I use a homemade osage selfbow with a tape on, shoot through reel. The only finish it HAD was a rubbing of beeswax/olive oil. I leave it in the boat year round and it pretty much looks like an osage fence post now, but still works fine.
I'm using solid fiberglass arrows now with muzzy heads. I made my own arrows at first, which worked fairly well, but had a high breakage rate with bigger fish. One can drill through the primer pocket on a .38 case with a drill the same size as the shank of one of those long gutter nails. Insert the nail through that hole so the nail head stops against the base of the inside of the case head, then hammer the point of the nail out flat enough to hacksaw a good, long cut near the point to bend up a barb. File the point and barb to shape, solder the nail head inside the case and that's it. The heads can be mounted on any shaft but I never found any that a big fish couldn't tear up. I gave up on trying to save the shafts and started tying my line around the head on the nail shank, then running the line up the shaft and half hitching it tight just ahead of the nock. I was using cane arrow shafts there at the last, just plugged in to the head and tied off with a half hitch at the back. They would almost always come out of the socket when a fish was hit and float free. The cane won't shoot very deeply. Most of the time the fish I'd shoot at were almost at the surface and that was a non factor but the inability to hit deeper fish made me switch to the solid fiberglass. Also, with those home made heads, you've got to cut and re-tie, then re-rig after every shot, which is kind of frustrating when a 30 pound fish swims up and moons you while you are trying to get ready for another shot.
Even with the solid fiberglass arrows, deeper fish often just leave me with a scale on my point which hasn't penetrated up to the barb. I don't know how deep you can actually shoot effectively but the arrow slows down really fast with the water resistance and line drag combined, and I have had sharp muzzys bounce off of deep fish without any penetration. Those are always monsters, too, big targets that I can hit farther away. Those times allow me to exercise my vocabulary.
Steve
