I think this is in need of some repair. It is.
Hi it's Tod of Tod's Workshop and Tod Cutler here back with Jorge Sprave
and i thought i'd show him this because Jorge is filming on the same location the same farm that
six seven years ago (*actually 9 years) I built this with a team of engineers
for another tv show and this is a giant Catapulta not a Ballista we can talk about that in the notes
giant catapulta so it's for shooting uh arrows spears call them what you will and uh so what do
you reckon to it yeah because it it remember it was a tv build not a historical build so
you know it's a little bit weldy and a little bit screwed through together a bit but
yeah well it's first of all it's massive it's really really big yeah did they make them that
big way back then no so that this this device is a catapulter and they made them in one two and three
spans so that's the span is the length of the bolt it's shot one span is about 35 centimeters
so this actually if you made a real if it was a real thing it would be a six span machine but
they never made them this big so it's twice as big as they made them because that would be very
hard to carry around you know so i mean it must be very heavy. Well I mean so there must certainly be
a few hundred kilos yeah several hundred kilos but i think you got two things going on i mean
they could logistically they could have done it they had some massive ballista you know which
shot stone balls 60 70 centimeter diameter so they could have done it and moved it but i suppose it
comes down to the question of why would they want to because this shoots a single arrow
what would the purpose of it shooting a single arrow as tall as you'd be well you know but
normally you're just it's hard to beat yeah i can understand why you want to shoot really big balls
it's a siege engine yeah you know so you want to kick in a door or bring down a wall or something
but a long arrow like this i mean this would definitely have a huge amount of penetration power
but who was that well armored yeah so exactly so but it is massive and i can see that this function
functions very much like i would build it today you know so with a ratchet system that prevents
it from you know releasing too early and a very very simple trigger system here trigger system is
effectively exactly the same as the gastrophetes i showed you a little while ago um which i think
is where the romans took their trigger system from so we didn't change anything on that i mean it's
it's a bit more modern a bit more welded but the system is the same yep and you probably put in
wooden rods into here because that is too short for it well we actually had steel bars
to load this it took two of us uh both hanging on the bars at the back to get it and it wasn't fully
tensioned you know we we had uh because we filmed it we we filmed it in a different format for the
tv and the day and then when the tv finished filming at maybe seven o'clock that evening
we rushed in with the real arms that we'd secretly made and put them on and then we got six shots off
before the light failed and that was it. And then that was the end of the filming. But that shot
like a huge arrow about 320 meters far right 320 meters that was our sixth shot last shot and the
arrow shaft had a diameter like you know what i can't remember anymore but it was it was big
it was a few kilos yeah it was a few kilos and uh and the thing is it was just we hadn't put
nearly as much power into it as we could have done we hadn't torsioned the bundles up properly
we hadn't drawn it back as far as we could have done so it had a lot more than that 320 meters
but of course it is questionable if that would have definitely increased the reach so much
because you might at some point as you know you reach the maximum retraction speed
and then you have to improve you have to increase the arrow weight to get more energy
so 320 meters is already quite close to what my experience is what you can do with the with
weapons like that well the romans um they invented stuff sometimes but they're also
good at record keeping they reckon 660 meters for a three-span machine okay so far yeah which
is crazy and this of course is twice the scale so that doesn't mean it will shoot twice as far but
you would imagine it would be somewhere in the 600 meter range which is extraordinary
absolutely i can't comprehend how you can make an arrow shooting device do that really
but the technology that they had back then was truly amazing well i loved it i mean it's one of
the things that you know in England at the time we were living in straw and mud huts mainly.
