funny little things these
Hi it's Tod of Tod's Workshop and Tod Cutler here and today we're going to
talk about this. The Gribshunden crossbow. We're also going to range
across a few other areas because it's an interesting project not just about
crossbows but about the way that you approach reproduction artifacts and what
they do and how they work. Now we're gonna start at the beginning; so... my
knowledge of history is English-based, France, Italy, Germany, but not so much
going up towards Scandinavia. So Gribshunden. We'll start at the
beginning. King John of Denmark and Sweden like to fight quite a lot, and
this is talking about the late 15th century. King John had a ship called the
Gribshunden or in English the Griffin. Now he went off raiding in 1495. Ship
caught fire, sunk in shallow waters off the Blekinge archipelago in southern
Sweden; sorry if I've messed the pronunciation. 1970s a bunch of Swedish
divers, local diving Club, found the wreck and since then, is obviously been
investigation and so on, but 2019 I believe, there's been quite a large
upscale investigation archaeological work on the site. This has been done
by a few universities funded through Lund University and Blekinge museum,
and they've asked for me to make a reproduction of a crossbow that they
have found, or fragments of a crossbow and that is really where the story
begins. If you have a look at these pictures here, these are fragments of a
crossbow stock. There's not a lot to see you can see where the nut was you can
see a couple of holes trigger hole a pinhole for some other purpose, there's
not really a great deal of it left. They wanted me to interpret that and turn it
into a crossbow as it could have been, that they were then able to shoot and
test really. So we looked at some of the artwork around the time so these are the
sort of pictures we were looking at. That gives you a bit of a layout, we looked at
another Danish crossbow or crossbow in a Danish Museum that again gives you the
sort of thing that we're talking about that we're looking at here. It was a very
interesting project this because I'm being dictated to about how to make a
dynamic, a kinetic object. Now you might think that they're the
client I'm the supplier, I make what they tell me. Yes and no. Because at
the beginning and this is no disrespect to them, but they didn't quite understand
the complexities of making a crossbow using the information they had. So they
knew that they had a nut that they had found which was on the shipwreck but not
necessarily, or any evidence at all it was associated to the stock they had. But
they wanted the nut of this size and they wanted the stock their crossbow
based on that stock and then they had bolts here which are based on bolt
shafts that they found that they wanted to shoot from the bow. But we don't know
the width of the bow, we don't know the draw length, we don't know the power
stroke. None of that is left on the stock that exists. We're just going to have
a look at the bolts here. Now this bolt here is one of my standard kind of bolts
but it's a bit shorter than I would usually do by about 50-60 mm -
2 inches so. This makes it less stable in flight, makes it harder to use, harder to
make. The bolts that they found on the wreck may or may not have been
associated with that particular crossbow, we'll never know, but they wanted to be
able to say these were the bolts that we found. Again I can say that this is a
bolt that will shoot from that bow but it's not that it was necessarily the
bolt for that bow and actually I suspect it's probably for a lighter bow because
it is a bit shorter and lighter bows are happier with shorter bolts. Then we come
to this one which is really curious. Now of course in the modern day and age you
don't take your hunting weapons with you when you go on campaign is a soldier,
things were different then, and this is a hunting bolt. It's blunt headed it is to
protect the plumage or the fur when you're hunting is to not penetrate, it's
to bludgeon something to death. It has a three quarter inch/ an 18 millimeter
shaft here and then tapering down. But this again is part of the problem. So
they had some bolts where they the actual groove for the flights was very
indistinct and I couldn't really make it out so I just had to assume that it was
wooden flights it might have been feathered and I put my wooden flights on.
It had a very pointed 18 mm 3/4 inch shaft here with a very pointed point
for the socket. We didn't have any heads I have to assume that it
was a crown bolt, a hunting head, even though it's a military ship. You know
they land they shoot, and the shaft length was really short I think it was
about 22 centimetres something like that. A very difficult thing; I've never made
one like that. I thought that thing would never work in a million years. I shot it
it didn't work, it was hideous. And then I cut the flights down because
my intuition was telling me that there was too much drag at the back.
I cut the flights down and it shoots nice and clean so that was quite an
interesting thing for me. But the other thing that was interesting is that you
can see at the end just here alright just at the end there. It's curved to
sort of cup the string. I don't know if it was necessary for this type of bolt
to do that it's not something I've ever seen a crossbow bolt before, but it was
evident on the bolts that were found on on the Gribshunden there. So what they were
asking me to do was to make a working crossbow so they could use it and shoot
it and test it and display it and say "this is the sort of bow that they had"
I can't do that. I can't do that because there's not enough left of the bow and
bows weren't made to a pattern, you know different makers made
them in different ways so that's not something I was able to do. But the other
thing that I'm not able to do is say "yes of course I can make the nut that
size" and "yes of course I can make the nut this far back from the socket"
because by doing that I paint myself into a corner and that corner might not
necessarily deliver a bow that works and of course the client wants a bow that
works. So we have quite a lot of too-ing and fro-ing saying do you want one that
looks like that or do you want one that works or do you want one that kind of
looks like that and works or.... you know. And this is the thing it's difficult. Now
I'm gonna explain what I mean by that so we're gonna start at the bottom line
right. You make a reproduction of a dagger, now this dagger here it needs to
fit my hand, well that's fairly obvious. The blade needs to be the right kind of
length well again that's fairly obvious. It's the right kind of thickness.
