So it's chipped it. Sure it has chipped it, but that's a fence
post, this is leather!
Hi it's Tod of Tod's Workshop and Tod Cutler here and today we're back
with the Lockdown Longbow and boiled leather.
Leather armour, cuir bouilli, sorry French people, i just killed that word I know.
I'll say at the beginning, a lot of this is my supposition
and my guesswork so if you know that iIm wrong, or if you think I'm wrong,
just remember even if I'm sound like I'm adamant, i'm not certain.
But I think I'm right. It's stiff there we go, I'll give you a good close-up. It's
shiny because of the process, I'll explain that, and same with the
discoloration. It's definitely hard and that is four
millimeters four mm thick. So what is going on well
there's a lot to unpack here and there's a little bit of sort of material science
so we're all gonna head back to school, but you know, I'll make it good.
I'll make it the way school should have been. So I've got myself a piece of
veg tan leather here, the same thickness as this, to give you
some sort of an example. It's flexible, you can do all of that
it's fine. Does it make good armour? Well let's just
have a look. I've got my piece of veg tan leather here
and I've got a block of foam and a Tod Cutler rondel dagger, it's the
pointiest one that I sell. Now if you do want to support this
channel buying the Tod Cutler range of products, it's a good way to
start, because that really helps me and it helps fund all this stuff I'm doing.
So rondel dagger; it's meant to be an armor penetrator, we've got four mm of
veg tan leather here, let's just see what it does. Well there
you go. I think that fairly convincingly goes
through. Well perhaps no great surprise, but let's
explain what's going on. Hardened leather, there's lots of
speculation about how it was done whether it was treated with wax whether
it was with the oils whether it was with water and so on, but
the problem is, the name is boiled leather, cuir bouilli,
so the assumption has to be that it is boiled leather but this is the problem.
It can't be boiled leather, it could be all sorts of things, but it cannot be
boiled leather even though that's what it's called.
So this is leather that I have boiled and look at it this started as flat
sheets, as hard as you like, hard as you like, but there you go I can
just crack it. Okay and I've broken it. It's really hard
but it's deformed you can't make sheets of armuor out of
this stuff. So it's not boiled leather right? that we
have now discovered. So what is it? Well you can see the
manuscript pictures and there's like sort of
big vats steaming that so I think the assumption is that it's something to do
with heat. Well yeah. So I got to thinking one day, i
landed a tv job, where somebody said "can you do boiled leather" I just went "yeah
of course i could do boiled leather yeah no problem at all", so of course
I put the phone down; it's like oh no boiled leather right what is it?
And I got to thinking and I went back to a conversation i had with Peter Johnsson
the great swordsmith and designer and he was talking about sword grips
pressing the glue through the leather and it becoming
impregnated and becoming almost like fiberglass,
and I thought that conversation I just went "That's it. That is it!". So what's
fiberglass? Well there is a point to this. Fiberglass is glass fibers, all right?
There you go, glass fibers. In a mat, it's flexible you can do that.
It doesn't crack, it's very thin that's why. You mix it
with resin, polyester or epoxy resin, which is
brittle so that's rubbish on its own, the glass is rubbish on its own; you put
the two together and the resin fills the gaps between the glass
and you end up with something incredibly strong because these fibers are really
strong in tension. So I thought, well it's like fiberglass but obviously it's not.
So you have the leather, which is fibrous you can see that when you rip it apart,
it's full of fibers. So the idea is you fill the gaps between
the fibers with basically a resin. That resin if it is brittle, it is hard
and incompressible and combined with the fibres you end up
with something tough. There are really important
characteristics about boiled leather the way it can be decorated the way it can
be molded and shaped for vambraces and breastplates
and and little tiny pen cases and all sorts of things, that use boiled leather
that means that it has to have a very specific set of properties.
One of those is that you must be able to mold it, but then
there's too much decoration on to do it while it's there, it will take days to do that
level of decoration. So you must be able to sort of bring it
back it's not like heating the surface and hardening it
you must be able to soften it again to decorate it and then let it re-harden.