If you're a roman artillery officer you would have a book with all of the distances in it that your
machines would shoot it would show you the size of a fortification of a room that you could put
a machine into or a tower base so basically you you capture a castle and you go oh this tower
is four paces by six paces wide and you open your book and you go ah i can put a two span
machine in that and operate it with four men i mean you know and we're living in mud huts
different world yes for sure well this is how long did it take you to build this this
was a four-day build for uh i think there were nine of us involved in it all together
but a four-day build yeah i could see that you can see that a lot of metal work involved well
and and actually if um should we come around let's look at the right front
so you pre-tense it by turning these things right yeah
would you like to use winches for that or how would you turn this um yeah so we had
basically we made massive wrenches for turning turning these um the capstans here but if you look
at the rope bundles as well you can see very often on uh when people make a ballista or a catapulta
you see an enormous amount of twisting on the cord bundles and here you see it's almost no twisting
and i i'm not even sure this might have been how it was when we left it six years ago um why would
it have why would it have turned yeah why would it turn so actually what you do is you you put
the ropes themselves under an enormous amount of tension as you're feeding the ropes in and
twisting these capstans at the bottom only adds a bit to it you know so you shouldn't if you've
made your ballista right you won't have that so that's the most they just weren't like that
um and the you know the absolute power of these machines the secret of them
is to put as much tension in those chords as you can before you even begin twisting them up but
anyway so that was alone putting the string into this thing the rope into this thing alone was it
a day for six of us something like that um. Yeah no kidding. I mean there are if i remember rightly
there are 330 meters on each side of the rope um you know so and of course you're trying to
do it in one piece so you've got 330 meters that you're walking out and then walking back
i've now got 328 to wind so you feed it through or pull tight
into the next one five o'clock in the morning we finished and we started filming at seven
that's tv glamour! yeah yeah but it was it was a fascinating job to be involved
but that video that you put up showing you know that has like four and a half million
views or something right yeah i mean and people love that stuff so but it was so
it was just it was an off-the-cuff filming it was not it was a shame it was a wasted opportunity
because i don't think i was even doing youtube films then so that was just a bit of old footage
um but i wish we'd filmed it better i wish we had you know what i would love to do i would love to
make a modern day version of this powered by rope same thing because that seems to work just fine
but with an electric winch and a repeating system of course of course imagine if you could do that
chunk if you'd like to make a joint project like that i would be that would be super good
wouldn't that be an amazing machine and that would be an amazing machine so uh
well i mean if you're up for that i would love to do that i'd love to do that and i could do
the ropes rope side of it and know before and the technology i'm pretty we'll probably not make it
that big maybe go to half size you know so yeah that's a little short oh you mean that's the the
rope box yeah the whole weapon i just think if if we just make this to half scale of this yeah
it should be good enough in roman terms it's a three-span machine but if you look at
you know this looks massive now but if you if you think of the headstock there that's what about a
meter wide yeah actually you're going to end up if you make a half size one which is the full-sized
roman version is it about a half meter square what what a weapon you would then have and i would of
course also say i think what what we would have to do is we would have to make it adjustable so
that you can also shoot it flat easily so we would also put in a motor that lifts it up and leaves it
when it moves let's have a look if this is still the way it is meant to be okay okay you can lift
it up oh yeah that's the joint should be able to there is a drive just in case this is a bit
unsafe is it can we oh i don't know it should be on the balance point yeah yeah there you go all
right and then you just have to adjust this yeah put something underneath yeah yeah but
wouldn't it be cooler if you have like a little dashboard where you can just of course dial it in
and a sighting system, a sighting system of course
and then do destruction and get a junk car and shoot at it
that's steady it's steady now i'm sure i've got enough in me to do all that no it's uh but it
was great it was a brilliant thing and yes if you would like to uh to do a modern high techie
that would be cool old world mix one i would uh it would not be hard that's a deal then yeah okay
yeah oh in fact that's one of the type that's the tightenings is that titan spanner for him
probably it looks like well it's lovely to show you this old friend of mine anyway Jorge
yeah that was a job well done a little bit sad to see it it's such this repair but
it should have gone somewhere but in a museum or something yeah too big for my garden anyway
thanks and again it's uh it's been great to meet up with you so
yeah so and thank you very much and uh see you again another time bye bye
thanks Jorge