A Visit to Raven Arrows

from Carbon Carver

The following is a candid report of my impressions when I discovered Tom's house after a motorbike ride in the hills. This isn't based on any factual data, just casual conversation. Therefore, it should be corrected by anyone that knows the real facts and wants to volunteer them.

Raven Arrows

Tom Rininger and his wife Jan are great contributors to the Traditional archery scene. They have been providing POC arrow shafts and turkey fletching to arrow builders for many years. Tom claims that he makes more saw dust that anything. However, I have the pictures to prove otherwise. I discovered while writing this, that POC isn't "cedar", rather a rare cypress, found only on the Southern Oregon and Northern California coasts and slightly inland in those regions. Evidently Oregon is serious about its heritage within the traditional archery industry and, by law, half of all POC that is harvested must be cut into 2x4x36" boards for arrow smiths.

Tom's saws are all specially set up to process these boards that ship from POC mills. Because Tom is a single operator, he does everything in stages. It is safer and more productive to concentrate on one machine at a time and its results. Tom said the hardest part of milling shafts is predicting the results of what any given run of boards will provide in the order of spine and grain weight. He said that he gets the occasional call for a "custom order" of specific spine and weight shafts. Basically, due to the variations in each board's wood density and wood grain profile it is impossible to just mill a hundred shafts of one spine and grain weight. He must first mill a few thousand shafts and hope that there are enough of that specification to ship the order. Therefore, he has learned, if he doesn't have a specification of shaft in stock at the time of the order, he can't just go cut a few more boards and fill it.

Saws:
single blade facing saw,
4blade autofeed board splitting saw,
2blade autofeed end trimming saw,
3blade autofeed strip splitting saw

The single blade facing saw is the most important cut of the group. The boards get the face cleaned and trued to square for riding the fences of the other saws. "Because," Tom said, "if the face isn't true, none of the other cuts will be straight with the grain."

After facing, the boards are staged for the 4blade board splitter. The 4blade saw has wide feed wheels and carries the board into the blades and the strips smoothly out of the blades. If there were any play in the strips while they traveled through the saw, the strips could be easily damaged from blade chatter and be useless.

In the next step, the strips are trimmed to length by a two blade end saw. The blades are located at the outside edges of the feed table and as the strips are carried through, the blades simultaneously trim both ends of the strips.

The next saw is a three blade and it splits the strips in to the sticks that are fed to the dowelers. It has a magazine that is vertically positioned in front of the feed mechanism and, when loaded with strips, it will feed the saw automatically.

Dowelers:
Both auto feed,
primary doweler cuts a 23/64ths peg
redoweler takes the 23/64ths down to 21/64ths or 19/64ths, I can't remember, could be neither and something in between.

Tom's dowelers are of his own design and fabrication. One has a large capacity, 24" tall, magazine that is loaded with a single file stack of sticks. The sticks drop into the feeder one by one as the last clears the mechanism. The other has a hopper that the finished dowels are piled in. They roll down to the feed chain and get recut to a smaller size.

The entire milling process creates an enormous amount of saw dust that can be found in every nook and cranny. The effort to collect and move the accumulated shavings out of the working areas is more than Tom likes to consider. He recently added a large volume vacuum dust collector and, with the help of his fabricated intake boxes, it has worked to keep the dust piling in one place instead of every where.

Once the doweling step is complete, the shafts are boxed and taken in to be spine tested. The spine testing is when Tom really knows what his milling efforts have brought. The shafts are examined carefully and the different spine piles start as the shafts pass through the tester. Tom has written notes of average draw weight next to the thousandths indicator, so whatever .520" equals in draw weight, it's noted on the gauge. This speeds the sorting process.

Hanging in Tom's office is a nice array of traditional weaponry. His black powder rifles, a wide row of long bows, several different sizes of fur traps and the little family dog keep him company while he sorts and categorizes his shafts. Tom has one favorite Yew stick bow that sadly warped when it was brought from a West of the Cascades humid climate to the high desert plateau dry climate. It was the first "real" yew bow I had every really seen. Very cool, with its almost single light layer of sap wood with knots showing here and there, over the deep reddish brown heart.

Tom ships shafts in a couple of different groups, spined within a five pounds range. His Premium dozens ("Actually 13 or 14 shafts", he said, "because there is always a crooked one that refuses to be straightened.") are matched for both spine and grain weight. Then he sells his #2 quality, matched for spine, in bundles of 100. His final offering are "garden stakes" that don't make it through quality control, and judging by the kindling pile next to his shop and wood stove, he has an endless supply of them. So, if you have a crooked bow that can shoot crooked arrows, Tom has a few extra laying around.

The other part of Tom and Jan's business is to process whole turkey and goose feathers into fletching. They have both shield and parabolic die cutting machines and there are two sanding rigs, one for right wing and one for left wing feathers. The sanding rigs are built of ancient iron tractor wheels with the paddles ground off. Rather than actually sanding the feathers, these machines use Jeweler's saw blades and finely cut the bottom and side of each feather pulled through them.

Because of their double bend, Goose feathers are very difficult to work with and end up costing more time than they are worth. The sanding machines eat the feathers very easily and more go in the trash than into the stamping box. Luckily, Jan has found a secret sauce she "pours" on the feathers to make them a little easier for the machines to handle or Raven arrows wouldn't be able to offer them.

After Tom showed me around he place, he and I sat and discussed his time living, hunting and trapping in Central Oregon, Idaho and Alaska. In addition to the several arrow making business he has been involved in over the years, Tom has been a successful professional trapper. And with the crazy antics of the fur market over the many years, successful just means, he said with a grin, that he hasn't starved yet.

I found my time with Tom to be informative. He even shared a few tips and tricks on arrows, hunting and trapping that will save me lots of heartache and frustration over the years. So, If you have extra turkey wings laying around that should be turned to fletching or want another dozen shafts of some flavor, Tom is equipped to handle those needs. If you have a surplus of space in your garage, a good table saw and wanted to try you hand at milling arrow shafts, Tom will even build you one of his doweling rigs.