Ah! Now you see! And now it's a beautiful throw!...
It's Tod from Tod's Workshop and Tod Cutler here and today we are going to talk about
this; a picture from a book. And then we are going to throw it, not the book obviously.
We're going to make the thing that's in the picture and throw that or at least try, to see
if it works and the reason is this is weird, now look at this. So we have a stick at the top here,
then we have a cord, comes down and then we have a barbed dart with fletchings on it.
Now these fletched barbed darts are, well you see them in in manuscripts particularly with the dance
of death, with skeletons throwing them, but you see them in naval warfare, you see them in sieges
occasionally, on battlefields; you never see them in museums. I don't know of any,
let me know if you do. Always got this barbed head on the end like that, really nasty thing,
so I think not armour, it's anti-flesh and certainly by the 15th/16th century the Irish
made massive use of these particularly harrying against English horses but the Irish used them
with a throwing string on them, a thong and what that does quite simply is it allows you to throw
this further. It's an old idea so it goes back to the ancient Greeks, the Romans used them,
it's even mentioned in a Viking saga and the Irish certainly used them still into the 16th century.
So we know about throwing strings, we know about fletched darts, they exist, so what is this?
Well that comes from a manuscript by a guy called Mariano Taccola dated 1433 so that's really sort
of at the beginning of the Renaissance thinking, but he wrote a book called De Ingenesis and it's
about civil engineering, it's about engineering in general and it is about weaponry, so like so
many sort of Renaissance thinkers like Leonardo da Vinci after him, they deal with all manner of
things of daily life and warfare, especially in Italy, warfare is daily life. But what makes this
really interesting to me is that stick there and then the cord coming down and then the arrow here,
the dart. The dart is fletched in the middle that is weird, that's undoubtedly weird and we'll come
to that, but that stick and that cord says to me that they're thinking about atlatls, the whole
sort of idea of an atlatl, which is not a European thing as far as I knew, at least in medieval times
you know obviously it was in pre-history and yet in this manuscript here there is something that
is so very close to it that it makes you wonder if he knew of it or if he was conceiving of it,
but either way that is absolutely fascinating, but the other thing that's really peculiar is
the fletchings halfway down the shaft what the heck is that about? Why not put the fletchings
on the end of the shaft? In the best traditions of children's tv, I have some I made earlier
and here they are a bunch of four of them with these lovely lovely Will Sherman heads on the end,
so nice big war arrow fletchings and then this shaft sticking out the end here.
Now I've had to guess on sizes because the thing is the manuscript is quite clearly wrong. If you
look again the stick that it's being thrown from is sort of a two-handed stick in proportion to the
dart or the dart would be really tiny it's one of those two things, but if it's a two-handed stick
there's no way of holding the dart, if it's a tiny tiny dart it just doesn't work with a long string,
so proportionately that picture cannot be correct. So what that means is I've
had to reinterpret this and I have this stick here this string and these darts.
Now there's only one thing to do now we've got to go throw it. I'm back in the field now with
my darts and ready to throw, now if you look at the back of the dart here I made a groove
and I made an assumption it just kind of felt right that there should be a groove
and the thread goes around, the cord goes around there over the knot like that,
so you can see it just holds it tight and it doesn't come off and then you come down and you
hold it so the whole construction is like that and the idea is that disengages when you throw,
but I've been doing some testing rather obviously because I don't want to look like a fool
and actually if you put it in a groove it sort of binds the dart a little bit
so we'll do it like this, sometimes it works brilliantly sometimes it doesn't.
Not very interesting, not very impressive; it went low, it went flat and that's partly partly
because I'm not used to it, but partly because it seems to bind in the groove. Now this time I'm not
going to put it in the groove that's there so I'm just going to hold the knot on, hold it in place
and the friction, tension is enough to hold it there and otherwise I'm holding
it in exactly the same way but it seems to work cleaner so we'll have another look.
Nice! So we'll go again see if we'll get another one; there's definitely a learning process
to this. I'm not going to get every single one right, the wonders of the edit is going
to make me look like some sort of throwing god, that's not true, but I can get four,
five, six in a row sometimes where they are really good and that's surely just a matter of learning.
Ah! Now that was a very interesting one, it was rubbish, we'll all admit that, but
it's spun and I haven't quite worked out why it does that. Sometimes they go really flat
and clean other times it actually rotates on its axis and it hardly goes, well half the distance,
goes half the distance and I haven't quite worked out why it rotates like that yet.
That was a nice one so let's go again. Now I'm actually throwing a little to the right
of where I think I should be, so I'm going to try and correct see if we can get towards
Graham, our brave GoPro down the bottom.
Oh I corrected a little bit, a little bit further left,
roughly same kind of distance another nice throw. You might think this is a really fiddly
way of doing it, well actually it is a fiddly way of doing it, i can't pretend it's not,
but you look at that manuscript, I can't see another way. I mean you suggest to me, I mean
you can tell me about hooks and things like that, but it's actually really difficult to get cord to
release cleanly off a device so I think it was done like this. When you get it right this goes,
that GoPro out there is 42 meters away at the moment which is about as far as I've thrown
these, but that's a heck of a distance for somebody who really isn't a good thrower. Oh!
What is going on? Well here's some development in progress. So this morning before I started
filming, I took it out and I threw, and I threw like a demon and it worked brilliantly and I
tried to film it and I just couldn't really make it work properly, not consistently.
So I thought there's a problem and I looked at the knot on the end and the knot had tightened
up and I've replaced it with a little wooden bead now and it now seems to work much better,
so fingers crossed. It's exactly the same, you wrap it around, there we are and the bead forms
exactly the same process and let's have a look and see if I have managed to improve things.
Oh goodness!
Right well that overshot the GoPro and actually went into the old chicken coop so I'm thinking
about 45 meters something like that. GoPro's at 42 so that's quite a throw for an amateur.
So I've got to try and retrieve my dart come look at this.....
Can you see it yet?
That's a result! Well I have my dart back now and we will throw again.
A little bit short and these definitely, definitely need learning about they're weird,
but when you get them right my goodness they are right.
So 45 meters beyond the GoPro; imagine this in the hands of
a medieval soldier who was practiced in it?
Ah and that is my case in point,
my editor really is gonna have a job making me look good on this one.
Let's go again.
We'll just do this last one and then we will talk about this funny tail. Oh nice throw to end. Now
quite clearly a thing that is odd about this projectile is the fletchings are halfway down
the shaft and then you've got this long extension at the back here. I've tried throwing it like that
as if it's a plumbata or something, tumbles, no good at all. So what is it about? Well clearly
you could mount this cord anywhere along that shaft length somewhere between about half and
two-thirds of the length basically the end of the fletchings here seems to work well if you put it
right at the end it sort of tumbles, it it just kicks the back up as it launches doesn't really
work very well but we've got to demonstrate it, we've got to have a look so let's try it.
Okay so that was short and flat wasn't very nice at all.
It behaved completely differently, went to the right I'm pretty sure I threw it in basically the
same place, again a disaster so we'll do one more just to prove the point that I still don't really
understand what that's all about either.
Oh it's just weird, weird thing. That's it for you today, but I can tell you it's not for me because
I am not putting these things down until I've worked out how to use them. So work is on hold,
help me out, sign up, put your bell notifications on, subscribe, sign up to the newsletter on
the website, but this thing is just going to divert me till who knows when. See you later.
And there you have it; another rubbish throw!