabilizers aren't bladelike-- they just have a higher surface area on the sides than the front. You can observe this effect by tying a length of thin cloth to the back of a short, fattish stick and throwing it. Just having some friction at the back of a projectile makes it want to travel point forward.


It's ideal, but the kinds of arrows you'll be making with this guide won't necessarily need fin stabilization to fly straight. In fact, they probably won't get it at all. Fletching is a very precise craft, and the first few times, you probably won't have developed the skill needed for fin stabilized projectiles. Don't feel bad about ugly fletching! As long as there's some friction at the back, and it's decently distributed the arrow will fly straight regardless.

There's a few other things to keep in mind when you make your fletching. Anything too rigid is going to a) deflect off the bow frame, and b) mangle your hands, itself, and the bow in the process. Anything too soft is going to be a pain in the ass to attach, and won't maintain a consistent profile, potentially leading to skew flights.

Feathers: Feathers are the undisputed best thing to work with. Smaller (but not tiny) feathers are actually better than larger ones, since they're easier to get consistency with. Split them down the middle with a sharp knife, cut them into halves or thirds, and trim some of the fluff off the front of each segment so you'll have a point of contact for string later. Group them by direction of curve! This is important! An arrow with two bits of fletching skewed one way and a third skewed the other way will not fly straight.

Yarn and twine: Labor intensive and not very good, but can be used. Cut at least 12 lengths of string around 4-5 inches long, then tie them all to a single master string like you're making the world's floppiest comb. Then, tie that master string around the back of an arrow, point the arrow upright, and loosely tie them a second time so they're not free hanging.

Cloth: Cloth works, and a single shirt from a thrift store will give you more than you'll ever need for around 3 bucks. Thinner cloth tends to be better. To make fins, draw your desired fletching shape on a folded in half piece of cardstock, unfold it, and cut the chevron/heart shapes out of your cloth. You'll want at least one length of wire or plant stem to help insert it into an arrow's trenches, and optionally, several smaller ones for upright rigidty. If you're a visual learner, see the diagram I drew in two minutes to get a better feel for the process.

cloth diagram - yep.



Grass: Certain kinds of decorative grasses have very fluffy inflorescences you can use for easy drag fletching, just don't glue them down as they'll need eventual replacing. You can also make fins out of grass stems: bct them into 1.5 inch "logs", let them dry, and glue them at an angle into your trenches.



Plastic: Anything that isn't a grocery bag will lacerate you BADLY. Grocery bags aren't bad, huge pains in the asses and require the "spine" technique outlined in the cloth section.