I've seen it in camps from Alaska to Zimbabwe. I observe it most closely while guiding, when more directly involved in the hunt and better able to impart my influence. My good buddy Bob Mizek, head engineer at New Archery Products, recently brought it up in hunting conversation. Too many archery hunters are simply wielding broadheads that are not nearly sharp enough for real life hunting applications. Whether this stems from lack of knowledge, frugalness, or sheer laziness is left to question, but we owe the game we hunt no less than the sharpest broadhead possible.

This issue surfaces in many forms: The archer firing a few practice shots into foam then returning those very arrows to their hunting quiver. A hunter missing an animal and later shooting that same arrow at game. Broadheads that clatter around in a quiver an entire season, slowly but irrevocably becoming dull. Replaceable blades allowed to rattle lose in a gearbox. Even those with good intentions attempting to touch up edges themselves without proper tools or skills. Some simply don't understand what "sharp" really means.

Broadheads should be shaving sharp; they should be spooky, dangerous. It could be argued that a perfectly placed field point will kill a moderately sized big-game animal, but of course, while "perfect" is the goal, nerves, arrow obstacles, jumped strings, sometimes result in less-than perfect hits that call on a super-sharp broadhead to save the day. Broadheads kill by slicing major veins and arteries, short-circuiting vital organs, by spilling blood. I feel silly bringing this up, but these are important points to remember.

A recent Texas scenario drove this home pointedly. I'd stalked a particular herd of wild boars several times, attempting to kill a true monster, one of those you need a winch to load. After a couple failed stalks and a lesser hog taken from the group with my recurve, the group leader had become a tad jumpy. When a strong wind and the terrain finally tipped the odds I had the behemoth broadside at 30 yards. I was already taking the hero shots in my mind. The arrow looked good all the way but at the last possible moment that huge boar whirled to flee and instead of the double-lung hit that should have followed, the arrow buried into a hindquarter up to the fletchings. What followed was a trailing job through riparian tamarisk and mesquite with evening light failing quickly. A severed femoral artery and punctured liver proved too much for even that 400-pound bruiser. I found him on his side after 500 yards of tense hands-and-knees trailing. A dull broadhead would certainly have resulted in a different ending.

There's sharp, and there is sharp, and no one is chastised for carrying heads that are too sharp. Major arteries are rubbery and extremely pliable, allowing a dull edge to roll around harmlessly, turning a potentially deadly hit into a nonfatal flesh wound. An embedded broadhead that is razor sharp, stopped short of full penetration by a shoulder blade, or due to low Kinetic energy, is able to inflict added tissue damage as the animal runs, creating a faster kill and wider blood trail.

Sharp Enough?
Producing a razor's edge is so technically demanding that myriad makers of even the most advanced broadheads in the industry still contract replaceable blades out to firms who specialize in razor edges. Anyone who prefers hand-sharpened cut-on-contact heads understands this. If you aren't using the highest quality replaceable-blade edges, you must resign yourself to the fact that extra time and skill are required to put an edge on your broadheads that matches today's best replaceable blade models.