RE: (NON) pass-thru issues....
Jeff:
If I remember from a lot of your pics, I think your shooting deer at pretty good quartering away angles on a fairly consistent basis. I think this is what is causing your challenges with non passthroughs. It's not necessarily a bad way to shoot deer, because it causes tremendous amounts of damage, but it's going to noticably decrease the % of pass throughs, especially when using a large diameter head. It's only going to be magnified using a wide cutting diameter head. It's not the head losing energy opening, it's the nature of a 2" cutting diameter head. In my experience with 2" Vortex heads when I was younger, the Rage's seem to lose a LOT less energy than those did. If you want more passthroughs, go to either a fixed blade head or start waiting for shots that are as close to broadside as possible.
I've hit 8 deer withRage'sover the last 3 seasons. Not one of them has run more than about 60-70 yards. Most of them less than 40. 7 of them passed completely through, the only one that didn't struck my 07' 6 pointer straight in the spine severing it almost completely in half and ended up inside the body cavity stuck in the inside of a rib. All of these hits were from 63-68lb bows, at 29.5", shooting a 440ish grain arrow around 275-290. Only 2 of them were quartering shots, I got lucky with those though and they passed through as well.