Very, very clean release. Really looking good.
Hi it's Tod Cutler from Todcutler.com here and today I'm back with the lockdown longbows
little brother. It's just a weaker crossbow isn't it? It is a weaker crossbow, but it is
so much more than that and I'm going to explain where we're going with it and what I'm thinking,
because there is a very valid reason that I want to start shooting with a weaker crossbow as well
as a more powerful one. I thought I'd just pop down the range with the little brother and just
see what it does, so I've got a couple of Will Sherman arrows, bolts call them what you will.
63 grams. Let's shoot them, see what they do. Type seven needle bodkin.
Nice, definitely, definitely more of an arc than you get on the lockdown longbow, the big brothe,r
but it's shooting very nicely, so we're gonna go on to type nines which are the short bodkins.
It's absolutely shooting beautifully, shooting absolutely beautifully,
which is what we want because this way we're going
to get accurate testing when I take it against brigandines and whatever.
You can hear that they're knocking against each other so they're shooting nice and accurately
which is what I want.
Lovely. Right let's go have a look what we got. This is exactly what I wanted to see,
it's a good group, six inches/15 centimeters at what? About 20 meters something like that,
so this is going to allow me easy testing into the future. Really great stuff. In the mid to late
13th century the English started to face what they considered a new weapon in Wales, the longbow.
Quite why it was new is difficult to say because you know, the same materials, the same size and
the same powers have been used across so many nations in such a long period of time,
but there was something new about what the Welsh were doing. One has to assume that it
is probably tactics, may well have been guerrilla warfare, however it came out, whatever happened,
the English saw the bow and wanted it and boy did the English adopt it as their weapon of choice,
of course leading to the victories in France. And the whole myth and mythology and legend that is
the English longbow. Probably more properly the Welsh. This is the lockdown longbow and this is
what I have been using to simulate a heavyweight English warbow, so my friend Joe Gibbs shot 160
pound longbow, he took some speed readings off it and some weights of the arrows. This crossbow
happens to shoot at exactly the same speed and the same weight arrows as Joe Gibbs 160 pound longbow
and I cannot draw a longbow like that, but what I can do is span and shoot this crossbow and it
is the perfect test vehicle for me to run a whole series of tests like these ones here.
Now what that shows is that a 160 pound longbow is a seriously powerful, seriously formidable weapon,
I think we probably all knew that, but here's the thing. Did it begin like that and was it
like that for everybody? When the English first faced the Welsh and their longbows,
from that moment on, an arms race began with the longbow and the armour and tactics. It's
a continuous thing through all warfare and this is just no different. Now my friend Will Sherman
who makes these fabulous arrows behind me, sort of mentioned this in a conversation; we had a really
good chat about it and it's also something that has come up in the comments and I love
the comments on these films. Quite simply I've been looking at the most powerful end of things;
was it always like that? Probably not. Was it always that powerful? Well of course not. We
know that that's going to be the case, but round about 1350 the armour was a lot less developed,
the metals and materials within it were a lot less developed you probably needed less power to
do the job. Less power means less training, you have a larger body of men to call on as archers
and also your bow staves and bow manufacture are going to be cheaper and easier.
There's lots of reasons you'd want a weaker bow, so actually logically, they probably were, let's
say 1340, shooting weaker bows. We can't know what weight they were shooting or if they were, I mean,
tell me what are your opinions, but I think that they probably were shooting weaker bows and in the
spirit of the Lockdown Longbow, Lockdown Longbow's little brother has been born. Very repeatable,
very accurate and shoots these beautiful Will Sherman medieval longbow arrows. Now this is
a really important thing for me because what it means is that I can now start running tests
like for instance a brigandine test I did against an earlier bow or a weaker bow or a brigands bow,
depending on how you want to view it and of course that really matters because the results might be
very, very different. I mean they are going to be very, very different because of course that is the
absolute top of the pinnacle of the arms race of the longbow, that's as powerful as they got.
This one much more day-to-day, much more a hunting bow, much more brigands bow, perhaps
though we don't know much more, an early war bow, but let's take it down the range,
we'll shoot it see what we get. Back on the range now with the original Lockdown Longbow,
so think of this as 160 pound draw weight longbow.
Oh right lovely! 178 feet per second,
I'll convert that to meters, it's just my chrono just does feet per second.
Lovely 187.
175 so let's say i'm going to say about 177.
Right now we're going to go for the needle bodkin, type 7 needle bodkin 177.
Well that ain't right, that says 250, so we'll just discount that.
179 they're actually pretty similar so 177 for the short balkans uh 178 for the long bodkins
and now let's go for the lockdown longbow junior.
151
155 so these arrows are spined for about a hundred, hundred and ten pound bow,
which is about what we want, 155 so about the same speed.
150 this will be the last one we do.
153 let's go see what we've got back at base for a quick look at the numbers,
a chat, a catch up and a conclusion. What have I learned? First of all, well simplistically
these shoot absolutely beautifully, both of them. I knew that the Lockdown Longbow did,
but this shoots really well, these medieval weight arrows, really stable, really flat, really clean,
but on a note of safety, it has been known for wooden arrows shot off powerful bows,
to shatter on launch. I test every single one with a long string beforehand. All right,
so just because you don't see the safety doesn't mean it's not there; if you want to do this kind
of stuff, be careful doing it, but I have found these to be a fantastic test bed for what I do
and this one is just going to take that on even further now because this one is a true
representation of shooting off a 160 pound longbow, this one is going to be a
true representation of shooting arrows off a 95 pound longbow and that's just going to allow me
really to just expand my testing against all sorts of things. But that first conversation I
had with Will Sherman and him, well I suppose really his theory, but putting that idea in
my head of the arms race which as soon as he mentioned it, it's just so obvious really to me,
it's just, I'd like to say again, I happen to know Will and chat to him regularly, that's fine,
but the comments that you leave are just priceless and I do read them and so as an example, the next
film that's coming up is to do with how sharp are arrowheads and this will be featuring in it too,
both of them. Well how sharp were arrowheads? And it matters, it's not a stupid question, I thought
it was, but one of you viewers has got in contact with me with some excellent information and got me
thinking along another thread, so that'll be the next film and that's important because following
that and related to it is going to be maille, so it is coming up soon. Thank you very much,
I hope you've enjoyed it; the Lockdown Longbow and the little brother. Thank you.