It is a monster and they do kick, they really do kick.
Hi it's Tod of Tod's Workshop and Tod Cutler here and today i'm back with two very powerful but very
very different crossbows so we've got, clearly, a modern compound bow here and then we have got
one of my medieval windlass crossbows here led to me by Skalagrim actually um do some
maintenance on it thank you very much Skal if you don't know him, link in the notes. Now
then let's go shoot them see what's going on with them because they are very very different
Back at the range now and first up with the medieval 960 pound windlass crossbow so this is,
as you know, pretty much a state-of-the-art object around 1400. I'm just going to set the trigger
and this, just like the modern bow, needs a draw assist for it in the case of this one
it is absolutely essential because there is no way anyone is drawing a 960 pound
crossbow. Oh it is a monster and they do kick they really do kick and the other thing
that's really quite noticeable about them is the ring in your ears
now people say oh well you know it's nothing like a gun you're right it's nothing like a gun
it is different i don't know why it's different but it really makes my ears ring
usually i'd wear ear protection for something like this. But two shots I figure it's all right but
you know don't kid yourself these things have got a lot of pent up power in them just going to
fully unwind the string there because otherwise it makes it very difficult for the next shot
oh! goodness me. lovely, so it's just shooting a little bit to the right i'll move the bow next
time i shoot right let's get the modern one see how that behaves next up 150 pound modern compound
crossbow with the draw assist so this is in fact exactly the same as an old style doubler pulley
even with that not totally easy but a lot faster than the windlass. Oh blimey didn't even see that
go oh right here we go again it's easy to get these things tangled actually in many
respects it's a bit like the window so you've got to sort of learn how to look after them
well two observations that there are to be made straight away the windlass bow is just
a much heavier object even with the windlass on it it's a real chunk take the windlass off
you're still holding a lot of weight out there and you know it's a long bow there's a lot of leverage
with a lot of weight at the front very little balance it at the back. This is a lot handier
and it's so much faster you can hear that between the release and the land on target
is so much faster you know that's just apparent here shooting it but of course that also means
the trajectory is much flatter as well. Awesome bit of kit i mean these sort of modern bows are
awesome objects they really are but don't forget these are state-of-the-art
2021 they're not state-of-the-art 1400 that's what the windlass bow was. I thought i'd show you those
two shots just really is a an interesting point because those two bolts are touching at 20 meters
20 yards medieval bows are my thing not really modern ones and i'm not used to this bow at all
but just because you haven't got sights and i say again and again doesn't mean you can't
shoot accurately and i don't even shoot that much nowhere near the way that a professional
crossbowman would have done in the middle ages. Well what did I learn today?
Well... these are separated by 600 years and it feels it, it feels it, this one is heavy it kicks mightily
as much as anything not just because of the power pent up in it although it is a lot of power pent
up in it it kicks because of the mechanism of it it's got so much steel flying forward that it has
to react. The bolt itself is also heavy you know these ones coming in that I was shooting here were
67 grams i think they were and actually they go up to sort of like 85 or 90 generally for a bow like
this so those were quite light ones. This here is very small very agile, easy to load, relatively fast
to load, accurate, flat, you know it's everything you could ever want in a crossbow but of course
this one here state-of-the-art for 1400 is part of an arms race
the concept of an arms race is not just a modern thing between the east and the west
it's as old as time and you had knights and men at arms trying to not get struck by the
missiles and you had the people at the other end shooting the missiles trying to get the
knights and men at arms and that's why you end up with bows at a thousand pounds in draw weight.
Unwieldy, but it does the job that you need it to do and that's really competing at a level, roughly
speaking, with longbows that's not what these sort of modern bows are about. What we're going
to do is take our 23 gram bolt for the modern bow and our 67 gram bolt for the medieval bow we're
gonna shoot them. Put them through a chronograph take some numbers down, make some calculations
and we'll just have a look at that and see what that can tell us about the two different bows
back with the modern bow let's put it through the chronograph, see what numbers we get.
all right let's see what we get
365.
357.
