Hi it's Tod of Tod's Workshop and Tod Cutler here and today we're back for a film
about bouncing arrows. These things. I only came across them a few days ago and they are just
fabulous, so I'm going to shoot one now, just on my newly flooded field here, just on the water's
edge. We'll have a look at it and we'll come back, we'll talk about it and then we will test
them for real and really see what these things do because they are seriously interesting. Down
on the range now for our first shots. Let's just send some over there see what they do,
really do. I have to squat right down and shoot them low; can I do it standing? Let's have a look.
Oh that was okay, that was shooting low down. I'm gonna try one standing up now let's see how we go.
So that did about 50,60 meters and it probably impacted
at about the 30 meter mark, so let's give that a go again.
Right just going to shoot our last one now and
I just love these bouncing arrows. I've never seen anything like them.
Just missed my GoPro out there; good stuff. Right let's go collect, we'll go back to base,
I'll have a quick chat about them. I just loved what I saw there, I didn't think for
a moment it was going to work as well as it did. I saw them a couple of days ago on a
fantastic channel called Ugri Archer, I'll put a link in the notes, so thank you for that. Now
I've been involved with bouncing munitions across water before, so I'm just going to show
you this little clip here from a documentary I was involved in years ago where I made the airgun and
the bomb and the deployment system for a scale model of Barnes Wallace's bouncing bomb from the
second world war. Now that bounces, but it bounces in a completely different way to these arrows
because what it's doing is it's spinning the bomb in a backwards motion to its direction of travel,
that allows it to skip very successfully. Obviously when you skim a stone
it's spinning it in a different orientation, that way around, spinning it in a different
orientation and again it bounces. Brilliant, not the mechanism here. These ones they hit
the water and effectively because the water is quite hard at speed, in essence they bounce off,
but not this first one. Not that one. That one plowed straight in,
not that dissimilar in shape to the others, but different enough it didn't even think
about working. Now that's the thing about looking at what native peoples do. So these were used in
northern Scandinavia, Arctic Circle I guess, going through Siberia and I think through into
Asia. Not really sure and I don't think that many people know really, but it's all to do with the
head shape. So the next one I used here was much blunter and much more like a modern torpedo nose,
so it doesn't plough in so much and it worked, but not brilliantly, so I went back to really study
rather than just out my head, really study the shape of the native peoples ones and it's this one
here, it's really particular. It comes to maybe about third distance then a little ridge and then
it comes back fairly steep, definitely not in that sense streamlined like you might consider this one
and it just worked brilliantly, straight off, just a little rough turning. Wham! Out there
maybe eight bounces or something, so I came back, I made nicer ones with a bone forked head
and that's where we ended up. Now then we're gonna go duck hunting because that's what these are
really for, wildfowl on water and that's what's really interesting about the difference between
these two. This one here has a singular point so if your birds for instance are near the edge of
reeds or something like that, this one hits the water bounces beautifully does all that bounce,
bounce into the reed bed, gone. The forked one comes along, hits the water, bounce, bounce,
bounce hits duck, brilliant. Misses the duck, hits the reed bed, stops because it binds up on
the reeds and that way you could find the arrow again because it's right on the edge of the reed
bed. It's not buried 20 meters,10 meters, five meters, somewhere in the undergrowth over there.
Absolutely perfect solution to the problem of what happens when you're shooting birds close to
the edge. Now the thing that we have not talked about yet is why do we want a bouncing arrow
when we're shooting birds on water? Let's go duck hunting and we'll have a look and we'll find out.
Just nocking up for my first shot here on a beautiful little Italian medieval style bow by
Chris Boyton who is very unfortunately no longer with us, but I just love this, it's beautiful,
about 60 pounds, bit under maybe. Our ducks are about 40 meters here we go.
Did I get one? I don't know let's find out.
Skipped over their heads. Right there's a big
group of them on the right hand side I'm going to go for those.
Oh got one!
They work right. I'm going to reset, we'll go again because it's fun. Why not? Well rubber ducks
are a hard prey it appears, so a couple of these are broken,
but they'll still work well enough for the demo.
