Oh sometimes you get to do something epically cool
and that was it! I mean look at this, it is awesome.
Hi it's Tod from Tod's Workshop and Tod Cutler here and today I am back with the most
bonkers payload for my trebuchet ever. 100 crossbow bolts, what a bundle.
Did they ever do this? Well probably not, but we'll talk about that in a minute. Is it going to
be fun? I think it probably will be that's why I'm doing it. So how am I doing it because obviously
you want this to go flying as a big bundle because if you threw them separate just as a pile of bolts
they wouldn't go anywhere, like 10/15 meters or something, so these are all bundled up
six kilos of crossbow bolts. They're tied up with a nice tight cord here that I've wound up with a
stick to make it really tight and then some fuse here that's tying the whole lot together. That is
the link that's gonna burn out. This is a modern firework fuse, I get it, but they had fuse. This
wouldn't have been a problem for them to do had they wanted to do it and then this green leaf here
is just to stop my bolts burning really. Let's load it up shoot it see what we got. Here we go!
go
Whoa! Oh my goodness me.
I left it too long, but we are so going again but whoa, that was very cool. How about that,
I'm a lucky guy, I love my work but sometimes you get to do something epically cool and that was it.
It went really high, it broke apart too early so I'm going to delay it a bit more next time,
broke apart too early but it spread out the darts, straightened up they came down. The whole field
was just a sea of little white dots some even went beyond our men at arms some were very, very close,
didn't hit them obviously. We're gonna go again, we're gonna go again, but I have to ask myself.
Human nature hasn't changed; if things are this cool now they were this cool then.
People want cool stuff, so when I said that they didn't do it, maybe they did.
Bundle of darts second time
go
ah
Rubbish. I know what's happened it's broken apart. The actual burning fuselink
has broken apart because the forces are so big as it spins it around it's effectively
allowing the bundle to spread out. Simple solution we're gonna go again; more fuse.
Here we go again.
Go
yo
That's nice. That is nice! Check this out, now that is somewhere you do not want to be standing.
Needless to say we missed our guys again, I mean look at this, it is awesome. It's just a sea of
little white dots, all 100 of them. Worked beautifully. Range is a bit short as ever.
I am coming around to the idea maybe these things were a bit more mobile than I thought,
but this as a result, is awesome. I love awesome, they loved awesome, would they have done it?
Let's go talk about it. Well I did enjoy that and I could, I could tell you I have a good time doing
this sort of stuff, but the question is does it have any historical relevance at all? Did they
throw darts out of trebuchets? Big ones, small ones, any kind of ones? Well this is an expensive
crafted item, you have to ask yourself would they bother really. Would they bother, because
a big basket of rocks not that I managed to do that successfully, but a basket of rocks or a big
rock is gonna be far, far more devastating than these relatively light objects coming down from,
okay high up, but they're relatively light, they're not gonna do that much damage,
not compared to a 10 kilo rock. They're expensive, rocks are free. Why would you do it?
But the thing is why it gets all a bit mixed up with this kind of thing is I did joke about at
the beginning, but you know we do like cool things and we've always liked cool things
why does that change? But the other thing is there is a manuscript picture by Mariano Taccola and I
think it's 1434, quite clearly shows a couple of whopping big darts you know as high as me
sitting in the launch shoot of a trebuchet ready to go,
so you could say well clearly they did then, but Mariano Taccola is a pretty fanciful guy,
a lot of the stuff that he drew clearly never existed except in his head and maybe that's one of
them, so I wouldn't take that as gospel that they had darts for trebuchets and again why would you?
Because you know a 50 kilo rock coming out of a trebuchet is going to do an awful lot more damage
than I don't know a 10 kilo dart or a 20 kilo dart or even three or four of them all bundled together
and also again explicitly I will say throw the same object again, you understand your machine,
you start changing the objects that you throw, life becomes really difficult and
boy have I evidenced that over the last few films trying to mess about with different things.
But here's the thing if they had thrown bundles of darts what would they have thrown? I suspect not
expensive things like this, so I have very crudely made this. A shaft which has just been split out
of a bit of timber, dead quick. Bit of old shirt poked in a hole in the end then quick big wedge
of clay just left to dry out. Make some divots in the shaft there just to hold it a little bit,
mix in some goat hair, horse hair, that'll hold it in, you know bind it and then just a very simple
and evil blacksmith barb. Really quite nasty you know. You can make 50 of these in an afternoon,
it's not a big job. Anyway do they work? Let's throw it and find out. See you another time.
Yes they do.