Oh I so have to show you that.
Hi it's Tod from Tod's Workshop and Tod Cutler here and today I'm back with the bushcraft
survival crossbow this beautiful, ugly thing that I made using only Tod Cutler bushcraft knives and
now with these three improved lovely bolts for it.
Now what I'm going to do is, well I'll talk you through the modifications on this, because this
is a little bit different the last time you saw it, but we'll do that when we go and shoot these
later on the range, but what's really important is in a survival situation you have to make do with
what you've got, what you can find. Now you might be in the middle of a city, zombies,
you might be in the middle of nowhere, there might be a few little bits and pieces around,
I don't know what your situation is, you could be in the jungle, you could be in the desert,
what you need to know is how these things work and why they do what they do, because you you know,
you're intelligent people, you're bush crafters, you are used to making do and mending, but if you
don't actually get what this is and how it works and how it functions, you can't help yourself. So
it's the old thing about "give a man to a fish and he eats for a day, teach a man to fish and he eats
forever" and that's what this is about. This is about teaching you how to make these things; I'm
not going to individually craft each one, I'm not going to show you that part of it because I think
you can do that and there's loads of internet things about that, loads of YouTube films,
but what there's not so much about is how they work and what they do and crossbows, you know,
not in the whole bushcraft situation, but in the reality, it is my job. I make these things, I get
it. Now before we begin I'm going to show you this modern crossbow bolt, now the first thing I'll say
is it has three fletchings on it, you're probably all very familiar with that,
but of course there is no central groove on our bow that we've made in the woods,
so you can't have three fletchings you have to have two, one just sticking out side to side
basically like the old school crossbow bolts were back in the medieval times.
So I'm going to put this down and then we're going to talk you through the modern one;
now this is of course a crossbow bolt it has a completely straight shaft on it,
beautiful carbon fibre, straight shaft, three fletchings which have been put on absolutely
straight and a head which doesn't have to be that heavy. We're going to come to the
role of heads in a little bit, but you've got a little head there doesn't weigh very much,
don't know how much 125 grains something like that a couple of grams, but that's all you need because
everything about this is perfect. Now I know you guys are great out there,
but I can promise you the bolts you're going to be making are not going to be perfect, so we're
going to put that one aside and we're going to talk about what we are going to make. I have
three different crossbow bolts here that have all been made in different ways, different materials,
but look at the fletchings on those we're going to come to those and talk about them later
and the same we'll talk about the heads later on as well. Now whichever bolt or
arrow you choose the layout is the same of course you have a head, you have a shaft,
you have some fletchings and they all do different things and we're going to talk about all of them
but we're going to start with the head. Now rather obviously you want it to inflict the damage on the
prey that you're you're hunting so whether it is the edges of a broadhead or a carved bonehead or
a long wooden point like this one which would be really good against birds for instance, it doesn't
really matter what it is, but you are carrying the offensive element of your arrow on the point.
Now that's true of all of them, but it has another function and that is to add some
mass onto the front and you want the mass because when you push this arrow, this bolt from behind
it's inherently unstable, it's it's like having a long stick and pushing it it wants to topple over,
but you put a bit of weight on the end and actually it's harder to topple over it's inertia,
it doesn't want to start it moving off in a different direction it wants to carry on in
the straight line and so you put a bit of weight on the front and that just dampens the whole thing
down, it just slows it down and stops it being so twitchy and it allows your fletchings or
your dragging element at the back to just correct the course and to keep it in a straight line,
so that's why you have mass on the front not just cutting edges. Now you want to
achieve that up front mass however you can do it, but you need to put something on there
so this one here is very simply just a larger stick which i've whittled down
drilled a hole in the back bonded it in with a bit of pine resin, here is the tip of a horn which
I've found, this one I've actually tied it on with some cordage because I've, you know figured maybe
you don't always have glue that you've made, this one I've actually used a dense wood, it's boxwood,
so this is probably the lightest of them but still you know, it now is actually relatively hard,
you could even fire harden that. We're going to do some penetration tests later on on some meat.