And I thought of all these different things about the way it had to work and
I thought.... it's animal glue. So then what you do is
when it's warm you put it over your mold and as it cools the jelly hardens,
it is jelly, jello, it hardens, the leather takes its set,
and then it dries over the next weeks and you end up with something that is
like wood. And that is our material science
story, but the thing is all of this is going to come true again when we talk
about gambeson, because a lot of this happens the same
way so i'll just show you. I have got a regular bit of gambeson
here nice and flexible, 32 layers of linen, and then Ii have a
much stiffer, wine and salt impregnated gambeson. We're
going to come to that in another film, but the process is the same that you are
filling up those gaps, those indices between the fibers
with something. In this case wine and salt, in the other case
animal glue. I can't say for a fact, not a fact, that I'm right,
but in my head I'm certain that I am. But it means also because I can't say it
for a fact, we don't have a recipe about it.
we don't know how this stuff was really made so there is experimentation to be
done and I've made a batch of stuff here
where I think maybe, the jelly was too strong
and so what has happened is we've ended up with something that has removed a lot
the toughness but left brittleness, like a knife that
is over hard, but I'm going to give you an example here look at this.
That is a piece of leather okay? Leather and jelly. This
is a fence post. Check this out.
That is not something that you see every day,
leather chops fence post. So it's chipped it.
Sure it has chipped it, but that's a fence post, this is leather.
So that is the end of our material science lecture so what are we actually
going to go and shoot? Well we've got one layer, two layer and
three layer pieces of hardened leather and you can hear, they are hard. Let's
shoot them. Back at the range with the lockdown
longbow and a single layer of hardened leather let's
see what it does. Type 7 needle bodkin
Whoah!!
Right well that is straight through, straight through, so I don't think
there's any point in doing any of the other arrows on that
one so we will go up thickness and we'll see how we go. It's actually
it's cracked right across. So maybe i cooked up my mix a bit wrong,
you know, like I say no recipe, but you know it stopped it... hell
actually you know what? let's just try type 9 just because.
Goodness, okay well that is also straight through, uh cracked it, whole chunk fell
off, so clearly single layer, hardened leather
at least with that recipe no good at all. We're now going to go for
two layers of hardened leather so this is about eight to nine millimeters of
leather and of course jelly, or if you're in the
states, jello, the magic ingredient. Type seven needle
bodkin
straight in but the penetration not so good and that is a needle bodkin.
Let's just try with the type nine again... oh killed it!
Right well I better go and correct that one then hadn't I?
Now then; getting interesting! So here
needle bodkin, type seven, it's cracked the surface I mean it's absolutely
shattered it, so that says to me that my inexpertise
of making hardened leather has just made this a bit too brittle and
not quite tough enough. You know what? Experience would change
that. This one, type nine, has not cracked it
but again if we now look at the back side of these, they're coming through, the
foam does stop it, does slow it, but it's not massive, it's not a massive
game changer to it. What is interesting, is that two layers
is making a difference that is beginning to make a significant difference
to how these things penetrate, so we're going to try with three layers
let's see what happens. Right here we go again i'm going to start this time with
the type 16 to see if that makes a significant difference
uh to how it goes through and then we're going to swap into the others, anyway I
don't know why, I wanted to mix it up. Well that one's straight in but it
doesn't look like the leather's cracked.
Type nine, let's see if it can do its business with type 16 does i'm guessing
this will. Let's find out
well that's stuck in. Towton or Tudor bodkin.
Last up, type nine.
We're there! Four clean shots let's go have a look. This promises to be
interesting. I love these tests, i just love them.
Now clearly all four have penetrated. Question mark is, how deeply? So I'm just
going to mark them off and then we'll pull the target off and
we'll have a look what's what's going on. Here you go this is an unpacking video
for you. And there we are let's give you a sense
of scale there is my hand. So that's not nice!
The other ones again you know not very pleasant.
Type 16 actually, that's interesting it fared less well
than all of the others which I wouldn't have expected.
Um that is intriguing, that is intriguing, but all of them have really been caught
and bound by this leather and this is you know three layers.
There's nothing to stop you doing four or five layers.
So I'm back at base and we'll have a look at what's happened today.
Again I just love this series of tests because these are things I haven't done
either and I've wondered about. So yeah, hardened
leather, did it work? Well yeah it did, so let's just have a
look. So clearly, one sheet of hardened leather to
my recipe, whether that's right or wrong, it went straight through and actually
fractured the leather, so not very good. Two pieces of hardened leather so that
is about eight millimeters thick, and needle bodkin is penetrating
from back of the leather to end of the point 23 centimeters.
