470lbs Medieval German hunting crossbow - shooting barbed heads!!

hi it's Todd of Todd's workshop here and today we're going to be looking at this which is a Central European hunting crossbow fifteenth-century 470 pounds in draw weight and it's a lovely little thing the Germans did an awful lot of work with ivory horn antler whalebone and so I've sort of emulated that really so the whole thing it's black and white and it's black and white done in ox horn and camel bone most likely that would have been horn and ivory back in the day we've got an antler Bowl clip on here and then I'll go through some of this sort of notable features of it really so if we start at the front here we've got just a steel hanging ring and then just here we've got a bolt bridge a little cradle to hold the front of the bolt so the bolt does not sit on the deck it does not sit in a groove like most military bows are now that helps to reduce friction it also helps to to guide the bolt as well it's just a little bit more reliable so it makes a bit more accurate but the other thing here is you've got this incredible cutout here now I don't know for sure what that's doing there it's pretty that much I can see but what it certainly does do is it reduces the friction as the string comes along the stock here now I've done my own empirical testing and I know that if you can't the string very steeply over the stock so it drags heavily on the stock you lose about 10 percent of your energy in that friction so any losses any small incremental gains basically along the way is a good thing so if you can lose less energy through friction that's good so actually even later crossbows that the whole deck still maintained this bolt bridge here but the whole deck actually could curve down sometimes so the string in fact touched here and it touched were more or less where it's at rest here but the rest of the time it wasn't even in contact with the stock at all so there that was sort of a target crossbow version sort of 18th century and then if we look at the front here again we've got woven leather braiding here serve no purpose to all other than bit enos we've got safety cords now historically Bose did break and you see this in museums all the time where bows have been replaced they couldn't be sure of the metallurgy they couldn't be sure of the heat treatment process that they put it through so although of course empirically the Smiths are very very good they couldn't be certain and that is my belief why the draw lengths on medieval bows are very short this one here is running at about 140 millimeters so I think about five and a quarter inches something like that you could probably run this bow at six and a half six and three-quarter inches so one hundred and sixty hundred and sixty-five mil that little bit of extra makes a hell of a difference actually so if they could have done they would have done so my assumption is that they simply did it for safety sake saying that bows broke and you put the cords on here and that just takes some of the sting of the bow out and bear in mind your face is the next stop for this that's obviously quite a good thing saying all of that my bows are hardened and tempered in a very controlled way computer-controlled they will not break there they will Bend if they're over drawn but they won't break string itself is linen bindings are hemp down the traditional way then we have a nut here and that is latched on now your gut reaction first certainly when I started making bows was that's not going to hold the nut in place well actually the the resultant forces when you're basically trying to rotate the nut against the trigger the resultant forces is to drive the nut down into the socket so actually you don't need a hard pin here at all the the cord is simply there just to stop the nut spinning out during shooting you can shoot the bow without a cord or without a pin in this salt the nut will get lost every time but technically it's not required to actually shoot the bow then we've got two lugs here for a goat's foot lever I've got a good video on this actually so we will post that up goats foot leave a clip clips on and then it allows you to draw the bow back without too much effort bearing - 470 pounds and then we've got a bulk clip now a bulk clip came in around about 1500 so if we say that this bow is 14 70 or something they would not have been there but the bottom line is this bow is actually going for hunting you know real real time hunting over in the US and I figured that the guy's going to appreciate when he's you know hiding in bushes and walking through the woods and so on he's going to appreciate having a bolt which is exactly where he it was where he lost put it and then just to stock itself the stock is cherry the white is bone and the black is horn now this has been supplied with three bolts these are standard sort of feather flex bolts that I supply with any of my bows a shaft around about 350 ml 14 inches long steel modern bodkin mudbud head on the end worked very nicely easy to get out of targets the fellow is also asked for a couple of blunts so these are wooden blunts with a steel pin in the end again on a shaft obviously these don't penetrate but for small games they will smack the hell out of it so again good and then these last ones are hand forged arrowheads by chap called will Sherman UK era Smith what I would also like to say I haven't actually mentioned it to will but what I'd like to say is that the sockets are particularly good and you might think that that's kind of irrelevant but actually when you're forming an arrows era socket you've got one piece of metal goes over the other so that you get a cone proper cone it doesn't have a split up side now what that means is inherently you have a socket which is not conical in form inside that's it's sort of