The number one most important feature a hunting arrow must have is structural strength. All penetration stops if any part of the arrow breaks. As momentum goes up, structural strength must also go up.

Destroying thousands of dollars’ worth of arrows and broadheads doing durability tests gets a guy thinking about the structural strength of an arrow. I decided footings for hunting arrows is a darn good idea. What’s even better is two of them.

Internal footings work well, but with the energy of a compound bow I never could completely eliminate the carbon from splintering out behind the insert during direct impacts. My solution was an external footing, but I wanted something better than just an aluminum sleeve.

So I took the prototype inserts for Grizzly Stiks new TDS Shafts and hired a machinist to turn down the back half of them on a lathe so that I could overlap the external footing over the back of the insert and weak point where the carbon ends. I asked him to make the tolerances between the insert and external footing tight enough so I’d have to put the inserts in the freezer to get them together. Then I used a slow cure epoxy over the outside of the carbon shaft to bond it to the footing, as well as gluing in the insert. This completely encased the front of the carbon shaft in metal so it couldn’t splinter out. And with the back of the insert threaded, I could still add the internal footings and weights to further strengthen the shaft if needed. I took three nice bulls with my new insert idea. As a result, this system was adopted for the current production arrows.