Here's a pic of a couple of the arrows I did after building my extremely low-cost cresting machine. You could get as fancy as you wanted to in the design department; I just chose to stay with a pretty simple pattern as I'm 100% a bowhunter first and mostly cared about the visibility that capping the arrow would give me; I then used traditional camo patterns of brown and green (because that's what color feathers I had) for the cresting to try and tie it all together.



This is the cresting machine I built, which I have approximately $11 invested in. Like I stated above, the sewing machine motor was used, and bought at a local sewing machine shop for $5. I did order the arrow chuck from one of the archery traditionalist's stores (King Custom, or something like that. It's been too long now. It's the actual chuck Bohning uses on their $139.99 cresting kit machines, and they sell it for about $6.) I attached the sewing machine motor to a scrap piece of wood, and used quarter-round trim as a guide to slide the support block which holds the other end of the arrow.



There's pretty detailed instructions on how to build one of these things on the web; just run a search for "cresting machines" or something like that if you're interested. I think it's capable of doing as good a job as the commercial ones. It's sort of like top-of-the-line bows: They shoot better than I do. Well, this little home-made job spins the arrow better than I can lay on the paint!

Oh. And I can't forget to mention that A LOT of help from this project came from some of the great folks over in the Traditional forum, like ClifNDi and Lilhunter and others.