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Hello everybody out there in the world of Whitetail Rendezvous. Today we’re bringing a very special guy. Because everybody in the whitetail world uses some kind of broadhead. And Preston Lewis is going to share what he does at American Cutting Edge. He is the Outdoor Division Product Manager, and also he and his friends, in 2012, started up a company called Blood Trail Hunters. Preston, say hello to our listeners.
Preston: Hey everybody at Whitetail Rendezvous.
Bruce: So, Preston, let’s talk about what you do at American Cutting Edge?
Preston: As the Product Manager at American Cutting Edge, I handle a wide variety of outdoor accounts, mostly focused on broadheads, more broadhead manufacturer, or blade manufacturer and distributor in Dayton, Ohio. So the top names in the industry, if you’ve ever shot a broadhead, there’s a good chance you’ve shot our blade.
Bruce: So just to get that right, so I used to shoot Barrie Archery Rocky Mountain Supreme. So it’s a possibility you made those blades?
Preston: It’s a very good possibility. Yeah, I obviously couldn’t say because of . . .
Bruce: Sure.
Preston: . . . because of protection. But, yeah, there’s a great possibility that. . . you’d be hard pressed to go to a sporting goods store and find a top 10 broadhead that we haven’t had our hands on in one way or another.
Bruce: Now let’s talk about that because there’s a gazillion broadheads out there, many, many fixed blades and then mechanical blades. And what makes a really good blade for a broadhead?
Preston: It kind of depends but usually, and the people hate to admit this but there’s not a whole lot of variety in broadheads when you come to think about it. I mean, there are tons on the market. Don’t get me wrong. And there’s tons of slight changes, but you have your two sections. You have mechanicals and you have fixed. What really makes it is basically just the torture test. I mean, if your material of your blade and the material of your farrow can stick up to a torture test, you’ve got the blade that everybody’s going to want. You’ve got a broadhead that everyone’s going to want. So when you hear a popular broadhead, it’s not because the marketing is behind it. It’s because it’s a good broadhead. It does the trick.
Bruce: Torture test, can you share or is that proprietary information?
Preston: Yeah, not at all. It’s part of a first article and precision testing that all companies do one way or another. I mean, you see them on commercials and things like that. As a matter of fact, if you go to Wac’em’s website, they just launched a new website. It’s really cool. I was on there the other day checking it out. And they basically show the steps of a torture test. I mean, it’s the barrel shoot. It’s the bone break, it’s the cutting diameter so on, so forth. Once you pass all those, as long as your blade’s standing at the end, that’s all that matters.
Bruce: Now why are blades so hard to get out of the tree because I just shot over an elk or underneath a mule deer?
Preston: Yeah, haven’t we all at some point.
Bruce: I pulling up on my whitetail buck and he jumps the string. The tree should have never saw the arrow. So is that gone? Is it worthwhile pulling those out?
Preston: If you can get them out, you can get them out depending on the head. They’re not meant to hit that kind of impact. With bones, and flesh and meat, and all that good stuff, it’s meant to go through that. It’s built for that. The hardness that we put blades to and farrows to on the HRC scale, you really just can’t get anything that solid and expect it to be just okay. So that’s my two cents about it. I mean, if it’s not going through an animal, it’s going through something else and sticking into it, it’s going to be hard to get out. Especially with that kind of kinetic energy.