Type 9, back of the leather to the end of the point, 15 centimeters.
But then let's go and have a look at the three layers.
Three layers needle bodkin, this time. 11 centimeters, short bodkin, 8
centimeters and this one i ran the Towton Tudor head,
uh six and a half centimeters and the type 16
five centimeters. Now that's interesting now this armor type is not particularly
heavy, but throughout history men seem to wear roughly the same weight
of armour they're prepared to wear roughly the same weight of armour.
And so I couldn't tell you exactly how heavy a breastplate made of this should
be, but actually if you did it all at three
layers of leather, and then maybe on the front you upped it to four or five, I can
see that being completely viable as a piece of armour. Can they make it? yes I've
showed you how you can make it how you can do exactly this.
You can mold it, you can shape it, you can decorate it, you can do all the stuff
that you want with it and it is pretty darn resistant to
arrows, four layers would this have gone through? maybe marginally five
i think it probably wouldn't. There's one more thing we're going to do we're going
to go back to my stab test with the rondel.
So these are going to take some getting out so we're going to break
and I'll be back in a minute. I've removed the arrows from the two-ply
piece and we're going to go for the stab test
again with the Tod Cutler rondel, remembering these are all available and
they really do help support the channel buying these things. So,
that's penetrated about a centimeter. Good defense.
So you know, anybody who says hardened leather is not good, they're wrong.
We'll try that again with a three-ply just see what we do.
And that one maybe about six millimeters through, so again
that one without a doubt is not a killing blow well nor is the other one
um neither of them are. They're gonna hurt a bit.
So what have we learned about boiled leather, cuir bouilli
and arrows? Well, one thing we learned is i can't pronounce it,
I've given you a recipe and a methodology that I am almost certain is
how they did it, if it is done that way, it works. It works
pretty well as a three-ply but arrows can still poke through, we saw that
as a four ply I doubt it, five ply almost certainly not.
Actually you know what? Let's go back to the range I'm gonna set this up with the
five layers and we're gonna see what happens. Because
you know what, they would have protected the front of their breastplate
because a normal steel breastplate or iron breastplate was thicker at the
front for exactly the reason that's where the
shots tend to come from. So scratch this. There's going to be a conclusion, to the
conclusion. Let's go shoot stuff! I just had to shoot this. I need to
know. So we've got five layers of hardened
leather according to my recipe. Type seven needle bodkin.
Well it's through. Type nine plate cutter, short bodkin, call
it what you will.
And that's through as well. Let's do two more just because. So we've got another
type nine.
That's annoying. Type seven.
Let's go have a look. Oh I'm slightly annoyed. I was sort of hoping
that they were going to bounce off, but they didn't, but anyway how far did they
go in? Ah, i'm not annoyed anymore
I'd love to show you, but I'm not. Let's take it back to base and we'll have a
look. And here we are for the great reveal.
Five layers of hardened leather. The type nines went through 30
millimeters and 28 millimeters type 7 needle bodkin uh 78 millimeters
and 65 millimeters. And there we have it type 9 needle
bodkins, well slender point, but you know you're not
going to be happy if you get that in the chest.
These ones, clearly you're not going to be happy, but you'll almost certainly
live from those you might even have other padded garments
underneath, who knows? Again what's interesting here is that
these are bent. Well don't forget, most arrowheads, we have no evidence that
they were made of steel, so they would have been wrought and wrought
is softer than this really, these are mild steel that i'm using in this case.
So bending arrowheads like that, there's nothing wrong with that, that's just a
realistic result to hitting something that is
really quite hard indeed. And there we go. Boiled leather; can't tell you they made
it like this but i'm pretty sure they did. If they did
make it like this, would it work? Yes it would. So what I'm going to do now
actually is i'm just going to remove the arrow heads and I'm going to weigh this
sample. I've got a breast plate, I'll calculate the areas
and I will tell you how heavy I think a breast plate would be
for it to be made of this material on the front surface and thinner on the
sides. 500 grams for that piece, so bear in mind
it's there, I think that you could probably do a
three-ply breastplate with a five-ply reinforcement on the
front for around about two and a half possibly three kilos
so round about six to seven pounds something like that.
Boiled leather; right good protection! See you next time for another lockdown
longbow. Don't know. Maybe gambeson's, maybe maille. Who knows