How much weight up front and why?

[Hoggslayer]

I set up some arrows for my recurve last year and thought they shot fairly well. I used 125grn heads. I'm going to hunt with a longbow this year and I was going to tune up some arrows for it, but had a few questions.

Should I be using more weight up front and why? And, If I increase FOC will that change my gaps drastically? Not that I gap shoot, but I'm sure its going to throw off my guess-o-meter some.

[DRT]

It depends. Arrow flight trumps everything. Yes 10gpp of arrow weight is good, Yes 15 to 20% FOC is good. Yes yes yes.
You'll get a bunch of opinions. Truth is it all can work. But good arrow flight trumps everything.
Guys shooting aluminum arrows are running 125grain heads all the time.
And if you really wanna use those heads but want more up front weight well they have insert weights.
For me, part of the journey I've enjoyed is exploring all that. Even when some said "you can't" I tried it. Some of it worked regardless of the naysayers. Some was a waste of time, money and effort. But the fun was finding out.

Sent from my SM-G892A using Tapatalk

[Trumpkin]

Bareshaft flight trumps everything else, just like Gary said. I've found a little more FOC (think 170-250 grains) on the front of an arrow will sometimes make a slightly more forgiving setup. But there's a balance to be had between FOC and trajectory.

[Onski316]

I messed around a good bit with this a while back. If your overall arrow weight remains the same but your FOC is different, I didn't notice any real difference in gap. Obviously, if you just add weight to the front, gap will increase, probably not noticeably if you only go up by 25g but 100g was noticeable to me over 20 yards. I did notice that my higher FOC arrows (around 21%) compared to my lower FOC arrows (11%) did group a little better and seemed to track better in wind over 20 yards. I'm setting up mainly for 3D but I do hunt as well. To get a higher FOC arrow, I had to use a slightly stiffer spine. My 21% arrows are 5.7gpi with 50g inserts and 150g tips. My lower FOC arrows are 7.4gpi with 14g inserts and 100g tips. If I remember right, my lower FOC arrows were 600 spines, might have been 700 now that I think about it where my higher FOC arrows were 500 spine. I bareshaft out to 20 yards to get them dialed in.
Seems the latest craze is nano arrows with higher (18%+) FOC. The science makes sense I guess. Look at what the barebow guys use for 50m competitions.

[Briar Friar]

Word to Trumpkin.

DrAshby demonstrated pretty effectively how a high FOC arrow will come out of parallax much faster than a low FOC arrow. My high FOC arrows forgive my flaws much better than low focs but my trajectory is not flat. My next arrow build Im coming off the high FOC mountain and attempting to build ~11 gpp arrows to flatten my trajectory.

Good luck MrSlayer.

[RickBarbee]

For me personally, anywhere between 14 - 15 percent FOC, and anywhere between 9 - 10 GPP have always yielded the best flight, and penetration.

Rick

[Bisch]

Good tune is what we strive for. Some folks try to get that with high FOC. In the end, it is the tune that matters most.

Bisch


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk Pro

[SJP51]

Bare shaft flight difference between 14% and 20% FOC is very noticible. Gap would have to be changed a good bit.