natural state and what that means is that it's actually very difficult to get the arrowheads straight onto a shaft it's there either canted off or they come down to one side or the other now on a wide head like this which does tend to plane through the air that's really quite important because if if the head is not set accurately the shaft will not flight row it'll-it'll curve on a narrow shaft it's not so important actually because you've got a long distance with the reflections at the back on a bolt it is much more important it's much more critical that the head is good and the sockets on his heads are really tight and really accurately formed so that they stay parallel to the shaft which is actually parallel which is of course what you want and then there's tiny little copper pin and that's just to retain the shaft onto the head onto the shaft these take a lot of load when they smack if that's hits a bit of bone as it's going through its gonna do that and you know the heads can and will detach it's just the nature of it so the pin helps helps to to keep the thing two things together doesn't guarantee it at all by any means so let's go shoot the thing and see what it is so first off I'm going to shoot the blunt and we'll get a speed reading off that now again there's a good video on how to load these things but you want the nut to be in the forward position because it's actually the goats foot pulling the string back which turns the nut and locks the whole system and the bolt clip also which is a little bit fragile that needs to be out of the way so let's load the thing up as I said 470 pounds so we're in you now move the clip into the right position hook the end of the bolt under it and you can see now it's it's all nicely held and let's see if we can get a reading 140 3.9 so let's just zoom in there so shot the blunt at the target here I've actually put the sheepskin on it just to try and take some of the smack out of it when it lands because you know that's a hard thing for a large blunt to hit I have a look at the back of this though those are old holes and that that's the one nice round hole so that's actually the blunt piercing the sheepskin there and all the wool so you get an idea from that how much of a a mess it would make of a small creature like a rabbit or a pigeon that said it is 48 joules in energy it's a 50 gram bolt it's 48 joules in energy or 35 foot-pounds of year us that's on the blunt so we'll have a look at the sharps now and we'll see where we get to with that so what I've got first of all is this it is a stack of cardboard and thin plywood the reason for that is obviously I don't want to stick my broadheads into this straw bus because it would show up the brass boss and it will be held to get the blunts out there broadheads down but then the other thing is that any bolt does not like hitting something really hard like a tree or something like that they just don't like it so this one because of the way it's layered and so when it just softens the entry of the bolt a little bit rather than whacking into something dead heart that said it goes in and if it does penetrate deeply these these sharps won't I've done a couple of tests but if it does penetrate deeply you can then basically take the whole thing apart piece by piece and get the bolt out that way so I always test broadheads against layered cardboard or cardboard labels imply that sort of thing so let's load up and shoot up its gonna get the bow ready so we're going to move the bow clip out the way get the nuts into the right position and then I always just put the butt of the bow just against the top of my leg there and on the front and drawback Krugers engaged Boal clip moves in and just hook the end of it there so let's see what we get does kick some this one as well actually half a little bow so let's zoom in that was 140 feet per second see on to the bolt or the reading now it's too dark for the reading but anyway there we are with the bolt now I will just show you a little bit about extracting the bolt as well now the broadhead here has come in at that angle so basically you find the orientation of the blade and you rock the bolt in the orientation of the blade pulling a little bit and asked a lot do not grab the shaft if you grab the shaft you'll end up breaking the bolt you really will so the end of a slow process just easing it out oh yeah and now we've got the bolt out so that's our broad head and we'll do a quick sum find out what the energy is I've weighed up and calculated the energies on the barbed hunting bolt so that weighs in at 57 grams it gives an energy of 53 joules or 39 foot-pounds the actual distance across it just for those you know it looks to be about 30 millimeters interesting quarter something like that thank you very much we're gonna do some long shooting now so you can have a bit of a look and and there we have it really Central European 15th century hunting crossbow its four hundred and seventy pound draw bite thank you so do a bit more long shooting this is about 15 yards something like that and again there's good videos on on how to load goats foot bows it's not overly difficult so sprinkle it back into position here we go little high on rights so that rate of shooting is pretty good actually and bulk clips back in like I said you've got to be a little bit delicate with them hi just above Center so I'll see if I can get this one pretty much on center just a little three inches right so we'll have a look at that grouping so like so it's about 15 yards so I'd guess it's about 150 mil 6-inch something like that no sights obviously

Channel: Tod's Workshop

Views: 194,748

Keywords: History, Hunting, Crossbow, Reenactment, Medieval, Archery, Tods Workshop

Id: JDs7CLxTDGU

Length: 14min 4sec (844 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 27 2018