A little bit of bone so that's going to be really quite an evil head
and then again an antler tine, so however you choose to add weight onto the front of your arrow,
add weight on, you need it. There's a very simple demonstration of what it
means to put mass on the end of a shaft and effectively the inertia that that creates,
so I've got 14 inches, 35 centimeters of arrow shaft here, I'm going to balance it.
Not that easy; get a bit of bit of weight on the end....
A lot easier and that is all it is same shaft with a bit of weight, the head does
exactly the same thing, it inherently dampens, softens keeps everything a lot more stable.
And now we're going to have a look at our arrow shaft or bolt shaft and the role this plays
in the projectile, so put it down. And we're back to balancing our shaft again. Now you might not
realize the similarity between this and pushing it but of course if you are although I'm doing
that vertically if you're pushing an arrow with a string it's essentially just like balancing
on the back end, it's the same process in essence, so again you can see I have to,
i have to work quite hard to get that to balance, this is a much longer one and now I should.....
be able to balance it much much better and that doesn't have a weight on the end. So this time
it's two plain arrow shafts but the longer one balances better and this comes down exactly to
crossbow bolts and arrows is if you have a really short crossbow bolt it has to be so perfectly made
because otherwise it just unbalances and it doesn't go straight, so the bottom line is in
a survival situation make your arrows, make your crossbow bolts longer, they will be more stable.
The last thing I'd like to say about the shaft on your bolt is that it's essentially just a spacer,
it's a spacer between the mass of your head and the drag of your fletchings or the stabilization
of fletchings, we're going to come to that in a minute. When I made these shafts,
I started with beach twigs like this one here which is, well not really very straight,
so I heat bent them and I think it's a really important thing for you to know how to do and why
you're doing it and how you go about it, so come and have a look in the workshop and I'll show you
how we turn to that, into things like that. Well I'm here to heat bend my shafts now and as you
can tell this is not a lovely fire in the woods being England of course it started to rain the
moment I wanted to go out there, but this is heat and it's the same thing as a fire in the woods,
so basically what you're trying to do is warm up the moisture, warm up the fibres of the wood
and that allows it to become flexible and you can bend it, you can bend it to your will; as it cools
down it will then be a bit straighter than it once was and then you can do the whole process again.
If your arrow shafts are already bone dry then what you can do is wipe them over with a bit of
water because the conductivity of the water and just dampening the wood slightly really
helps the heat to get into the center and that's what you're trying to do you're trying to get the
heat into the fibers of the wood and that's what will allow you to bend it and indeed for it to
take a set and that's what you want, you just want it to stay straight. So as you can see
it's not great, but it's not too bad at the moment definite kink here, you can see it on
the end there, so I'm just going to warm up this bit and then we'll try and bend it straight.
So what you do, you do your first one, you won't get it perfect, go do your second, do your third,
then come back to your first one again and just start to, just start to bend out any bits,
make them straight. So I'm going to put that down now, I'll start with my next one
There's a challenge and for the record this is beech.
Look at that, that's going to take a bit of work.
So look how flexible it is now and that's just with a bit of heat, we'll get these straight
and we'll see you in a minute. We're back to talk about fletchings, these things on the end,
but I guess you knew that! Now this is something that's interesting that you might not realize,
you do not have to fletch arrows with feathers right, so you can fletch with feathers,
but there's certainly indigenous tribes who fletch theirs with leaves and that works just fine,
but you can also do it with just a bit of fluff, old rope, bits of threads off your shirt;
in the case of this one, seed pods from grass. All of these things are creating a little bit of
drag on the back and what that does, only a little bit of drag, but what that does is as you can see
there it's traveling now straight towards you, right. Great it's stable, if it starts to rise
now, if you look at all this fluff at the back here it's now presenting more of itself
into the wind direction, the air direction and so the air pushes it back up and it naturally wants
to stabilize, it goes the other way, stabilizes, less so from side to side with the crossbow bolt
because you've only got the two fletchings but it still does it to a certain extent,
so the fact is you might have fin stabilization on a really nice thing like a modern crossbow bolt
but it's actually difficult to achieve because these fins are never going to be perfect so really
what you're relying more on is a bit of drag and what it means by having a bit of drag is having
something on the end of your shaft and don't get too hung up on how perfect it is.
