Muzzy’s Trocar HB is a hybrid, four-bladed broadhead that offers an outstanding balance of precision and power for bone-shattering effect when it hits a target.
In this Muzzy Trocar HB review, we’ll look at the positives and negatives, give our first impressions, talk about the design and weight considerations, and sum things up to help you decide if this is the right broadhead for your needs.
Pros & Cons
Pros:
- Significantly larger cutting surface than most competitors
- Has a hardened steel tip that can smash through bones
- Does not deform when striking hard surfaces
Cons:
- Arguably more complicated than necessary
- Takes some practice to master using
First Impression
The Muzzy Trocar HB broadhead immediately stands out from the competition by being visibly more complicated than its competitors.
We’ll talk more about its overall design in a moment, but you don’t need to be an expert to look at this broadhead side-by-side with others and see that it’s visibly fancier.
For experienced shooters, this design offers a significantly greater cutting surface than most of its competitors, which means more extensive entry wounds as well.
At 1-5/8″ cutting diameter, it’s large to start with, and its cutting surface is even higher than almost anyone else can offer.
In short, this broadhead is interesting, but does it hold up? Let’s talk about design.
Design and Performance
Most of them come in one of two major variants for those who aren’t familiar with broadheads.
Cut-on-contact blades are the closest to the traditional idea of an arrowhead and immediately begin cutting into the entry target. Chisel tips have a narrow, needle-like piercing tip before they start cutting.
This broadhead is a hybrid that has longer, fixed blades behind a chisel tip. What sets it apart is the fact that it also has two expandable blades that pop out when it enters the target, creating a more massive wound without affecting flight as much.
check priceAs experienced archers know, the flight and accuracy of an arrow is its most important quality. It doesn’t matter how fancy your broadhead is if you can’t hit your target (read.. fixed blade true flight Thunderhead).
This is the fundamental problem that modern broadheads face. A larger cutting surface means more significant wounds and more likelihood of dropping your target.
Still, that same cutting surface increases air resistance and makes it harder to land your hit on a good part of the target’s body.
Hybrid designs, like the one we’re talking about in this Muzzy Trocar HB review, try to have the best of both worlds.
Fewer exposed blades during flight mean more accuracy, while a larger cutting surface after hitting the target means better kill performance.
We like the hardened chisel tip on this broadhead, by the way. It offers a distinct advantage when striking bone, which is a real possibility when you’re targeting larger animals like elk.
Cut-on-contact blades have an edge, not a piercing tip, so they deflect more easily. Deflection can be a real problem with this broadhead.
Weight Considerations and Blade Quality
One of the fundamental elements of this Muzzy Trocar HB broadhead is the arrowhead’s weight because this impacts many of its components.
This particular broadhead is 100 grain, which is the industry standard for weight. However, we’d rather see this broadhead at 125 grains, and here’s why.
Most broadhead manufacturers prefer using standardized weights, regardless of the actual design of the arrowhead (read.. QAD Exodus Review).
Experienced archers know that weight changes can affect accuracy, so keeping weights the same minimizes the changes that archers have to deal with when changing broadheads.
The issue crops up when you’re trying to make an exceptionally complex broadhead without changing the weight.
If you have three blades instead of four, those three blades can be thicker or have a sturdier central shaft that prevents deforming.
More blades mean more cutting surface and, therefore, better wounds. However, more blades also mean the blades’ mass needs to come from somewhere else, which can thin and weaken the overall blade.
The Muzzy Trocar HB broadhead has two small levers on each side, right next to the expandable blades. These aren’t cutting tools. Instead, they trigger the pop-out blades.
However, they take away from the mass that could be elsewhere on the arrowhead, leading to the thinner design for each of the components.
None of this is to say that the Muzzy Trocar HB Hybrid 4 blade broadhead is a bad arrowhead. It’s not. In fact, it’s a stable and reliable broadhead overall, produced by one of the most well-known names in the industry.
That experience comes in handy when creating complicated broadheads, and I wouldn’t trust something from a new company.
Still, we don’t agree with everything they did for this broadhead, which means this is ultimately more complicated to discuss than it looks at first glance.
Muzzy Trocar HB Broadhead Review
Summary
Muzzy’s Trocar HB is a complex broadhead to review. Hybrid broadheads aren’t totally new to the market, but they’re still relatively rare and aren’t as popular as choices that are either fixed-heads or mechanical-only.
The good part of these broadheads is that they offer pinpoint accuracy, similar to a traditional field point head.
That’s the gold standard in the industry, and it’s a testament to Muzzy’s overall design expertise that they can make a broadhead that’s so complex and yet so accurate.
check priceIt’s also impressively durable for its complexity, though not as much as Muzzy wants you to believe. While it will cut organs and muscles just fine, you can expect some bending if you hit solid bone. These broadheads can’t guarantee a good blood trail, but they usually create one.
read.. what grain broadhead for deer
However, we still think these broadheads are a little light for their number of blades.
There’s something to be said for matching the weight most users prefer, but there’s a point where you can get better reliability and performance by going up to the next weight category.
Ultimately, that’s the deciding factor for this Muzzy Trocar HB review. It’s still a good product, and you probably won’t regret getting it.
Conversation | 2 comments:
What poundage would be recommended for this broadhead? My wife shoots 50lbs. What do you think?
mechanicals “consume” around 3 pounds of kinetic energy to open. I don’t know the setup/bow, but generally speaking, 50lbs should leave her with enough KE