Hi it's Tod of Tod's Workshop and Tod Cutler here and I'm back with the Lockdown Longbow,
so my longbow simulator that shoots medieval weight arrows at the right speed for a heavyweight
English longbow. It allows me to do all sorts of tests and answer burning questions like here's
one; "if you're an escaped prisoner in 1410 on the castle battlements, can you jump into the moat
swim away and not get shot by the longbowmen". Because what does happen when you shoot arrows
through water? Well the thing is I am a lucky guy. I've got a very lovely tolerant wife,
I've got a Lockdown Longbow, I've got a YouTube channel to do this stuff on and I've got a
swimming pool. So let's go find out what happens to arrows underwater. Let's go shoot some stuff.
I'm back on the range now with type 9 bodkins, I swapped them out for the 7's, the needle bodkins.
I think these might be less likely to go through that plywood stack behind me and I have a lovely
wife, but there are limits to how lovely she is and I think a hole through her swimming pool
is going to test her. So we're going to shoot now and see, at four and a half meters, same
distance I'm gonna shoot into the pool from, how these perform on those boards in the dry and then
we're going to do it under water and see how they perform. Underwater the distance that they will
be traveling through the water is about two and a half meters to give you an idea, right let's go.
Quite a bit of kick up on that.
That's interesting. I haven't really noticed that before,
a little bit on the slo-mo, but I didn't realise quite so nasty. Actually
straightens shortly, but at four and a half meters not so good.
Right so here we go. They've all done exactly the same, which is 18 cm, because they've gone through
the front board, the second board with the gap and they've just poked out the back of the 18 mm board
at the back and that's where they've stopped and I'm not going to kill my pool which is very good
news. So now what we've got to do is take this stack up to the swimming pool, drop it inn shoot
it, find out what happens. Will the guy live? Will he die? Who knows? Here we are down at the range,
a little bit different to normal, it's a swimming pool, this is going to allow us to shoot through a
couple of meters of water and just see if there's any energy left in these arrows after doing that.
Is it going to do anything? Are they just going to float? Who knows? Let's shoot something!
First one's in and that is certainly in there, is no doubt about that.
So this time I'm going to go for a lower, longer shot, getting a bit braver
because the swimming poll still seems to be in one piece.
You can't see from that angle, but I'll bring the camera around in a moment, but I can tell you,
looking at this, that it is definitely taking a lot of the sting out of these shots. Here are
three boards coming in, fat one at the back, it's a bit blurry, it's a bit difficult to get
in focus, but you can see none of them have even touched the backboard, so a lot of force has been
taken out of them, but then one of them hasn't even penetrated the back of the second 12 mm
and they went through all of it before, so really it's taken a lot out of these arrows.
Looking at the back of the board now, this is the second one, not the third one,
so this one I don't think even touched the third board, that was well clear from it and this little
pimple down here is the third arrow which didn't even make it through the second board.
So it has really taken a great deal of energy out of this, but let's go and have a quick chat about
it back at base. Back from the swimming pool with my very soggy looking arrows;
so at least we now know what they look like if they've been underwater.
At the start of the film I said these will go through about two and a half meters of water,
that wasn't the case actually, it's probably more like one and a half meters,
but it made a really dramatic difference to the way they went. So previously out in the open air
those arrows had punched through two 12 mil boards and all the way through, just peeking out the back
of the 18 mm. This time two of them certainly didn't even touch the 18 mm, one of them may
have just touched it. One didn't even get through the second 12 mm, so it really did take an awful
lot of energy out of it. Now part of that might have been that the wood had soaked up some water,
but I was conscious of that, so I was very quick about getting the boards in and then
doing my shooting, they weren't there for hours. But really that's kind of our answer;
is that at a meter and a half, you're still going to be in big trouble, obviously but it is taking
a lot of the velocity and therefore the energy out of the arrows' travel very, very rapidly. So
would you be safe at a meter and a half? Clearly not, but you are going to be better off than on
the surface and is it going to be worth those guys shooting at you down from the battlements? Because
they may well get you. Well I hope you've enjoyed this film; on the surface it seems like a really
pointless thing shooting arrows into water, but what it does, the whole purpose of these Lockdown
Longbow films is to build a picture around bows, of what they can and what they cannot do
and this is just part of fluffing out that picture and expanding our knowledge of this whole thing.
So there's going to be some more in-depth ones, but there's also going to be little
frivolous ones like this. It's fun. Let's just carry on doing it; let's just shoot stuff.