The best experts in manufacturing blowpipes can make up ten in a year, transforming their ability into a source of exchange values. Although this exchange value has course inside the Achuar group in reason of the individual differences in the quality of execution of the blowpipes, its production is dedicated mainly to the intertribal trade. Indeed, the neighboring indigenous groups of the Achuar (Shuar and Cañelos) also use blowpipes, although for several reasons they have stopped to manufacture them themselves. The Achuar blowpipes enjoy an excellent fame and they are very appreciated by those bordering ethnics with an important demand for it. To the north of the Pastaza, for example, the blowpipes constitute the main mean of payment by which the Achuar acquires manufactured goods from Cañelos Indians. It should be noticed that this specialization conferred the Achuar in the regional division of the work is founded rather in socioeconomic factors that technical ones. As it happens many times in the intertribal trade in Amazon, the shortage of a product is raised artificially to cause the necessity of an exchange. The materials and the necessary ability to make the blowpipes have not disappeared neither among the Shuar neither among the Cañelos; they simply find more comfortable to acquire of their neighbors a handmade product of excellent quality, at a very low cost, since these groups are the forced middlemen between the Achuar and the centers of commercialization of the manufactured products.

The projectiles used in the blowpipe are fine and very pointed arrows, of about thirty centimeters long, called tsentsak. They are elaborated with the thick fibers of the palms Kinchuk (Phytelephas sp.) and Iniayua (regal Maximiliana). Once gotten the material, the making of the tsentsak is an easy operation; some forty can be manufactured in two hours. Those arrows are very economic to use and a hunter doesn't need to save their projectiles. As the section of these tsensak is inferior to that of the corel of the blowpipe, hunter wraps up its extremity with wool of kapok to form a rhomboid that plugs the conduit completely when they are introduced in a shot position. The arrows are placed in a small quiver (tunta) that the hunter keeps. This quiver is constituted of a bamboo segment (Guadua angustifolia) inside which is a sheaf (chipiat) with a series of thin sheets cut in the leaf of kinchuk palm and tied one to the other. This sheaf is quite dense and introduced arrows stay in vertical position without swinging when walking. A round pumpkin, mati (Crescentia cujete), is tied to the quiver; emptied and perforated, it serves to keep a small reserve of kapok wool for the making of the tacos. Around the pumpkin end is wrapped a long and flexible twig, japik that is used to clean the core of the blowpipe. The last accessory of the tunta is a half of inferior jaw of piraña suspended by a cotton thread. The teeth of that fish are sharp like a shaving blade and it allows making a small cut exactly under the pointed extremity of the arrow. This disposition is very ingenious, because when a monkey receives an arrow anointed with curare, his reaction is to pull up the projectile; if it has a small notch it will break off and the tip will be planted in the animal the necessary time so that the poison acts.

As most of the Achuar utensils, the blowpipe and the quiver are objects of a very elegant simplicity and their sober beauty is the product of a perfect adaptation between a form and a function. Those works of art are particularly well adapted to their use and the ballistic qualities of the blowpipe converts it a terribly efficient hunting weapon. The aim can be very precise since the weapon is endowed with a small excrescence that serves as rise located some thirty centimeters from the tip. Series of tests using famous hunters has allowed measuring the effectiveness of the blowpipe shot. In horizontal shot, the useful range of the projectiles is of about fifty meters. This range is very sufficient for the hunt, because in jungle, few times one has such a distance to reach a pray without finding obstacles in the trajectory. The precision of the blowpipe is also very satisfactory, since the great majority of the hunters hit a target of twenty centimeters of diameter at a distance of thirty meters. Silent, precise and of economic use, the blowpipe perhaps is the best traditional weapon adapted to the small hunt in the forest.

In spite of their own qualities, the blowpipe probably would be of a marginal use if its effectiveness was not multiplied by the use of curare with which are anointed tips of arrows. I will use curare as a generic name that serves to designate the hunt poisons used by the Amerindian societies and, in that quality, it covers a multiplicity of different toxic preparations, generally prepared from plants of the type Strychnos. The Achuar curare (tseas) it is always prepared starting from the two same fundamental ingredients: the liana machapi (Phoebe sp.) and the fruits of the tree painkish (Strychnos jobertiana). To increase the force of the poison, some hunters add to these two substances other taken out of vegetable elements of a half dozen of non identified plants: yarir, tsaweimiar, nakapur, tsarurpatin, kayaipi and tsukanka inial. Each man possesses his own, generally inherited formula, and those that manufacture more effective curare conserve the secret of his composition zealously. But the dominant active principle of the tseas is always the strychnine, the same one that causes a violent tetanización and then, a widespread paralysis, causing the death by asphyxiation.