I'm a tinkerer almost to a fault and get alot of enjoyment out of experimenting with arrows, cartridge reloads, pretty much anything...
I've only had my crossbow for about a year and am still trying differnt things before settling on one "main" setup, however I've been shooting verticle bows since I was old enough to shoot one and building my own arrows almost as long
I did a major revamp of my crossbow arrows just recently and posted it on another forum, for the sake of saving me retyping it all I'm just going to quote the couple comments I made there...
"it seems as though there isnt any brass inserts for the beman thunderbolts, at least that I can find anyway, and from what I gather brass gold tips are slightly bigger and wont fit the thunderbolts, which I guess is better than too small because, if need be, I could just shave them down to make them work, which would be a fair ammount of messing around considering I'd have to cut them down to get the desired weight too
I also dont have any brass inserts on hand... but I did a little alumin. insert refabing and came up with a good and fairly easy way of increasing my inserts weight without going into a big ordeal, I also found a decent way to rework inserts for my nocks(which are inserts too) and make them work, which put my arrows right in the area of weight and FOC that I was looking for...
so, with beman thunderbolts, my new nocks, feathers, my new inserts, and 125gr heads I came out at 434gr OA with a FOC of 18%, IMO thats not bad for beman thunderbolts, they're actually about 4gr's lighter now than they were but have alot more FOC... so I'm happy now
then the broadhead testing begins...
I was going to wait until this summer to start messing with this stuff but the way things are going it looks like I'll have it all sorted out by spring"
"well, I've had the last couple weeks off and its been cold so I've had the chance to mess with my stuff alot, besides putting together the arrows above I also put together a few test 2213's
I shoot 85gr thunderheads out of my vertical bow and really like them, however I really DONT like the 125gr thunderheads I bought for my crossbow... I gave three of the 85gr thunderheads to my son and kept three for myself in case I get the urge to hunt with my vertical bow, but I got the brainstorm of rigging up some more inserts to be used with the 85gr thunderheads and my crossbow, and they came out very well
this is what I came up with... 2213's, 85gr tip, weighted insert, cut down insert for nock(13gr), and feathers came to 435gr OA with a FOC of 17.3% with the thunderheads, stat-wise they turned out to be an almost exact copy of the above carbon arrows..."
I still havent gotten a chance to do much shooting, I did shoot the 2213's a few times at my deer target and the POI was the exact same as the carbons and the 2216's I was using before I redid everything and they definitely shot good, in fact at 25 yards off-hand I was grouping them so close it was difficult to get ahold of just one arrow to pull it out...
I still havent done any broadhead testing though and to me thats the real test