The title is just to invoke emotion/interest. My own experience is actually very mixed on this.
I thought I'd share a story on my experience with single bevel broadheads. This is one of those "airing dirty laundry" posts, so rather than judge the crap out of me, just try to learn from the experience. I know some of these scenarios leave some room for campfire scruitney about shots or practice that should occur. Something about a big bull bugling in your face that has a way of taking all of your practice and tossing it out the window.
I started hunting with 100 gr slick tricks, because D-Rock said I should. They worked great, and I really have no qualms with them. I killed 3 elk and several deer with these broadheads and they flew nearly identical to field points. Pretty deadly little things really. I actually have major questions about moving away from them as they never did me wrong. On bull elk, I had a broadside passthrough at 12 yards (lung, went 70 yards), I had a frontal at 12 yards (buried, arrow didn't exit but wasn't visible), pass through that was in no-mans-land between lungs and backbone (bull didn't die, back on cam healthy 2 weeks later), and a moving shot at 10 yards with a slight deflection from a branch (dead bull, went 500 yards), only 8" of penetration. Varied history, but generally positive. One lost bull, who lived, and even that was a passthrough. The only ones that weren't passthrough either buried the full 29" arrow, or were deflected and didn't hit squarely.
Then, I listened to the meat eater podcast with Ed Ashby, and especially as an engineer, it made a lot of sense to me. Still does. With an arrow, you're not looking to transfer energy to the animal, ideally you cut as big of a hole as you can, just so that the arrow barely drops out of the far side for a complete pass through. Given that we can't always have ideal, we're looking to punch as long of a channel as we can, so that we get deep penetration and hopefully pass-through, no matter where we hit. I can hear the argument already, why not use a field point then, and noted, but you want to have SOME balance of cut size to hit important things, while not limiting your potential for deep penetration. This is an optimization problem, where you want to get as deep as you can, with as much cutting surface as possible and we mostly disagree on how to achieve this. With a well placed shot, a crazy sharp field point-like head probably IS the best, so some of this is just protecting for the most likely errors you cause. If you're likely to misjudge distance, you'll want a light/fast setup, but if you're likely to judge distance well, but hit a shoulder or a twig, then bigger and heavier is for you. If you judge distance well, and hit where you aim, and have no twigs, then you can probably use whatever the heck you want, even a non-functional expandable would probably do the trick.
All that aside, our camp went weight forward and heavy. Not MEGA heavy, but I think I'm around 550 grains, up probably 135 grains from where I was before, give or take. I use 100 grain inserts, and 150 grain Cutthroat heads, single bevel, shooting about 260 FPS. We've had mixed results with these. The first year my buddy lost a bull (with a pass through), and blood stopped about 500 yards from the shot. He swears blood was coming out both sides of it when he last saw it at 40. Who knows what happened there, but we looked with 3 guys a second half of one day, and a whole nother day and turned up nothing after he ran uphill. I suspect the shot was further back or higher than anticipated. That same year, I played around with illuminated nocks. I practiced, but apparently not enough, and the slight extra weight of those nocks REALLY messed with my arrow tune, and sent my arrows corkscrewing through the air. I didn't really learn this until after I shot at a bull at 40 yards, and hit low and back...(pass through) and then shot my arrows at targets with both nocks and found the difference. This is definitely my fault. The blood trail wasn't great, but a gut shot wouldn't be... This bull was alive and walking uphill 9 hours later, looking pretty happy, all things considered. So, rocky start to the new heads.
Then comes this year. I had the bull I shot this year come into 30 yards. I wouldn't say I had a great degree of trust with my setup, given the experience from the prior year (it was actually 2 years prior, the 1 year prior was a dry year for us). This bull was quartered to. I aimed further back than I should have for his position, and hit where I aimed. When I shot it sound like a good ol' rifle "THUMP", which was weird to me. After the shot, I went and looked for the arrow as I expected a pass through, and never found it. Blood wasn't great, I had it from probably 50 yards from the shot, to 100 yards from the shot, and in the end he had piled up 170 yards from the shot. As I was tracking, I was thinking "We gotta get new heads, these blood trails suck." When I found him, really not far from the shot, I noticed maybe 8" of arrow sticking out, and was even more frustrated I didn't get a passthrough. Thats the point of these things, right? Well, when I started cutting, it was my first sign of something... there was bone dust where I pulled off the hind quarter, reminding you of a rifle shot. Then came me cutting the meat up... THE FEMUR WAS DESTROYED. My arrow had penetrated 20+ inches through the animal, and then still had the power to shatter his femur on the off side. I cannot believe it was able to retain that much momentum, and do what you hear of these things doing. I was bailed out by my broadhead. I'm still not sure if I ever hit liver, because I did gutless, but I'm certain that having your femur broken impacts your ability to move away from the shot. In this specific scenario, the heavy single bevel bailed me out, and we recovered the animal.
Regardless of your judgment of my story, its hard not to be impressed by an arrow doing its job that well, in the circumstance I put it in. While I don't want to hit a shoulder bone, I now would be VERY surprised if these didn't tear through them if that scenario came to pass.
This settles no debate, but demonstrates a heavy single bevel doing what it is supposed to. I have a feeling that had we been using our lightweight configs the 2 seasons prior, we might have those two animals instead of this one... but it is hard to say.
I'm going to stick with them for now, they were expensive! I need a few more samples on what they can do before I bail in favor of a more traditional "fast" setup.
