Hardened tips - Close, but . . .

I bought some of these to play around with making my own slip tips. On the far right is a standard "Muzzy" brand broadhead arrow tip, with a 9/32" OD and a #12-28 tpi (threads per inch) internal thread. I recently found the two larger tips. The middle one is a Muzzy brand bowfishing arrow tip. It's 5/16" OD, with a 1/4"-28 tpi internal thread. The one on the far left is a "Cajun Jackhammer" bowfishing tip. It's also 5/16" OD with a 1/4"-28tpi internal thread. All of these are very hard, with the Cajun Jackhammer advertised as being a 50 on the Rockwell "C" hardness scale. 17-4 stainless shafts are usually about a 44, and the Rob Allen shafts about a 47 on that same scale. They all run about $2.00 each.

They almost fit a 6mm thread (argh!). The 1/4" diameter is close enough to work, but the 28 tpi threads are just a little too far off of the 1.0 mm metric pitch threads to fit.

Anyway, the larger tips were news to me. Those Jackhammer tips seem perfect for reef hunting, so maybe someone out there can figure out a clever way to use them.

I don't know if the artwork of Mori and Kitto and others can be improved much for a blue water tip. If I were paying lots of money to go on a once-in-a-lifetime trip, where I might only get a single shot at a trophy fish, I would absolutely want the best.

I'm just hoping to come up with something for my own day to day wreck diving, that won't make me cry like a little girl when I hear the tip clang up against a concrete culvert.

I have in fact shot fish with a busted tip. What would make me cry, were I using a $90 slip tip, isn't the knowledge that I have dulled the point, but knowing that I may have damaged the fit of the adapter and tip to to the extend that it won't work properly. Or that it is bent and causes the shaft to be inaccurate.

My ideal slip tip would be:

Robust enough to survive reef / wreck impacts
Have a replaceable point, like those above
Be easy to replace the spectra or cable rigging
Be inexpensive enough that I won't hesitate to shoot down into a wreck, knowing that I may lose the tip.

I must admit, the slip tube seems flawed to me, but I've never used it. You have a long cylinder (the tube) slipped over a considerable length of cylindrical shaft. If that fit is too tight, then the tube would not easily slide off. Unlike the tapered adapters on blue water tips, the cylinder over cylinder doesn't get any looser as it moves.

If that tube is too loose, then the open end will get fish scales and guts jammed in it . . . and not slide off.

You also have a line attachment point welded to a thin walled tube. This seems to me like it would have a high likelyhood of deforming the thin tube in the area of the weld and again . . . not slide off.

In the pictures that I have seen, I don't think the tube had a little prong or wing to catch on the backside of the fish and help it deploy, so I would be worried that it would pull right back through the hole in the fish.

But as I said, I've never used one, so maybe they work fine. I don't understand how a bumblebee stays airborne either, but they do.

Two things make this a little tough without a lathe:

First, you need to reduce the diamter of the shaft from 5/16", 9/32", 7mm, or whatever, down to 1/4" for the threads.

Then, you have to cut threads almost right up to where that diameter stepped down, which is tough with a tap.

But like most things, determination and patience with get you pretty close.