The Wasp Havalon HV Broadhead: Behind the Scenes
The award-winning broadhead is a one-of-a-kind collaboration with Havalon knives
For almost 20 years, many of the world’s top hunting guides, outfitters, and taxidermists have relied not on heavy belt knives to do their skinning and quartering, but tiny Havalon folders with replaceable scalpel blades. Havalon ushered in the concept of a replaceable blade hunting knife with the introduction of their original Piranta in 2005, but they’re a company with a long history of producing surgically sharp cutlery. Havel’s Inc., Havalon’s parent company, is a producer of scalpels for the medical industry.
It’s easy to see how a product that’s sharp enough for surgery could get the attention of a broadhead company. And that’s exactly what happened when some of the Wasp Archery staff met some of the Havalon Knives staff at a sports expo several years ago.
“The Havalon partnership was quite accidental,” says Wasp’s Fred Dougherty. “But if you go to enough shows, you run into people. We learned that people had been asking Havalon to come out with a broadhead, but they didn’t want to be in the broadhead business. But we’re in the broadhead business, and so after talking about it with them, we offered to partner with them on the project.”
A customer sent this photo of a Wasp Havalon HV broadhead that punched through the shoulder of a Tennessee doe, but was still good as new after cleanup.
It took a couple years’ worth of meetings for two small but perfectionist brands to settle on just the right design. The blades had to be sharp and of high enough quality to meet Havalon’s standards. But a scalpel blade is too thin and brittle to hold up to broadhead use. “Havalon knives are some of the sharpest things known to man. I’m afraid to handle them! But those skinny blades won’t hold up on a crossbow arrow going 500 feet per second,” Dougherty says.
The compromise design hit the sweet spot of being scary sharp but extremely durable.
The Wasp Havalon HV fixed-blade broadhead.
“The blades we use on the Havalon HV broadhead are as sharp as they can possibly be, without being brittle,” Dougherty says. “Our manufacturing standards call for a blade that can bend to 45 degrees without breaking.” The blades of the Havalon broadhead are actually a bit thicker, at .035, than other Wasp fixed-blade broadheads, which are 0.27. And they’re stamped with the distinctive Havalon V logo. The result is a rugged fixed three-blade broadhead that’s incredibly sharp but also heavy-duty, and with a large 1 3/16 cutting diameter. The distinctive orange ferrule is made of tough 7075 aluminum, a material unique to the Havalon HV model. The tip is the signature hardened and sharpened stainless steel tip made via Wasp’s proprietary process. “Anyone can make a Trocar or stainless tip, but nobody else can make a hardened, sharpened tip like ours. Ours are ground with diamond wheels and carbide hones, and are far stronger than Trocar,” Dougherty says.
The original Wasp Havalon debuted as a 100-grain model in 2019, and it was followed a year later by a 125-grain model. That broadhead bested the competition in an independent review conducted by Field & Stream that tested for accuracy, consistency, durability through cattle ribs, and sharpness. In a few short years, the Wasp Havalon HV broadhead has become the broadhead of choice of many serious bowhunters and crossbow hunters. It’s also risen to be among the top three selling broadheads in the entire Wasp Archery lineup. Both the 100- and 125-grain Havalon HV broadheads are sold in packages of three complete broadheads, and each package includes an additional 6 replacement blades.
— Story by Wasp Archery staff
View All Posts
