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Need help on getting up to date on the new style shorter blazer style vanes since I shot 4" vanes last time. #6630262 01/13/17 08:40 AM
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bowbuilder1971 Offline OP
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I need help on getting up to date with these shorter blazer style vanes that I see fletched on all the hunting arrows these days. Last time I shot carbon arrows out of a compound bow was somewhere around 2006 and back then we used 4" off set vanes. I shot them out of my Mathews LX and the smaller blazer style vanes were used by indoor competition shooters with a bird cage of long stabilizers going forward backwards and all over the place. You know the style of shooters who started shooting the 3D tournaments during the late 90's and would hold up everyone on the course by getting up to the stake and would then go through a frickin' 5 minute yoga stretching ritual at every damn target before they would shoot their damn bow lol. I always thought they were fun to watch lol. Since I sold my LX bow and got back to shooting my T/D recurve, I have been shooting tapered wood shafts and Beman ICS Hunter carbon arrows with feathers on them. Well I was checking around on eBay to see how much used LH Mathews bows were going for and found my old LX bow up for sale by some guy who bought it from the place that I sold it to. So I bought it back for a cheap price and it's getting shipped out to me. So today I went in to the local archery shop which is a licensed Mathews dealer (West Houston Archery) and asked about getting a new set of cables and string for the LX and looked at all their carbon arrows. Well they all had those blazer style vanes on them and they said that they work fine with broadheads and that they are just a little higher which gives them the stability needed for perfect flight. Is that right? Do you all shoot these style vanes with your hunting set ups and do you use them with fixed blade broadheads or only with mechanical broadheads. They also had a lot of these thin body pencil arrows that remind me of the old days (80's) when Beman came out with the first carbon arrows with an insert that glued on over the shaft and point that made them look like an RPG. I remember in the early 200's that the arrows were starting to go the opposite way and they were manufacturing fat bodied arrows for hunting and now they are going towards skinny pencil shafts. Is it so the vanes can clear the window on the riser when mixed with the newer style small vanes that look like they run higher off the shaft? Will these new smaller vanes work with the old style regular width shafts and are the windows on the newer bows cut deeper to give extra clearance? I do have a couple dozen camo Beman ICS Hunter shafts left from back in the day when they were cheap per dozen. I also bought 1 1/2 dozen Gold Tip Warrior carbon shafts last year to throw some 4" feathers on to shoot with two recurve bows that I purchased. They are not the best rated guaranteed straightness arrows but they were on sale so I bought them. I have also been looking at the Beman ICS Hunter Pro arrow shafts that have a guaranteed straightness of .002 which is pretty good. I belong to the Buffalo Field Archery Club and will be shooting 3D tournaments with the LX and possibly hunting with it. I am not looking to win tournaments and just looking to get out and have fun so I don't need to shoot high end arrows. If I can get a tight group at 40 or 50 yards then I am happy. what is most important to me is good arrow flight. I do the whole bare shaft paper tuning, know how to set up bows and will probably shoot the Rage or Spitfire's I have sitting in my tackle box if I decide to go hunting with it. I took a good amount of deer with the LX bow and I probably shot the best I have ever shot using that bow. It seems to fit me like a glove and I have owned a lot of compound bows in my life lol. I used to be able to get LH bows for cheap money on clearance from the Bowhunters Warehouse's big want ad looking B&W book in the 80's. Who here remembers getting those in the mail lol. Getting off track here.......Are the shafts for hunting put out by the companies now the same width as the ones that were standard in the early 2000's and before? Or are they a little thinner in width to accept the new style blazer 2" type vanes that sit higher off the shaft? Is there a certain brand that is better than all the others put out these days? Will they work with my old ICS hunter shafts? Does a 100gr or 125gr broadhead work better with different brands of these style vanes? I read that some vane brands are thicker and stiffer than others so I was wondering if the forgiveness of different ones work better with certain grain broadheads for flight. Is there a certain brand that you all prefer and brands that I should stay away from. I like to build my own arrows so if I do buy some new ones then I don't want to buy pre fletched arrows. Will a jojan or old Martin fletching jig work for putting on these style vanes. I seen that they sell a Bohning Blazer fletching jig that says that it's the only helical jig for the 2" vanes. So I was wondering if my old fletching jigs won't work for them. I will be shooting with a drop away rest. Any help on all of this to get me up to date would be greatly appreciated. Thanks again.







Some of the old 4" vane fletched arrows that I was shooting when I had my LX.


Picture of my old LX

Re: Need help on getting up to date on the new style shorter blazer style vanes since I shot 4" vanes last time. [Re: bowbuilder1971] #6631365 01/13/17 11:48 PM
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I've been shooting them for about 8 years I guess. I've had no trouble stabilizing any fixed adequate head I've shot but I work hard at tuning my bows well.


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Re: Need help on getting up to date on the new style shorter blazer style vanes since I shot 4" vanes last time. [Re: bowbuilder1971] #6631393 01/14/17 12:12 AM
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My dad used Blazer vanes out of his Browning Timberwolf. confused2 Arrows were Easton ST Excel though.

The "pencil thin" stuff you're referring too is micro-diameter carbon. More focused kinetic energy (?) or something like that according to Easton and Beeman boxes that I use the arrows of. There's also the wind-drag logic where the smaller something is, the less effect wind will have on it...even in archery there is now a craze to shoot western game at obscene distances (to me anyway).

I've always used 2" vanes. Then again, the oldest bow I've shot is a 2005 model, single cam Bear. On the old RedHead Carbon something series (before the Blackout arrows) I shot 4560s (low poundage spine) and had blazers on them and they worked very good. In Carbon Express Thunderstorm 30-50s I had a similar vane also at 2" at it shot well. These were both "standard diameter" carbon shafts. On youth Beeman ICS hunter arrows, I had 3" vanes. Then I switched to Easton Bloodlines, then/now Beeman MFX Carbon and Easton Axis. All of those wore/wear Blazer vanes, but are the "pencil thin" shafts.

I think they should work on the normal carbon shafts as well, at least from my experience.

Re: Need help on getting up to date on the new style shorter blazer style vanes since I shot 4" vanes last time. [Re: passthru] #6633891 01/15/17 11:16 PM
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Thanks Passthru. That's good to know. I will probably switch over to using them then. They are a lot easier to find in shops these days than 4" and 5" vanes and feathers. I get in to tuning to perfection too. I actually had to put a spacer on the Trophy Ridge drop away rest because I couldn't get it to shoot a bare shaft perfectly through paper with the LX. It was fish tailing even with it moved all the way in and still wasn't shooting center so the spacer corrected that. I still have the spacer too. I must have thrown it in one of my hunting storage totes before trading it in. I am going to take the micrometer to it and make a better spacer out of kydex or some synthetic pen blank to have on hand before I start tuning it up. I always liked shooting 125gr Spitfire broadheads with my set up.

Re: Need help on getting up to date on the new style shorter blazer style vanes since I shot 4" vanes last time. [Re: chital_shikari] #6633905 01/15/17 11:25 PM
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Thanks chital_shikari. I was hoping that they would fit on all the regular size Beman ICS Hunter shafts that I have laying around. I am going to buy a single blazer style fletched arrow and set the angle on my jojan fletcher to it so I can re-fletch my old arrows and finish up the rest of the shafts with them. I get the bow this wednesday and will hopefully have it all set to go by friday so I can hit the club this weekend. I am going to have to buy a ladder stand if I want to hunt with it. More fun things to buy lol.

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