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Not discounting your experience, I haven't used mechanical in a long time do to past experiences with them.
Could you explain the above statement to me. I've always been of the impression that bows didn't use energy in their kills like rifles do. If you are getting pass through shots with both types of broadhead what does energy have to do with it? Isn't it just the size hole they cut?
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Bows don't necessarily kill like guns as they don't produce hydrostatic shock, however, without energy, you can't penetrate the animal...so they do use energy to kill. I can't think of a system that would kill an animal without some energy being expended. Modern compound bows produce energy that is far more than is necessary to completely pass through a whitetail with a traditional fixed blade head. So, a large amount of the energy produced by the bow is just spent shoving it deeper into the dirt on the other side instead of being used to cause more damage on the tissue.
The larger size of cut means more of the energy stored in the arrow is being used to cause damage to the tissue. More damage to the tissue causes greater blood loss and faster death. So not only does the animal die closer to you, you have a better blood trail to follow on the way there.
Ideally you want to find the largest broad head that will reliably achieve a full pass through. That's the most efficient use of the energy available. This is a problem with a fixed blade head because the larger the fixed blades get, the worse they plane in flight and cause major accuracy issues. The only option at that point is mechanical to achieve proper and repeatable flight while achieving large enough cut to expend maximum energy damaging tissue.