Kegan — In sum, your choices are WoodyWeights, internal tungsten footing (no other material — steel, copper, lead — is both heavy and strong enough), just gluing on a heavy head (best with footed shafts), or using an external footing in the form of 3″ or so of aluminum shafting glued onto the the wood shaft end. I have tested them all, and all have disadvantages. The cheapest and easiest route to good FoC with woodies is to use a light wood shaft, single tapered, and the heaviest good broadhead you can find (and they’re getting heavier all the time. With perpendicular shots you’re likely OK, but with angled bone impacts there’s a high risk of the shaft breaking right behind the head. The internal tungsten footing added to this will get you into the 20%+ FoC range with less risk of the head breaking, but is expensive and a lot of work. In my backyard tests, shooting at angles into trees, the Woody Weights tended to “break” where glued to the point, and also increased shaft breakage behind the head due not only to the extra head weight but also, I presume, to the longer lever-arm they create. The only “solution” I’ve found so far that I’d hunt elk with is the external footing or “sock.” This has the added advantage of allowing/forcing you to use screw-in heads, which, with glue-in inserts allow a lot more possibilities for EFoC. To date I’ve not been able to get one to break behind the sock. Only drawback here is that right now, so far as I know, you can only get aluminum shaft inserts for aluminum shafts, which Ashby’s testing has shown to be a real weak point … and also such a rig looks rather clunky though it shoots fine. And so it remains for now that if our goal is max FoC, carbon shafts are the way to go — maybe wood-grained carbons? 😛 But keep in mind that most bowhunters, who never hunt anything bigger than whitetails and maybe feral pigs, don’t really need 25+% FoC to get the job done. Although Ashby’s research shows that EFoC adds more to penetration than overall arrow weight, a good heavy wood arrow with the right head will still get the job done on most game. Right now I’m shooting carbons for elk because I want the insurance. I shoot woodies for everything else. I have no doubt that someday soon, some intrepid arrow maker will solve this problem for us. In nature, no rich habitat goes unoccupied for long!
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