360. right so let's call it 360.
that'll do for these numbers. Back for the medieval one 67 gram bolts with this one
179 quite a difference but quite a difference in weight that it's shooting too
with the difference in weight comes the difference in momentum
181
183 last bolt we're going to shoot is this one here it's actually one i use
for test weights when i'm trying to work out the the weight of a head that i want
i don't have any bodkin heads with me at the moment but that's 90 grams
167 and that was blunt it's still gone through half inch plywood 12 mil plywood i'm back from
the range now and i've done some calculations so i've taken the bolt speeds and i've done the
numbers on them to get energy and momentum because the two are important but they're
different okay here's my little table i'm going to read that out now but it'll also be in the
notes in both imperial and in metric just going to talk in metric now we're going to start with
our modern bow so here it is 150 pounds in draw weight and it delivered our 23 gram bolt at 110
meters per second that's pretty fast 139 joules of energy 2.53 of momentum right okay all sounds good
139 joules that's you know that's a reasonable amount that's heading towards a 2.2 long rifle round
so you know you are getting towards the energy that a bullet has or a small bullet
and now to our monster bow so this is a 67 gram bolt 56 meters a second so half of the modern
bow there so it's not a great surprise that the energy is down it's 104 joules but the momentum
is 3.7 so it's significantly higher than the modern bow shooting the modern bolts behind us
now i heard a great phrase years ago when i was discussing this and that is "the energy is the
messenger, momentum is the message. Now as most people are involved with firearms will tell you
momentum is really what counts when it comes to penetration so it's interesting that the momentum
is higher but then if we look at the bodkin weight bolt that i shot there a 90 gram bolt
the velocity is down again well you'd expect that because the the mass is up 51 meters a second but
that's now producing 117 joules of energy but it gives us a momentum of 4.6 of course there's
the difference between the speed of shooting of longbows and crossbows and they are different
things for different times and in different social structures and that is videos many of them
about that we're not talking about longbows but just as an example this is a speed trial i ran
between myself and Joe Gibbs a couple of years ago you can really clearly see the difference
between the two and you might walk away wondering why anybody would ever want to shoot a crossbow
it's complicated but people did we're gonna have a look at what's going on now with these two bows
we've got a medieval one 960 pounds in draw weight we've got a modern one 150 pounds in
draw weight so this is 800 pounds more it is six times the power of this one or the pent-up energy
and that is a mistake that we've got to be careful not to make because people again and
again they see the headline number 960 pounds and like i referred to at the beginning of the
film that looks like it's going to shoot through a tank or something... they just don't. Why don't they?
Well we're gonna have a look at this the layout of it how it all functions and compare it to
this one so starting with a medieval bow let's start now starting at the front of the bow here
it's made of steel steel is very heavy that means that there's a lot of inertia it's a
lot of resistance to moving when you pull it back and then you let go of it that resistance
to moving means that you're not accelerating the bolts you're not putting the work that
you put into moving the bolt you're putting that work a lot of the work into moving the steel bow
that's inefficient the other thing about it is and is technical is the inertia goes up as a cube law
from the center of rotation what that means is this bow it's a bit difficult to move if i make it
just a little bit longer it's actually a hell of a lot harder to move and so the thing is you can't
make it that much bigger this is kind of about as big as you want steel bow to be really so it's
its overall draw length has to be relatively limited but that aside i read a paper recently
where somebody had analyzed a bow which was forge welded from over 40 different pieces of steel
any one of those forge welds can give up and then you know if that breaks it wraps a kilo of steel
around the side of your head so the nature what you do by nature is you make the draw length short
i'm almost certain that's why the draw length on these medieval bows is so short
but a short draw length is just inefficient so everything about the bow is not that great
it's compared to modern materials i'm you know it sounds like i'm dissing this bow this is state the
art for 1400. i've said it for say it again modern terms not so much the string itself it's got to be
thick to take the 960 pounds of of load on it but it's natural fiber that means a thick cord here
is heavy again you're putting the work of the bow into accelerating the whole mechanism not the bolt
that's what you want so if you look at the system here yes it's a very high draw weight and
what you need to remember with all of these things and i've said it before so many times
