Flight characteristics of this head belie their appearance and what you may believe about how a head like this "should" fly. I generally prefer compact heads, and find them to have excellent flight and control. This is why I prefer the Slick Trick heads. I also generally (still do really) prefer steel ferrules from a strength perspective. I shoot 100+ KE on purpose, and so I can kill at angles and placements that wouldn't be possible with lesser setups. Hence, why I prefer strong, steel, fixed heads. Say what you want about how well your chosen brand of expandables work, they have weaknesses that I don't see the need to tolerate, and they don't bring any killing abilities to the table that don't already exist in fixed heads.
Stingers fly with field points if you have a tuned bow, and fly as well as the Tricks out to not-so-comfortable distances. They are quiet in flight and they maintain sharpness better than Tricks. I believe this is due in part to the lesser angle of the blades, allowing them to "slip in" to targets and animals easier, whereas the steeply-angled Trick blades have more of a "chopping" action.
Don't get me wrong, I'll put a Trick into any animal on earth and will get good results, but there are advantages to a more swept blade angle when it comes to penetration.
I decided I needed to kill something with a Magnus to really see how they would perform, and whether I could fully trust them. With the long profile and aluminum ferrule construction, part of me believed they would fold over easily, which is something I also will not tolerate. However, since their flight was better than what I would have expected, I no longer trusted my thoughts based on appearance alone, so a kill was in order.
Earlier this season, I took a couple deer with 125-grain Grizz Tricks, as a test, as well. The flight of those heads was, and is, excellent, as is the durability. Field performance doesn't meet my standards, though. I believe I posted a picture of a doe I shot from stem to stern with them as a head test, and they worked. Full pass-through on a difficult shot, dead deer, but obviously a stunned reaction from the animal and a longer-than-it-should-be blood trail. The next one I killed with them, I took your standard broadside shot, and I also got a longer-than-it-should-be trail. I believe this is due to the long point of these Grizz heads - it seems to create a large hole before the blades enter, and the result is deer that know they've been hit and react accordingly.
Magnus is the opposite of that, but I still had doubts about strength. Over the weekend, I saw a lot of deer on a sit and at last light that evening (literally maybe a minute of legal light left), after I had waited out the buck that I didn't want to shoot and he finally vacated the area, I had a good-sized doe broadside at 18 yards. Just like the stem-to-stern shot I took, this shot needed to be one that would prove durability, so I moved the sight pin up to a point that would hit the spine, but also take lungs. If you don't know where this is, don't worry, most don't and most shouldn't take this shot. However, if you do, if you hit low you have a dead deer, if you hit high you have one that will be dead after your second shot.
At impact the doe dropped like you would expect from a spine hit. She kicked a little, sending her a short ways down the incline she was on. She also attempted to push herself under a blow down, but was dead in 45 seconds, requiring no follow-up shots. The durability test and death test seemed to be a success - deer died quickly, and obviously the head didn't explode or bend at impact significantly.
Here is a shot of how she died, to indicate that although this isn't a large animal, it wasn't a baby. You can also see shot placement somewhere here:
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I recovered the front half of the arrow at the impact scene, and was impressed at what I found. I know a Trick would have killed this animal also, but am confident that blades would have been lost either to bending or most likely to severe chipping that would have been difficult or impossible to file away. I accept that from Tricks. The blades of these heads are very high quality and I can almost always (unless they are bent) bring them back to razor-sharpness. However, the Magnus head was essentially completely undamaged, meaning the durability portion of this test passed with flying colors, something I couldn't have been sure of before recovering the head.
The main blades are still shaving sharp, able to easily shave paper (I don't do sharpness tests on my own skin, preferring thin paper and the ability to shave it). One of the small bleeders is also perfect and sharp, the other still sharp but with a very small chip out of it. I will not repair this chip, as it's size doesn't dictate that being a necessity. I have merely cleaned this head, run it over briefly to touch up any burrs I couldn't see, and put it in the quiver. Here's how it looked before that treatment:
- bh.JPG (96.39 KiB) Viewed 650 times
Here is the final result, again posted to indicate this was not a large deer, but it was not a test of a fawn, either. I try to select medium to large does for these broadhead field tests, as fawns can be killed with a field point.
- d2 - Copy.JPG (156.41 KiB) Viewed 650 times
