So what I'm going to present to you today is utter fiction.
Hi it's Tod from Tod's Workshop and Tod Cutler here and today I am back with the trebuchet,
giant darts and plumbata. I am going to do something which they historically didn't do,
I have no evidence for it, it's probably not gonna work and it doesn't really have
an awful lot of point because I know I could never make it work well enough.
So why am I here? Well two very good reasons one they could have done it and the possibility of
what they could have done is really intriguing. Number two; it's gonna be cool. Reasons enough.
So what I'm going to present to you today is utter fiction, it is something that has come
out of my head because I think they should have done it, but not because they did do it. Now
that is a slippery slope because just because they could have made a steam engine in 1310
doesn't mean that I'm gonna pretend that they did; they didn't. So I'm going to show you something
and here's a little teaser, but not yet, I'm going to show you something that they could
have made in 1310 but I don't think they did, but if they had made it, it would have changed,
well would have changed Warfare for sure and probably machinery and life really.
It's a timed release, a reliable, adjustable timed release time trigger. I'll show you that in a bit,
but the reason I want to do it is a while back I was looking at these giant darts for the
trebuchet. Now the Europeans seem to have done it a bit, the Arabs seem to have done it quite a lot,
I still don't understand what is the point of this thing, but they did it and then I thought
you know what? Giant darts; I'll put a bundle of plumbata, sort of fake ones really because
I don't want to lose these expensive ones in the field, so I put a bundle of plumbata onto the dart
a fuse link again, light it, time it, release it. It works; check this footage out.
But it is never ever gonna be repeatable, you just can't and any sort of a weapon in
war you need to be repeatable, you need to know what it's going to do
and that's where my adjustable time link comes in. But I'm still teasing you because check
these things out, look at what these do if they drop from a meter, just imagine a cloud of 50,
80, 100 of these things coming down at once from some sort of trebuchet deployed munition.
It would be devastating. We find timed triggers, timed releases, timing units everywhere these
days, toys, games, machines, weapons. It is absolutely standard technology, but somebody
had to come up with that idea first and then others can develop it, but that First Leap,
that First Leap is the real genius moment. And they could have made what I'm showing you here,
they could have done this in 13th, 14th century, they could have done it in Roman times or Greek
times no problem at all but nobody had conceived of it or at least I don't know that they did,
show me if they have and I'm wrong. But this means that they could have used this device
throughout a whole range of things just like we do now. So how does this thing work? It's powered
by a coil spring here and it pushes this piston back and forward into this syringe body here,
they had syringes way back into Greek times they had, well they had leaf springs, I've used a coil
spring to make it easy, I could have done it with a leaf spring, so that all of this technology,
they could have done straightforwardly enough. And then this little rod here
pushes back through this gate and you can just put for instance, these two rings into that gate.
When you release the piston, the rings release. How do you time it? Well you
just have this little screw bar here with two units on it that jam the whole system open.
You want longer you screw it out longer, you want less, you screw it in, but here's the
thing you have a syringe body you have a little hole there it's full of air. If I pull that now,
almost an instant release 0.2, .3 of a second something like that. Not very useful.
But you can change it, because what you can do now is you can pull it back,
you can load it, you can hold it open and then you fill the syringe body with something else.
That something else, easily done is water. Water is always completely reliable, it is always water,
you could also fill it if you wanted it as a slower release
you could fill it with oil and then what happens when you release that pin, when you pull it out,
there's a little hole there and the water squirts out and the timer is slow
like that at the end of the time the trigger releases, boom. Now that was two or three seconds,
you could with a thicker fluid or a smaller hole you could make that longer. I think it's
time we went to test it. Seeing as we have a castle out there from a previous job and
a whole line of men at arms very tempting, so I think the first one we will just do a ball. Nice!
ah
oh!
As ever a spectacular miss. One day. I'm gonna throw this dart, but a dart of course is a bit
different to throw than a stone. Stone goes in the in the sling, other end of the sling goes onto the
end of the arm as it swings around one end slips off, one stays attached. The sling stays attached
to the arm, you can't throw the dart with the sling, so you have to have a detachable rope.
So the rope attaches on here, on this peg, the other end goes on the end of the arm as normal and
that means this flies and the rope flies, but you pick up the rope after and let's see what happens.
One dart. They're always a bit spooky these things. Let's see what happens. Nice!
oh beautiful!
I love it, I love it! Right and we had a GoPro on that one let's see what we got.
And at last this is the point of today's craziness. So we have got our mechanical
timer here, 13, 14th century style, we have got two sabot shells and they contain three
racks of bolts. So basically that pin there will get pulled when it leaves the trebuchet,
this the timer will go, this will then drop away, the air will open the sabot shells, all the bolts
will drop, that's the theory. So this is probably the craziest trebuchet dart ever made by mankind.
We have our string here to pull the trigger as it passes through, timer will start at some point
over there it's going to beautifully rain down darts onto our men. Is the theory. What could
go wrong? Well probably about 18 different things. This is the first time I've used any of this kind
of technology, the chance of it all working and working as I want it to work is about zero let's
face it. But we're all going to see now, is there any promise in this as an idea? And they would
have seen that too, so had they had a mechanical timer they could have done this, if they'd done
this they might have thought that is about the best thing ever and they would have pursued it and
they would have got there in the end. Me it's not very likely. Right let's shoot. Here goes. Nice!
Oh dear me, dear, dear me.
And that is behind the target.
Well clearly uh you know I just took out half my own troops there, um other than that
I don't really know what went wrong. At the moment; promising? Not on the surface. No.
Well I think it's a reasonable assessment of the last shot that it was a disaster, however I found
out why. I put a rope that was too long on it and the whole dart clipped the winding drum on the way
through, so basically it broke up on launch, essentially before it even left the machine.
So shorter rope we're going to go again.
All that remains now, fill it with water and shoot. Loose!
oh
Loose!
Well- some went
front of target.
Well that was only a minor disaster rather than a major disaster, but I genuinely think that there
is enough there that they would have pursued it. You can see the logic that's going on here,
you can see what I'm trying to achieve. In two shots, from cold I haven't done it.
Well you know what, another day we will come back. So I hope you enjoyed it, my crazy little wacky,
they might have done, invention from the 14th century. Come again. Thank you.