Dark Ages Crossbow - Full making process

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hi its ton of table stuff here and today we're going to have a look at making a Coletti era ravine crossbow so basically there's a lake in France Danny Leo where there was a settlement about a thousand years ago that was then excavated in the not-too-distant past and they found the remains of a crossbow it's a very light boat probably a hunting bow almost certainly not a war bow we don't have any war bows war crossbows going back that far there's another one a rising peg system from skåne in Scandinavia it is also very simple but at the same time I believe and then there is the quality air to share Avene bow what's notable about it is it has three components for a film industry so it's very simple bow to make very backwards so it's it's a light hunting bow maybe used for fishing maybe use for birding we don't know but we're gonna start by making the bow so whenever you make a crossbow that absolute first start has to be making the bow itself because that tells you what the brace height on the bow is going to be and what the draw length is going to be say if you start with the stop then you really limit yourself about what you can do with the bow itself so and that makes life more difficult because the stock is the easy bit to make if you like so we're going to start with the bow and I have here a piece of ash and it's actually an odd handrail so it'll be very suitable but if we have a look on here we have to work with the growth rings of the bow itself so you can see here that the growth rings are slightly inconveniently not parallel with the side of the handrail so we have to take out a piece of wood roughly here and we can start to work that down can keep it flat on the back most crossbow prods were flat it also makes it easier to make a bow if you a D section bow is always harder to make and in fact it works very well I mean the Native American Indians basically stuck with various flat bow design the knight and bow from that the Vikings used from Scandinavia again flatboat as far as I know so it's an established form it's just when you think longbow along bow is D section but this is not of course a longbow what is also notable about this bit of wood here is that the grain runs straight that means that I can work it very easily there's no sort of kinks where boughs came out there's no war pitch in it I'll be able to get a good piece of timber out of this or bit just an ordinary bit of ash handrail so the first thing I'm going to do is cut it down so I'm going to use bandsaw now for just cropping this out you could do this with a plain or even hand saws is just this is going to be faster for us [Music] [Music] so now we've got our billet timber you can see running up here the grain on the side so it's nice and straight so within the boundary of the of the billet itself there is a floor here that I'm going to watch out for so I'm going to try and work that out it's it's basically I don't know if you can see but there's a little void in the wood what is deeper within the wood through there I don't know so we've got to watch out for that we've now got our billet sitting in the vise and this is the back of the Bo's this is the bit that's going to be facing the quarry that you're shooting at and I've got to get this down now to a single growth ring from each tip to tip so it's going to change this front angle a bit and then we're going to redress it again on the bandsaw [Music] so not sure how much you can tell but you can see there are different colors here so the lighter one is the actual good wood and the darker one here is the sort of the pithy wood I'm not sure if that's like spring growth or winter growth or whatever but I've still got another layer I'm going to take another grow through and complete growth ring off this billet and then we should be more or less forward to the billet okay so we've got our billet thinned down now it's got one continuous growth ring on the front all the way to just about here where the grain just dips down slightly actually so I'm gonna work with the grain now and take a spokeshave and dig into that a little bit to try and get back a continuous growth ring if I can so just here is really the important bit so we're gonna do that now and then we will taper it into more of a bow section Oh what I would say before we go is there is a floor in the wood here in a flat bow this is not so important well this a long bow this would fail you'd get an elbow there hinge whatever you want to call it it would snap ultimately it should be okay on a flat day I'm just gonna if you can see on the end here it's of a trapezoid it's not square so I'm just gonna trim this square on the saw just so I've got a reference point and then we will measure out and do another saw cut [Music] so first thing is from the center of the bow and it is 99 centimeters now I'm not worried about measuring this to accurately says I'm gonna cut this on a saw for the sake of speed but you cannot make a bow and just put it on a saw and call it done you have to tear it will come to that process next so the fact that this is just a little bit approximate at this stage really doesn't matter because the finished bow will be definitely two different dimensions on each side simply because the wood flexes differently so this piece of wood will Bend in one way this piece of wood will Bend in a slightly different way so I'm just gonna store it now for speed and then clean it up on the plane so what I'm doing now I'm just sort of finally tracing down that growth ring just to make it short make sure if I've got it as good as I can the timber obviously moves slightly so you've got work with it I find a spokeshave at this point it's better because you can move it with the grain of the wood and as you see that you've got dip down here and then swoop that out then it allows you to do that so basically you can see from this it's kind of flat and kind of rectangular but actually it does Bend slightly and that's because I'm having to work with the wood this is not a piece of MDF it's not piece of chipboard and if you excuse the pun it will not bend to my will I have to work with the bow itself with the wood itself so there is some slight lack of straightness but the idea is that when you draw it into a bow that'll go you won't see it right so we're going to start tillering the bow now so basically I've cut the tapers in this way in this way and playing them flat I've also just thinned the tips slightly but on the belly of the bow that inside of the boat of it the face is you and there you can cut through the growth rings it's on the front that you want to try and avoid that if you can so first thing I'm doing really is