“Then came the gad­geteer, oth­er­wise known as the sport­ing-goods deal­er. He
has draped the Amer­i­can out­doors man with an in­fin­i­ty of con­trap­tions, all of­fered as aids to self-re­liance, hardi­hood, wood­craft, or marks­man­ship, but too of­ten func­tioning as sub­sti­tutes for them”

     If you want to in­cite a heat­ed de­bate amongst hunters bring up broad­heads. There is not a more con­tro­ver­sial piece of gear than the broad­head, and their re­spective cham­pi­ons will de­fend their mer­its to the death. The irony of this is the vis­cer­al dis­avow­ing of said hunter’s broad­head of choice im­me­di­ate­ly fol­low­ing the loss of an an­i­mal af­ter ex­e­cut­ing a “per­fect shot.”

     When I first men­tioned the con­sid­er­a­tion of pro­duc­ing our own broad­heads to my peers, the no­tion was met with skep­ti­cism and dis­be­lief.

     “Why would you do that? There’s al­ready tons of broad­heads out there al­ready.”
     “Se­ri­ous­ly, what can you do dif­fer­ent­ly than what’s al­ready been done?”
     

     My re­sponse was suc­cinct in its mes­sage;
     First, they are the “scape­goat” for a bad shot and hunters will al­ways look for a new head as a so­lu­tion. Even­tu­al­ly, they will work their way around the broad­head carousel to us and hope­ful­ly we can help them be­come more pro­fi­cient bow hunters.

     Sec­ond, yes there’s tons of heads avail­able but be­lieve it or not, there’s still not one that’s been ex­e­cut­ed prop­er­ly due to ei­ther a lack of ex­pe­ri­ence and un­der­stand­ing or ei­ther cor­po­rate pro­duc­tion cost re­straints.

     Through­out the en­tire de­sign, pro­to­type and man­u­fac­tur­ing pro­cess­es of our
heads a sin­gle bev­el de­sign was nev­er even con­sid­ered. Not once. Why you ask? Well it wasn’t from a lack of ex­pe­ri­ence, quite the con­trary ac­tu­al­ly. As a tra­di­tion­al bowhunter in the 1990s the sin­gle bev­el head was read­i­ly avail­able and very pop­u­lar among stick bow shoot­ers. In all hon­esty, it’s quite pos­si­ble that I’ve killed more an­imals with a sin­gle bev­el head than any oth­er type.

     But let’s back up a bit.

     The orig­i­nal con­cept of the sin­gle bev­el head was not that of cre­at­ing a head that gen­er­ates ro­ta­tion by func­tion of its op­pos­ing bevels. The “con­cept” of ro­ta­tion was a byprod­uct of some­one some­where ob­serv­ing the op­pos­ing bevels and think­ing “that will make it spin.”

     So why did the sin­gle bev­el style even orig­i­nate? Sim­ple, most of these heads
were pro­duced in low vol­ume, pre­dom­i­nant­ly in garages and back­yard shops that had only sim­ple ma­chin­ery avail­able thus not al­low­ing for prop­er dou­ble bev­el grind­ing. The sin­gle bev­el grind is eas­i­ly achiev­able with rudi­men­ta­ry tools, that’s why every machete you’ve ever seen in de­tached, third world ar­eas has a sin­gle bev­el edge. It’s because they can grind it with rocks and make it sharp.

     Do they cre­ate ro­ta­tion due to their op­pos­ing bevels? Tech­ni­cal­ly yes, but the
amount of that ro­ta­tion is so mi­nus­cule it’s not mea­sur­able and when the ex­ist­ing ro­tation of the ar­row is con­sid­ered it be­comes ir­rel­e­vant. If you con­sid­er the ra­tio of the sur­face area of the bev­el to that of the rest of the broad­head the per­cent­age of bev­el area is not even close enough to cre­ate a “pro­peller” ef­fect.

     So, here’s where I re­al­ly get con­fused. Let’s say for ar­gu­ments sake that they do
cre­ate ro­ta­tion.....how is that an ad­van­tage? The pro­mot­ers will say that the ro­ta­tion
as­sists in the breach­ing of bone, nope. What splits bone is the two blade de­sign, that’s 100% the most ef­fec­tive de­sign for breach­ing bone in my ex­pe­ri­ence.

     If ro­ta­tion was an ad­van­tage then you’d see mul­ti­ple heads with the blades off­set like vanes...... oh wait, there were sev­er­al de­signs like this years ago and there’s a reason they’re not around any­more. Ro­ta­tion is not a good thing! It cre­ates re­sis­tance, thus rob­bing en­er­gy from the ar­row’s mo­men­tum and hin­der­ing pen­e­tra­tion. It’s simple, think of it as in a nail or a screw ef­fect, then quick­ly de­cide what ac­tion you’d want for an ar­row to pass through an an­i­mal. But for all you sin­gle bev­el dis­ci­ples, fear not, they don’t ro­tate enough to mat­ter.

     So what’s the dis­ad­van­tage?

     The way a broad­head kills is by he­m­or­rhage re­sult­ing from a ra­zor sharp edge as
it slices. With that said, the longer a blade can stay ra­zor sharp while pass­ing through an an­i­mal the more he­m­or­rhage it will cause. The sup­port­ed edge of a dou­ble bev­el blade has su­pe­ri­or edge re­ten­tion to that of a sin­gle bev­el blade. Don’t be­lieve me, go find a sin­gle bev­el knife in your kitchen or in your hunt­ing gear....I’ll wait.

     To that end, are sin­gle bevels bad? NO!
     Will sin­gle bevels work? YES!
     Are they su­pe­ri­or to oth­er heads? NO!

    Where I take is­sue with the sin­gle bev­el craze is this; Most of the com­pa­nies that
pro­duce sin­gle bevels know all the facts I’ve just men­tioned, but are still pro­mot­ing the above con­cepts that have been dis­pelled decades ago. You can even go back a few years and hear the same in­for­ma­tion I’ve just high­light­ed from peo­ple who are now pro­duc­ing sin­gle bevels.

     Ad­di­tion­al­ly, the big­gest rub is that sin­gle bevels are far cheap­er to man­u­fac­ture
as it takes half the time and far less so­phis­ti­cat­ed equip­ment and staff to grind. To put it in per­spec­tive, if you di­vid­ed the cost of man­u­fac­tur­ing a blade into ma­te­r­i­al, shape milling , and grind­ing it would be 10%, 10% and 80%. Sim­ply put, the cost is in the grind­ing. So when I see sin­gle bevels that cost more it is very frus­trat­ing to see consumers get tak­en ad­van­tage of.

     In sum­ma­ry, if you want to know who we are, and what we stand for at Day Six, the fact that we don’t pro­duce more prof­itable sin­gle bev­el heads should tell you everything you need to know.

     As al­ways, thanks to every­one for your con­tin­ued sup­port of this fam­i­ly busi­ness. It’s a dream come true to do what we do every day and we tru­ly val­ue each and every cus­tomer.