Hand Made Arrow Shafts
			For me one of the best things besides bowhunting is making my own equipment and making good quality matched arrow shafts is one of the most important pieces of our terminal tackle. You can use a variety of timbers such as oregon, hoop pine, slash pine, silver quandong to name a few and with trial and error I am sure that many more will be found in Australia.
		Step Two. Lay your billet on the board and plane each side lightly until you have all four sides squared up and dressed down to the finished size. Make sure you plane down as far as you can go once you have all four sides dressed. The cleats on the plane are 9mm to 10mm high but you can vary to suit whatever size shaft you want.
		Step Three. Place the billet on edge into the grove and plane the edge down, do this on two sides, now place one of the edges you have just planed down on the flat surface of the board and plane down the other two edges. Now you will have a billet with eight equal sides.
		Step Four. Lightly plane off each edge so that you will now have a billet with sixteen equal sides. At this stage all you will have to do is sand the shaft down smooth, you can do this by hand or you can put one end in a drill and sand smooth. Use fine sandpaper so you don’t leave sanding marks on the shafts but you will still need to finish off by hand sanding up and down the shaft with the grain.
		If you have done everything equally and you have cut all of your shafts out of the one piece of timber you should have a set of shafts that should be matched for spine and weight. The set of three arrows were made by Jason Condie who bought nogging material at the hardware store. These shafts worked out to 10 cents each and flew as good as any commercially bought shaft.