Hi it's Tod of Tod's Workshop and Tod Cutler here and today we're going to
have a look at this windlass bow but more specifically these two bolt heads
so this bow on 860 pounds so it's quite chunky but I'm just going to pop it down
that's the draw weight not actual weight you'd be amazed what people ask.
So we have two bolt heads here, we have a traditional bodkin head which is just
slightly lozenge shaped this one weighs in at about 65 grams I think so two and a half
ounces approximately on an Ash shaft with nice curved flights on it here set
helically and with a wing section which is normal for these kind of bows now
this one is a broad head, Swallowtail, it's very broad, now the shaft length is
quite short and what that means is that the head starts to steer the bolt shaft
itself so that you can get away with this on a longer hunting arrow like on a
longbow arrow but on a short bolt it starts to steer the bolt and so we're
going to shoot this in slo-mo and we're just gonna have a look at how this
behaves compared to the bodkin now you do see in artwork big heads like this
and you see them there a lot but I wonder if they're just telling the story
that there's barbed heads there because in my experience smaller barbed heads
like that one so you can see the size difference these will work fine on a
bolt obviously they work fine on arrows but this one it struggles a bit with the
steering of the bolt and getting it to fly straight so let's just have a look
see what it does
and here we have it so the distance was about seven meters the short bodkin
it's gone off-centre that's my lousy shooting by about six or seven
centimetres the Swallowtail on the other hand it seemed to start all right and then
you could see veering off and it just started to rise and it started to go
left if that had been a decent distance, 20 or 30 meters, that would hit absolutely
nothing, so I think we can assume one of two things from this either the
manuscript pictures are basically exaggerating the form of the arrowhead
so that all the viewers all the watches of the the people who look on the
picture understand that it's a broad head and that's kind of like medieval
art sort of thing to do or otherwise the other aspect is that you would have to
forge your head incredibly carefully mounted on your shaft, try it, fettle it,
and just keep on reworking it until you have something super accurate that's the
only way you're going to do that and that of course is possible to completely
balance it but it's going to be quite a long process the other choice is that
you do use a barbed arrowhead like that one, but you just make it smaller so
this one is about 28 millimetres, inch and an eighth across something like that and
that works. And that's it really, so thank you very much