What’s the best fletching jig for TAC Vanes?
Thank you for your interest in TAC Vanes!
We strongly encourage you to carefully read through our directions and watch the videos here.
We strongly recommend clamp style jigs with a helical clamp for best results. With this setup, you just need to make certain that the vanes are 100% seated to the shaft, by adjusting the jig until you get the vanes to stick inside 5-7 seconds. Leave a 1/8” gap between the vane and the clamp and make sure the clamp isn’t contacting the shaft before allowing pressure to the entire vane. See photo below of how we cut our clamps and how I load the vane in them for every fletch job. If it’s properly seated, you’ll have zero problems as long as you follow the brief instructions that’s printed on our primer pen and glue bottle labels. You must use a helical clamp for ideal results in fletching, but especially accuracy.
We personally don’t prefer the jigs that fletch more than one vane at a time for a few reasons. The primer will only last about 15-20 seconds on the vane and the material will heal itself before the glue is able to penetrate the plastic. It’s tough to get all the vanes primed and glued before closing each one inside the short window. Our vanes also have a pointed angle on the back. When you place our vane in the slot of the EZ fletch style jig, it sometimes wants to slip out of the bottom because there’s no “positive stop” on our vanes like many others have. This is probably the top issue with these jigs for us. The slots are also wider than our vanes and that can create slop, which will not place them as evenly as many other jigs.
No matter what jig you’re using, the best thing we tell people is to start by fletching one vane to one arrow and check the very first vane you fletched. Rather than fletch every arrow you have, only to find they aren’t sticking. If that first vane is not stuck in 10-12 seconds, it’s definitely not sealing to the shaft. If it’s stuck good, then fletch the other 3-4 vanes on that arrow and let it sit for 15 minutes. That allows the glue to 100% cure and fuse the vanes to the shaft/wrap. Then check each vane again to be sure it’s stuck really well and if so, then you know the jig is set right, or you at least did it correctly. If you were able to pull a vane off, then it says the jig probably needs a slight adjustment.
