I am looking to switch to fixed heads this year and I think I have narrowed it down to a certain head. Both heads are 3 blade 100 grain. This particular company has two versions of the head. One has solid blades and the other has vented blades. I know I would possibly need broadhead tune my bow but I am curious if the solid blade head would be more likely to plane/veer off in flight. I am just wanting some input from anyone who have switched from a fixed head with vented blades to a head with solid blades and if you had any accuracy issues. Seems to me that the solid blades would catch more wind/air and cause it to not be as true while in flight as one with vented blades but I am not expert in this so that's why I wanted other opinions
I'm speaking without a lot of knowledge but I too have been curious and wanted to do a lot of testing on various broadheads. My feeling on your question is the difference between the planing is probably almost undeterminable between the two but the difference in the noise that a vented head makes compared to a solid head is huge.
No direct experience either, I've always used vented fixed heads. I think cutting diameter will come into play more than vented or not. I live in Idaho and have always had to use fixed blades. I'm running pretty standard 1-3/16 cutting diameter heads with 3 fletch 2" vanes and have no troubles getting them to fly well. I tune by just getting a bare shaft arrow to hit the same POI at 20 yards as a fletched does, and at the same angle in the target as the fletched. Once the bare and fletched hit the same POI and the bare is hitting at the same angle as the fletched, I can switch to fixed blade heads and they will fly right with my field points. If you ran into a situation where a bare and fletched hit together at 20 yards, but then set the bare shaft aside and put a fixed head on and found that it wouldn't still hit same POI as a fletched field point, then "steering" of the vane setup would be my first suspect. I'm kind of a "don't fix it if it ain't broke" type though and don't experiment much as far as BH setups go, so someone else may come along with some real world experience between the two that can offer a better response. But in your situation that's how I would proceed. Tune bare and fletched at 20 until perfect, then try which ever head you end up choosing. I would have no qualms about choosing the non vented if that's what I really wanted. If it won't still fly with fletched field points, then I'd go to a vane setup with a bit more steering. 3 4" vanes or 4 2" vane setup. Worse case scenario is you have to run your set of arrows to a shop and have them refletched.
