I made up six tapered arrows recently using my metal lathe. I had to centre drill the ends so that I could support each in turn on a live centre during turning. I tapered the shafts in sections of varying degrees leaving a 5 inch centre section at full shaft width. See the following - scale exaggerated:


After painting and fletching the arrows looked like this:


I believe the shafts were the standard 23/64" dia shafts but I'll have to give measurements in mms - sorry. The diameter at the nock was: 6.5mm; centre diameter was:8.7mm; diameter at point: 5.5mm. As you can see the tapers are quite marked. I could see much point in tapering just 1/32 " at each end. The tapers I ended up with were about 1/8" at the point and a bit over 1/16" at the nock (for greater strength).

They fly very well and gave me nearly 40m better range than the untapered shafts, which surprised me a bit.

I believe, however, that the Pink One's way of doing it is better using a tpered channel and small wood plane, followed by sanding. Easier to control things this way and probably just as accurate.