it's not the headline number 960 pounds wow that is amazing that is going to shoot through walls
it's going to shoot through tanks no it doesn't because the efficiency is low the draw length
is low all the mass in this entire system is very high it doesn't want to move so overall
these machines are really powerful but they are not as efficient not remotely as efficient as a
modern bow so we're just going to swap over now to the modern one now this of course has been
designed to overcome so many of the problems that the old style crossbows had so the string
is gossamer thin you know kevlar dacron whatever it is very low weight so that makes it efficient
these bow limbs themselves carbon fiber and glass fiber very low weight very fast to return once you
release them so their efficiency is very very high they're short that means that the inertia
related to the the cube law the distance from the centre of rotation is much lower in it itself than
the the longer steel limbed bows this compound system means that the bow itself also doesn't move
as much as as a single uh single string bow does conventional bow it's a much shorter displacement
on the limb tips again much less inertia to the whole system and then on top of all of that
what you've got is these clever cam systems on the end here so somebody has analyzed this spring
and how it behaves and they've allowed the power to come in at the right point so that the whole
system is efficient as possible and then on top of all of that you have now got a crazy long draw
length it's not the six inches the 150 millimeters of the medieval bow this one is now 14 inches 350
millimeters that makes it far more efficient as well so the two things are just entirely different
beasts it come at utterly different directions of their design the medieval one is just iterative
really from late Roman times the same system has been developed again and again just getting more
and more powerful some point in the late 1960s early 1970s compound technology was invented for bows
and the world changed. With a modern bow we've got much higher energies but low momentum
and it's converse with the medieval bow now what does that mean in a practical sense well i alluded
to earlier on when i used that cryptic phrase that energy is the messenger momentum is the message
now what i mean by that is you know the energy is great that gets you to the target gets you
there quickly it gets you a long way and you can see that with a modern bow but it
doesn't aid penetration that much what you want for penetration is momentum and you
see that again and again with uh with bullets particularly but it's the same true of arrows
particularly because the arrow actually is really good at conserving its momentum because it doesn't
break up it doesn't mushroom it doesn't expand like the bullets do and i showed that
very conclusively i think in the sandbag film that i did a few films ago where the heavyweight
arrows are just flying through those sandbags and actually the lightweight bolts weren't for those
of you unfamiliar with the lockdown longbow films i have a whole series of them on this
channel here that i've been doing recently where i take a medieval weight medieval style arrow
i shoot it off a compound bow yes it's a modern bow but it shoots these arrows at the same speed
the same velocity that my friend Joe Gibbs does of his 160 pound English longbow, English "warbow"
so the thing is the target does not care what is shooting it it is the arrow and the velocity and
the speed that matters and so you see that again and again with those films how effective this is
momentum that is what is counting with that and it's not what you get off the modern bow and this
brings me to one final point the real conclusion of this film is if i was a crossbow archer in the
year 1400 which bow would i choose would it be the 1400 state the art crossbow the 960 pound
behemoth or would it be the modern one well i can tell you now that speaks to my soul that is the
sort of object i like i like the materials i like the look i like the feel of it i like making it
i like using it it's not the one i'd choose and i'm going to explain now why i choose this one
and very simply the answer is flexibility because a bow like this will shoot the lightweight bolts
350 meters maybe even more which is fantastic for harrying troops at a distance pinpoint accuracy at
closer ranges as well so that is enormously useful you cannot shoot lightweight bolts
off a bow like that medieval one behind me it will just kill the string very very rapidly
so that is not an option so what you have to do with the medieval one is you shoot the heavy bolt
you don't get the distance but what you get is the inertia which does the damage to the targets
that the lightweight bolts don't do but again and again i have demonstrated with the lockdown
longbow films that it can shoot these medieval well longbow bolts if you want to call them that
devastating power as far as the crossbow is concerned
and really they would have loved for that they would have killed for it they would have killed
with it and there we have a tale of two bows and i hope you've enjoyed it i hope it's enlightened
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