Now my shot was accurate enough actually,
but it hit the water and bounced off to one side, whether it's because of the breakage or
whatever, I don't know, but that's probably going to be fairly indicative that they're not super
accurate because as soon as they interact with something else, it all goes to pap.
Oh and that one skidded mightily off to the left, actually
it was not a bad shot, but it hit the water and it turned into a bad shot.
One duck, but you know that's interesting because that explains a lot about why we want the bouncing
arrows, but we're gonna come back to that. I'm going to go again for our poor innocent ducklings.
Interesting, I think that my distance is just a little bit too great here,
uh maybe 25 meters? It's hitting and the angle of incidence is too much and they're plowing in;
I'm gonna go for another and see if it's doing the same.
No, I'm completely talking gibberish, it bounced beautifully, I don't know maybe it's just chance,
maybe they just don't work every time and i've been lucky up to now.
Yeah, again bounced beautifully, missed the ducks, let's run again.
Ah just bounced over, oh what another one, it's just, oh just like that much over, that much over.
Yes, no, no plowed into the ground, just before it. Hmm. Oh lovely, lovely, lovely.
Oh just between them. Oh my goodness me! What have I learned about bouncing arrows today? Well quite
a lot. And the first is absolutely they are fun, they are great fun. I couldn't leave those little
rubber ducks alone even though as you can tell they are pretty hard targets for these bone tips,
uh and I've trashed every single one of these, but at the end I'm going to put up a drawing, give
the dimensions, so you can go and make your own based on these ones here if that's what you want.
That's the first thing; second thing, really interesting is at the beginning I stood and
I shot just as I regularly would and they work beautifully and after about 45 minutes of filming
they just started diving into the water and I don't know if they soaked up water and they
changed the mass distribution or something, but something went wrong. And now you can rectify
that actually by getting very low to the water, so when they're dry, brand new out of your hut,
your workshop, whatever, the angle of incidence can actually be relatively steep and they bounce,
but as they get wetter for whatever reason, come on you explain it to me, I don't know,
for whatever reason as they get wetter you have to bring the angle of incidence down or they just
don't bounce, but then they bounce beautifully. Then we come to the final part of all of this.
Why do we even care if arrows bounce? Neat trick, great. Looks pretty, so what? Well it's genius, it
is absolute genius, because a target that is flat on a lake or on the ground is difficult to hit,
you know, a small target it's hard to hit like that, it's just, all you archers out there will
know it, but if you have a flock of birds, one individual bird might be quite difficult to hit,
but as you saw with the ducks there, the arrows might bounce over, they might go between, but
the thing is if you've got 50 birds out there it's going to strike something, or stands a really good
chance of striking something, so the fact that it just keeps on going and skimming across the water
just massively, massively magnifies the chance of striking something and that, if you're a
subsistence hunter, is just a dream come true. So the people who invented this, whoever, whenever,
presumably a long time ago, were just so clever, so clever, but the thing that I couldn't show you
was the forked tips hitting vegetation. I really wanted to do that, and stupidly I should have
tested that first, but it turns out rubber ducks are a much harder target than I was expecting
and all of my arrow tips got broken on the ducks, so I couldn't show you that, but take my word for
it that when a forked tip strikes on vegetation like that, it comes to a very rapid stop.
Now just as a little addendum to this film, two years ago I did a film about
medieval arrow heads and one of the ones I was discussing were these forked heads like this one.
Now at the time I didn't know what they were for, I'd heard sort of rumours that they were
for birding and so on but there was nothing really conclusive, but I think we can now absolutely say
as far as I'm concerned that these are for birds, but what is also interesting is I think they are
exactly the same as these. That birds live in bushes on the ground, in grass and so on,
you shoot at them, yeah you're going to hit the bird with this and it's going to damage it, but
the arrow doesn't travel that far and you stand a really good chance of recovering it and I suspect
that more than any other function, the curved nature of these heads is exactly for that. It
just helps to stop you losing your arrows, but small game, it's still enough to beat the hell
out of it and kill it basically. Anyway thank you very much. Bouncing arrows; absolutely love them.
Go and make them, go and mess about with them; they are brilliant. Thank you.