Who Chops Their Own Turkey Feathers?

[Turk_man]

I curious how many people cut their own feathers from the turkeys they shoot. I`m going to start doing some and will take any advice I can get.

[LBR]

I send mine to Raven to be ground (don't have the time or patience myself, and they do a great job). I use a Vario feather clipper--more expensive than others, but well worth the price difference in my opinion.

Chad

[Thorneswift]

Turkey feathers are cool cause they are about the only feather that you can split cleanly by grabbing the ends and pulling them apart. It takes a bit of practice but it saves you from scraping the sides of the vanes and splitting with razor like you would with goose feathers.

I clean them up by sanding with rough grit on a sanding block taking special care to do an even job at the thicker front end cause I shoot off my hand. If you wanna go all the way you can trim them with a hot ember on the end of a small split of hardwood. If you blow on the ember as you trim up the feather it'll keep glowing long enough to do each fletch.

When I fletch I always use sinew and used to have to tie two thin fibers of deer leg sinew to do the spiral wrapping till I broke down and bought a buffalo backstrap tendon. The long fibers make fletching easier and also is nice for making sinew bow strings rather then adding a shorter leg tendon section at each twist of the plies.

If you ever work with goose feathers like on an Ishi replica arrow, they are soft and get wonky easy, but when I went to soak them in hot water to stretch out the feathers' vanes I found that the hot water fixes the ginks in the feather.