All right, so it has arrived here is the giant crossbow. Requires a windlass to span this is a
15 century model and
Today, I'm just gonna try it out for the first time
It's not gonna be too much in the way of armor testing yet. I've got some
padded armor pieces and I'm gonna
Take shot at but there will be a lot more so right now
it's just general operation and how it performs and all that and of course a
Big thank you once again to everybody who contributed to the fundraiser, so this is pretty awesome
This is how the windlass works a bit more of a process
Compared to the other crossbow with the goats foot leaver
But you know you're getting a little more power of course
All right since it is the first day
shooting it I don't know yet where to aim and how and blah, it's
probably a little different from the other crossbow and
Operation and all it's not going to be quite as smooth yet, but we'll survive
Definitely is loud enough to suggest that hearing protection might be a good idea
because even if it's not
Unbearably loud or anything like that. It's, it'll still wear down your hearing over time
In a previous video I shot a gambeson or rather a modern
interpretation of a gambeson with another bow made by Todd this one with a draw weight of
350 pounds I couldn't fit it over the target so this ended up being two layers
So unusually thick the bolts bounced right off at least the ones with points
There are somewhat more similar to field tips the broad head did achieve some penetration, but didn't go very far
It was also tested on butted and riveted mail the bolt pierced the butted mail but bounced off the double layer of gambeson and
Didn't do much against riveted mail at all. This time
I didn't have the same gambeson with me so for consistency at some point,
I'll have to redo the test with the same bolts and the same piece of gambeson
But for now, this is just to see how this crossbow with a needle bodkin bolt performs against one layer of fairly simple lightweight padding.
All right, so it hit close to a previous cut but this spot right there. I don't think was damaged before
Let's take a look
It's interesting how it bunched up here yeah, that's
Quite a bit that went in it definitely was not one of those cuts that went all the way through
Surprisingly easy to get out, and it was, yeah, previously undamaged
Right here, so that's good
Yeah that rips right through, although it didn't get quite as far as I thought it might
So even though this piece looks quite torn up that spot that was just here it was undamaged that's good. Oh
Yeah, it buried itself quite deeply
For comparison, this is a modern compound crossbow, and this is not a fair comparison
It's more of a fun comparison because these these bolts here are far lighter
Lighter and the points are smaller, so there is a lot less resistance and
Of course
Far higher velocity on this one because it's more, way more, mechanically efficient, and of course. This is way easier to aim
I can quite easily say
bottom left...
And It'll hit just there.
Also note in the slow-mo footage how much slower the heavier wooden bolt flies and how much it makes the cloth cave in compared to
The fast lightweight carbon bolt so yeah, I said not a fair comparison
But just kind of fun to see the difference here
Yeah, it's that way
Smaller contact surface much higher speed so this wood just drilled right in
Whereas the, the other bolt will disperse more energy so it will
Technically deliver more of the momentum to the target, but it'll spread it out more
If you're wondering how hard it is to span this crossbow the mechanical advantage of the windlass makes it fairly easy
It's only towards the end where the resistance gets a little higher, but it's not difficult although
I can say after half a day of doing this over and over again
I did feel it in the arms and back a little bit.
Well that was close but not quite
Well that
Drop placement goes a bit unfortunate. It didn't actually get the mail even though it looked very close really is a small target
So the difficulty with aiming here is because you don't have sights you have to put the tip of the bolt a certain point above
or below the target depending on the distance and
The smaller the target is the harder it is to find a reference point to adjust if you're off by just a little bit
All right there we go
So that finally hit it
Right in the center where I want it
Well that's what this type of point is perfect for it
likely finds its way through one of the Ring spreads it open and then it can drive right through and
Yeah, as we can see
riveted mail on top of the gambeson
is not enough against a 15th century windlass crossbow with this sort of
draw weight
See if I can get this off. There we go, okay. Here's a close-up of the damage
It's a nice, neat
hole punched through and we've got
Damaged ring sticking out here
There's another one
I mean,
I'm pretty sure this limits the penetration the bolt can achieve, but
yeah, I don't think this is survivable depending on where it hits.
All right, so how about sturdier padded armor?
I've got the padded jack set up on the target,
and we'll see how that goes. It should be pretty tough material, I mean, I know it is. It took
Very sharp swords and good technique to get through that.
But then again,
The needle bodkin once again should prevail, I think. Let's see what we get here
much larger target way easier
Okay, that's pretty impressive
Now it's certainly limited the penetration compared to having no Armour, quite
significantly in fact
See how much we have here.
Oh wow, that's
That's pretty stuck
Alright so about this much, which is
You know pretty good
But I mean with no armour this would bury itself up to the
the flights so
There's a close-up
This is really sturdy material
plenty of layers
of cotton and linen
So it's not easy to penetrate at all. Now one thing you should keep in mind is that this is
Comparatively short distance. This was only about 10 meters
Not exactly battlefield distance in general so over longer distances of course the bolt would lose quite a bit of kinetic energy
Testing this on the other hand would be rather difficult
I don't think I could hit a target like this at a hundred meters or even 50 meters
Whereas on a battlefield you have this entire mass of people that you can aim at and you're gonna hit
Something you can just essentially shoot in the general direction
It's not that hard to hit something
I Think I'm getting better with it, the loading. Practice, practice practice
Well so unfortunately this hit where there was a previous sword cut but this cut didn't go very far didn't go all the way and
This still also hit areas around it.
So I'm just gonna have to leave it at that, it's getting late today
but I
Can see
The needle Botkin is actually more effective than this
Which is surprising I expected this to go further because it can cut potentially I mean
It's probably too dull for that
But it's also nice and thin, but then again it gets pretty wide
So yeah there is that.
More tests to come by the way one of the most time-consuming things and that day was digging for bolts
I didn't want to shoot at the regular target stands because due to the power of the crossbow if the bolt hits wood or even
Just styrofoam. It's really hard to get it out almost impossible, so instead I shot at the broad head pit and well
They really drill far into it. I was happy to have a folding shovel with me anyway
I hope you enjoyed the video and thanks for watching