Why 12 arrows?

[Cameron]

From reading various posts on this forum it seems that most people call 12 arrows a set (although according to the laws of archery you will soon have 11 arrows).

As far as I know the most arrows we ever shoot per end is 6. So why get 12 arrows? :roll:

[Stakeholderman]

No good having six arrows, what'll you do if you break or lose one ? Believe me you will be pleased to have a set when that happens.

[Marcus]

Reason for 12 arrows

You make 12 up. Go and shoot, first arrow hits wood and breaks, leaves 11.
You can't group so you unfletch one.
Leaves 10
You tune em up and find one doesn't group with the others
Leaves 9
You shoot a group and blow away 2 nocks. (New equipment rule)
Leaves 7


Here is another rule. If you start shooting a round with only 6 arrows you WILL loose a fletch or nock.

[James Park]

Yes, sounds like a pretty reasonable arguement to me Marcus, and a good addition to the set of archery rules.
I can remember when I started shooting (1960), everyone bought arrows in sets of 8. Then we all started using hard plastic vanes (plastifletch, I think they were called), and it was quite likely that you break about 20 of them in a day of shooting. By the time you got near the end of the round you usually ended up shooting arrows with half of their fletches missing or broken. I think it was about then that we decided that 8 was just not enough (I had a set of 18 just to allow for fletch breakage).
We also went to 4 fletches an arrow so that with most of them broken off you might still have sufficient left for you to be able to shoot the arrow.
For a two day tournament we usually had a major repair job on the intervening night just so we could shoot the next day. We bought plastifletch is boxes of 100 at a time. Problem was that it was better than the alternative of using feathers!!
Then someone wise invented soft plastic fletches, and in about 10 minutes all of the hard Plastifletch went on the junk heap. I cannot find even a single example of the old hard fletches in my junk box now, but I think Leigh Cornish still has a few boxes.

[GaryH]

Another reason.....

Purchase 12 arrows (matched "set")

Nock, fletch and proceed to cut to desired length.

Get to 10th shaft, have blade explode (assured this has never happened before) upon finishing cut, mangle another 3/4" of the end.

Down to 11 before installing points :evil:

The rest I'll just agree with :roll:

[Cameron]

Thanks everybody :wink:

Now I'm a little bit wiser