We'll shoot these. Let's go shoot them now and we'll show you
what they do. I'm down on the range now and the first test has to be does it even penetrate flesh,
because when I first showed this bushcraft crossbow, I made it in an afternoon from
the wood that was just available around me here, so I didn't select the best stuff,
but actually go back, go back if you haven't seen it, go back to the first film
you can see how I craft this thing using only Tod Cutler bushcraft knives that was it,
but now what I've done is I've swapped it out for another bow that's made exactly the same way,
there's no difference in how it was done, this one was actually by a friend of mine, Joe Gibbs,
amazing archer, for a different project of mine, but the technology is the same, you could do this,
it's just a piece of ash drawing about 55 pounds, something like that, so here is the question,
will it penetrate? Oh it's a bit Matt Easton
So it's definitely a bit harder to draw, so first up we have a horn point
and my grass seed fletchings, does it penetrate?
Yes it does! Well that does the job doesn't it?
Right let's go again with the next one, boxwood does it penetrate?
Yes it does! I think we're getting the picture here right.
Well I suppose I might be able to squeeze one in with this last one which is a bit of black thorn,
it's sort of more for birding really is what I made it for, but let's see.
Well you can get the idea from that, it really does work,
so we're going to shoot it again for distance and see how it goes.
Oh I so have to show you that, look it was Robin Hooded - brilliant. I wasn't expecting this, hang
on I may be some time. Oh there we go, uh yeah got a bit mangled at the end; can you see that? But uh
well it works. Down on the range now at around, I don't know 12/14 meters, something like that,
I doubt you're ever going to want this to use this bow for more than that, but I'll talk you
through the bolts now. So three different bolts made in three different ways. So the first one
a horn tip, it's just got a ridge on it and it's been lashed on so that's been drilled
deep enough to take the shaft in case you don't have any glue, can't get any glue, can't make it,
this one just whittled down, uh just a bit of black thorn I think, drilled out and then
glued with a pitch pine glue. Again this one, the shaft has been split and the tang of the boxwood
head pushed in a whole lot over wrapped with the pitch pine glue and and string. Making string,
making pitch pine glue, that sort of thing I'm no expert on that and I can just watch some
videos and come and tell you, but it's just like second-hand information, it's a waste of time.
Go and look at people like, I know, Survival Lilly, I really like her stuff,
she covers all these things, go and have a look at what she does it's really good.
But then we come to the other end here, this is actually a bay leaf, so you can season dinner
afterwards so the shaft has just been split and then just tied on in place here you've got to
get it right up at the knock end here because otherwise the string of the bow will split it.
Pitch pine glue again and some pigeon feathers and then this one is just grass seeds,
some fluffy grass seeds that have just been tied on in a couple of places
just to create a sort of a drag generator really, so let's go shoot them. Bay leaf and boxwood.
Oh not bad, so that veered a little bit to the right, might be the bolt, might be my shooting,
but you know this is the first time I've really shot this bow in this configuration. These
all take a bit of learning but it wasn't a bad shot. Horn tip, fluffy grass for the fletchings.
Oh that was just under, I mean literally just under, so you know you might laugh at
those fluffy fletchings, but they really work; so we'll go again.
And just over, so yes not brilliant but actually it is the first time I shot it with
three different bolts so we'll go again, but I think that's pretty respectable. Right round two.
Some people ask if there are any advantages over a crossbow and a bow
well you can shoot from cover with a crossbow and that can be quite useful
because you can leave it spanned and loaded and the only thing that moves is your finger.
Bit high.
Just missed it, but you know that's pretty pretty good, fluffy grass
and horn, this is my, I think this is my favourite one.
Oh that was good, that was like genuinely good, so I think we're going to go again
on that. Right last up and then back to base to conclude. Oh that far! That far!
oh
Well no dinner for me today, but let's go back to base. Thanks so much for watching
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