Hi it's Tod of Tod's Workshop and Tod Cutler here and today we're back with
the lockdown longbow for more trials.
And what are we going to test today? Well the whole idea of these things is to go
in a purely medieval direction; we'll be looking at armour, we'll be
looking at shields, we'd be looking at hardened leather, gambeson's, all sorts of
stuff, but sometimes you get diverted. And I was
just setting up for the next film where I'm gonna
put some armour on to a ballast weight, a sandbag. And I just thought,
I remember a conversation I had with somebody a long time ago.
20 odd years ago I was teaching a girl who had lived through the siege of
Sarajevo. Hellish time, no politics please, not
interested in that; but she said after a while the front
lines stabilised and they put their water butts up and their sandbags and
everything else, and then somebody discovered, bows and
arrows shot through water butts and sandbags. And I
thought that is really interesting that war has
come in that environment, down to, yes guns and shells and all of that, but also
bows and arrows. I don't know the truth of it, but I don't
suppose she was lying to me she was there she had no reason to,
but either way I thought "you know what? I need to find this out"
So seeing as we're here, let's take our medieval arrow
off our 150 pound lock down longbow and shoot it through a sandbag.... or not
through a sandbag. Down on the range and ready to go and with
a job like this one nothing better than a Tod's Workshop
'tactical' t-shirt, so that's the one I'm wearing today.
Type nine armor piercing bodkin, apparently, we'll find out about that.
Oh! straight through! Let's do that again! Wow, that was like it wasn't even there, I
can't wait to have a look at the back of the target actually
and just see how convincingly it's gone into that boss.
Again! Spins it around the corner a little bit, but I mean
boy it's coming out the other end fast. Uh I'm not sure about firearms, it's not
my thing, but I do know a bag of sand does mess with the bullet coming out
the other end I think.
Wow and again that one skipped massively, so that's now about......
ah 30 meters, 30 paces behind the target. Let's go and have a look. Yeah, so I mean
as you can see, the line of direction should have been
in like that, so it's now off at one side, both of them maybe about
15 degrees, so I don't know, it's a function of it going through the bag.
But I mean it's just so gone through. And come look at this! So what we've got
here are the points coming through 25 mm something like that, an inch,
absolutely convincingly, if that is coming through the back of that boss
that striking the front of the boss from uh well from my own
empirical guess, with around about let's say,
70 joules of energy plenty plenty enough. I would expect that off a pretty
powerful medieval crossbow maybe a 600 pounder
so that that's that is impressive that is really impressive.
So thank you girl from Sarajevo, I've forgotten your name whoever you were, I'm
afraid. But that was really interesting
Well I'm back and I am so glad that I did that actually I took that little
diversion, because that was.... I loved it, loved it! I kind of expected
it, because actually I believed that girl that I met,
she had no reason to lie, but I wasn't expecting it like that! I mean it went in
as we know with about 130 joules of energy, something like that.
But to poke out the back of the boss, empirically from my experience with
crossbows and that sort of thing, I reckon you're
talking about 70 odd joules left in the arrow after passing through
the sandbag to get through there and 70 joules
is a lot, that's a lot. So that's probably the same as a
hundred pound long bow.... something like that 100 or 110 maybe that kind of area.
So it's still a powerful projectile coming out the back.
Really interesting. But I originally set that up to do some armour tests, so
let's go do some of that. See you next time. Thanks