Well, scared the crows anyway.
Hi it's Tod of Tod's Workshop and Tod Cutler here and today I'm back with an 850 pound draw
weight crossbow, not the windlass crossbow that Skallagrim had, the one that I was looking after,
but another one that I've made. His ones now moved on. In a recent video I shot this and I
called it the "end him rightly bolt" although of course actually as we all now know if you've
read the comments, the "end him swiftly bolt" it's not as good an idea but it's, you know,
it's the truth let's face it. 510 grams of steel and it was awesome and at the end of that video
I thought; well actually let's look at what different bow weights,
bolt weights do because they will fly different distances, they will carry different energies
with them and they did shoot different weight bolts, so let's find out what it's all about.
But before I go on, I'd just like to say that I'm filming here again on location at Kentwell
Hall which is now open after this horrible Covid mess and we have a whole load of events coming up,
so just come on down, check out the website see what's going on, it's an amazing place and it's
where my journey in history really began by the way. Back to the subject now. So the lightest
bolt here is a needle bodkin at 65 grams and then we have a couple of plate cutters here at 80 and
93 grams so again these are historical weights for these, it's what I get out of museums, museum
catalogues, books and so on and then the last one is this crazy thing here. So these ones you'll
know about, you've seen before plenty of times, I mean look at this thing here, it's called a crown
bolt but really it's a mace on a stick its what? 21 millimeter diameter here something like that,
7/8 of an inch, it's just a brute. 159 grams, 89 grams of that in case you're curious is the head,
but then the shaft of course is so much bigger. I'm going to come back to these because I find
these really interesting, but they are apparently for shooting at animals where you want to retain
the fur without puncturing a hole through it, again in the book that I lifted this from, it
says they don't travel as far. Evidently it's not going to travel as far, I mean it's much blunter,
much heavier, but let's see what it does. Really we're just going to do a very simple test. Now
we've got four bolts at different weights, we're going to shoot them for distance, I've got an
angle meter on my phone, so we'll get the angle of the bow exactly the same for every one and
we'll get an absolute definitive answer on how far this bow shoots the different weight bolts.
Just loading up for our first one which was 65 grams on a needle bodkin
so all the shafts and vanes are the same except rather obviously for the crown bolt. You've got to
unwind the ropes first otherwise it's just a bit of a nightmare to look after. Okay three two one.
That's a long one, I don't know how long,
looked good. It's just impossible to tell. Right let's go again and going 80 grams.
Down. Scared the crows, anyway I don't usually shoot for distance,
so it is interesting to see what happens, but like I said you just got absolutely no concept
of what's going on the other end really. If you want me to guess,
I'd say that that went further, but of course logic says that's just not even
possible because it's 20 grams,15 grams more and other than that flights and shafts are the same.
oh
And down. Right, then the last of them is this crazy crown bolt supposed to be for hunting and
I think also they used to use it for target use because of course it doesn't penetrate the target
so you haven't got to pry your bolt out of the target all the time which
anybody who shoots modern crossbows knows can be really quite annoying,
so this is a rather crazy 159 grams. There we go 45 and go. Yeah much less. You can tell
right away. Let's get our rangefinder and see how far we've gone and the thing you all want to see
is the "end in rightly bolt" but I can't show you this, it was made for Skalls bow and actually it
will hit the stirrup on this one, the sizes were slightly different, I just can't shoot this off
this bow, so sorry guys. Just walking out to them now and we'll get a distance with a rangefinder,
but you know I think about these things an awful lot and uh I mull over them,
you know early mornings, late at night, it's just what I do. Now the string on that bow there,
I haven't made one for a while and I think I've made it too heavy, it's definitely thick and it's
probably better for a 1200 than it is an 850, so I might run this test again at some point in
the future and put a thinner string on it and just see what kind of difference that makes,
anyway maybe it's going to be a nice respectable number, maybe it's going to be embarrassing, we'll
find out. So we have our first bolt our crown bolt 148 yards with a 159 gram bolt, sorry for
the mixed numbers but this is the UK. We've got our next one here which is oh oh blimey that's in.
93 grams and the distance
219 yards so okay, but it does become interesting there was I think it was in the 1970s there was a
French mathematician, physicist, historian uh called Liebel who did a lot of work
on crossbows and I think from memory he was calculating they should be
reaching maybe 240 or 260 yards something like that but anyway here's our next one
oops aha 80 grams so at least we haven't had some weird upset which has changed
the laws of physics, because they are in the order they're supposed to be.
223 yards and then we have the last of them here.
65 grams and a needle bodkin.
And that has gone 238 yards now that was a very unsurprising result and also a surprising one,
so we're going to go for the unsurprising result first of all well the absolute tank, the club,
the mace didn't go that far, it's 160 yards or something like that and then the others behaved
again as exactly as you would think, they went a distance proportionate to their mass,
so all of that is what you would imagine it to be, the lightest one ending up going about 235 yards
I think it was. That's all in some respects a little bit uninteresting, it's what you'd expect,
but it got me thinking, because last time I did a distance trial with one of these heavy
windless bows was here at Kentwell Hall, but it was a 1250 pound bow not an 850 pound so
400 pounds difference and it shot almost exactly the same distance, I think the bolt was probably
slightly heavier but it did the same kind of distance, it wasn't a revolutionary difference
and so you know it's my theory here, but I think what's going on really is if you think
back to five six films ago, I shot a very light bolt off one of these windless bows
and it hardly went any faster at all than a heavy one so the traditional way of getting more energy
into target is you make your projectile faster, but these steel limbs they don't go any faster,
doesn't matter how light your projectile is they don't go faster, so you get more
energy into your target by mass and that is why the the draw weights of these military bows,
steel military bows were just going up to crazy numbers like 1500 pounds and stuff,
is because you get the energy into your target by simply shifting a big heavy lump. You can't
do it quickly, but you can make it heavy and I think that's what all these are about. Now I have
to stress again that's just my theory, its that really I'm trying to understand these bows like
you are and I think that's what it's about. But anyway thank you very much, I hope you enjoyed it.
We have our bow mounted in the jack here with the load cell set in pounds and the distance
we're looking for from the belly to the string is 288 millimeters so just under 12 inches,
that gives a power stroke of 173 millimeters. So I've just marked it with a red line on the ruler,
we'll just jack it up. There we go and we'll see what we get, so hopefully
somewhere between around 850 to 880 something like that is what I'm expecting off this bow.
And I'm gonna have to step up now.
So we've got another 50 mm, two inches or so to go,
so we're getting relatively close. I don't want to overdo it obviously. There that's it
850, in fact 850 exactly so that is around about 385, 390 kilos something like that.
We're gonna let the thing down and now we're done.
When you're dealing with bow weights like this you've got to use jacks like this it's just,
you know the whole thing is heavy industry, when you can imagine back in the day the sort of
equipment they needed just to span these things and put strings on them and maintenance right.
There we are we're done.