Point of balance, it it's a personal thing. My view will be different to your
view, so there's no right or wrong about this as long as it is the right kind of
dimensions and the right kind of materials and the right kind of shape
and appearance, then it is basically the
right dagger. It's a fairly static object, you can't go too far wrong reproducing
something like that. You take this sword here, this one's actually by Albion, the
the dagger there was Tod Cutler, this is an Albion sword I happen to have. This is
slightly different. If you look at this, a sword is a spring, now you can see
it wobble I hope. Now here you've got a center of percussion, that's where you
want to strike with your sword. My personal view is that might be perfect,
you might not like that, you might want that position here or here, so again if I
reproduce a sword like this if that point of percussion is slightly
different, or the balance point here is slightly different, by a centimeter or so.
It doesn't matter, it's still a good sword. It might not be your sword, but it
might be my sword. It's still a good sword. A sword is harder to make than a
dagger, because it has some kinetic properties but it is still essentially a
fairly straightforward object to get a good sword. There are some things
you have to do, but this is where it all changes because you take a bow like this,
and as soon as the client starts to dictate to me what these dimensions
should be, the possibility of this bow working, it just goes through the floor.
It might work, but it might not and I can't deliver a bow that doesn't work.
Let's look at the bow from the front to the back. So we have a stirrup here which
is different to the one in the museum on the museum bow but is in line with the
artwork at the time that is geographically correct. We've got a steel
bow here, the original was probably composite that's what I'm thinking,
however steel was certainly around so it's a plausible possibility I don't
make composites. Linen string, hemp bindings to hold the bow on. Then
we've got a holly stock here I don't know if any analysis has been done on
the wood but it's a nice dense hardwood so as well-suited. Horn cheek plates here,
those are required to strengthen the sides of the stock. Now the Danish bow
had a steel band here which held the pin going through and a steel band here.
I've forgotten the German name for this but it's instead of cordage where the
nut is tied on, they put the steel through sometimes.
Then we have an antler nut here with a steel sear and then the reinforcement
pins that go through the teeth.
And then we come to the pin here now if this was a cranequin bow and I would expect this to be a cranequin bow
I would also expect this pin to be a bit further back if it was loaded by a
goat's foot lever I'd expect it to be a little bit further forward so it's it's
a little bit in sort of a no-man's land between the two. I've made it as a goat's
foot one because we had some time issues and some budget issues and it works as
goats for lever but it's it's not ideal. But again it highlights that thing about
certain aspects of a bow if they if they are defined then you have to follow them
and that hole was clearly there on the stock and its relationship to the nut was
clearly there in the trigger hole, so really those relationships were set so I
wanted to follow that, it's what it's the tiniest little bit of information that
we could really extract out of that stock. That and the fact that it was the
curvy type of a bow like this one here, sort of either a hunting bow or a war
bow, there wasn't a lot of differentiation but it was of that sort
of central and northern European curvy style. Then we have a trigger bar
that again is following the ones in the paintings more or less. This goats foot
lever, it's made from scratch, it's made for some less than ideal hole positions
and so it doesn't work quite so well, but there are other ways you could do it and
I'll show you that now. Let's see it shoot. So the first thing set the nut
into the open position, goats foot lever on, little different to my regular ones.
Now just putting a bit of pre tension on it, flipping the bow upside down you see
this an Italian manuscripts quite a lot. Pushing with the bow and the lever up
and in and then we're off. So regular bolt this time, first up. So a couple of
inches above the center. Set the nut again, this time we'll shoot a crown bolt.
A bit of pretension and we're in. Funny little things these. Gonna shoot a bit
low and there we are. So you can see it shoots well enough and you certainly
wouldn't want to get hit by that.
And there you are. You've seen the bow shoot
the crown bolts, you've seen it shoot the armor-piercing bolts. You know, it
shoots well, it's it's a good performing bow. But it was very interesting project
for me because more than any other project that I've done recently, this has
highlighted for me, what the client wants, and what the supplier wants, and the supplier
does not always want to give what the client wants. And in honesty, the client
doesn't always want to receive what they've asked for; the crossbow
highlights that. That it's a complicated mechanical device, it's kinetic,
it's got lots of moving parts, it does certain things, there's a relationship between
every single element there that is important. And you cannot cherry-pick and
say "I want this this and this and I want you to make a bow that works". It's not
like that. And it was a lovely meeting of coming together and understanding what
Lund University and Blekinge Museum wanted and what I was prepared to do and
deliver. Because as a client you may well say " this is what I want" but actually if
what you want doesn't function, it's not going to take you very long after you've
received it to decide it's not what you wanted at all, and then suddenly it
becomes my fault. So it's really a suppliers duty as well to hold the hand
of the of the person commissioning it, walk you through the process, and end up
with an item that might not be exactly what you started with, but is exactly
what you wanted. And there we are, so the Gribshunden crossbow project.
Really interesting one for me. Thank you