just popping it in the vise here just getting a feel for how how it's looking like it's flexing so um at the moment you know it's okay I can start to put it on what's called a tiller tiller stick I'll show you that now and we will get an idea of the beginning of the bend and then from there on in there's no measurement there's no drawing you just look at the bend and you adjust the wood accordingly so I'm just gonna cut the knocks in now so I can put a string on it so I've just cut some simple knocks in now and I'm gonna put a string on it which is slack I'm not gonna brace the bow at this point so I can see from that we're beginning to get something like a bow so this device here is just a tillering stick all it is is something to put the bow into at the top and some pegs at a known distance so I can pull the string back and measure the distance that the bow comes back but what is really important is this allows me to step back a little bit from the boat and to have a look at it and to have a look at the curvature of the bow so what I do is they just put a little bit of brace high on it and I looked how it's bending now I don't know if you can see it there but this limb actually is bending in a fairly nice curve this one comes around in a curve and then this portion here is barely bending at all so I'm just gonna mark it now and so that I know what I'm doing I'm just gonna take away some wood in this area here but on the belly of the bow always on the belly of the bow or the sides never on the front now so I'm just going to take it down and skim a little bit of wood and this is just a very repetitive process a little bit at a time and then once you're confident you can pull it down to the next step and again at the next step you adjust the curve again and you just do this until you get to the draw weight that you want now the bow as it stands now it feels quite stiff obviously as you'd expect but I'm getting flex here but actually not so much on both these parts so I'm just gonna thin the limbs down a little bit all the way to the tips so we've got it on the tiller now on a slack string nice curve on that arm little less nice here a bit of a hinge point but next thing is just to relieve a bit of wood here because that's remaining very stiff so I'm just gonna take that section down a little bit in thickness [Music] it's all I'm doing now is just flexing it a bit going towards the next point that I'm gonna knock it onto just helps to sort of train the wood up a bit rather than just going straight into it it's also quite cold here and it helps to warm the wood which does no harm yeah so we've got a nice curve on this side this side just a little bit stiff so I'll just gonna take a little bit more wood away this side probably from about there coming through I think so we put a shorter string on the bow now so we've got a brace height just gonna put some scales on it and it's not a very powerful bow but that is what happens when you want to do it in a hurry and make sure that it works so we're coming in at about thirty pounds a little bit more 32 34 something like that it's a nice light weight little boat to make it easy to shoot so now I'm just filing the Knox in before they were a little light they were just for working the bow so now I'm putting them in properly putting them in a slight angle and then of course the same on the other side so we're gonna make a string now for for the boat we're gonna do a very simple one shouldn't take us too long there's many ways you can do it but we're doing this in three parts to give reinforced ends and I'll show you what I mean by that as we get to it so I'm just looping round and round now to make a very simple bundle of cords this is a linen thread takes about 50 pounds 22 kilos and draw away so we're not going to need too many of them and the thicker your bow string the more energy it takes out of the bow so you don't want too thick but you don't want it very thin a modern Dacron string for instance basically it's it's too thin often to sit well on the back of the Berlin so on the back of the bolt so it doesn't shoot cleanly so you want a little bit of fatness to your string it's just gonna knot in it very simple knot just to hold the cords so you'll now take this skein of cords off just to keep it bundled up in medieval days you'd whip it I don't think they did so I'm just turning it inside now a few times just so that it holds itself together nicely okay so now we're going to build some loops that go on the ends of the string and they get twisted in so we'll just lay this scheme onto one side just trying to keep it reasonably neat so now we're just going to make the end loops so I'm gonna put in 14 because that is the same number as in the main string for so the thread is a linen thread with a breaking strain of about 50 pounds 22 kilos so there'll be absolutely plenty here but you don't want your string to be too thin otherwise it doesn't engage with the back of the bolt very well too thick of course and you're losing a lot of the energy of the bow into driving the string because it weighs quite a lot so it's a very simple thing now we've got our two loops and we just pull the center of that loop through so it just forms and not on the end of the string do the same at the other end so we're doing the same on the other end so you just pop it through and just pull the bundle through like that so we've now got a string now as you can see some of these are a little bit flappy we want to get tension the same on all of them so I'm just gonna back that loop off again on both sides just give it a little a little movement and now you can see all the cords have gone tight so I'm gonna pull it up same again on the other side and that way the same load is on all of the strip all of the cords so we'll just check that for size now it should be a little smaller than the bow to account for brace height so it is in fact a tiny bit smaller and we will put some twisting into it which helps keep the cords together and gets it to the right size so but a couple of sort of inside-out twists on the end loops that will also help to hold everything together also the twisting action shortens the string slightly which is what we want so that you get a good brace high on your bow and then what we'll do now is just give it a little twist just spinning it around my finger there and that now should be give or take about the right sizes for the bow and we can always increase or decrease the length of the string by adding or taking away twists so now I've got to serve the ends of the string so basically what that means is just whipping some cord round and round it so it all holds together and it sits in the nox nicely so just doing two pieces at once just place a bit faster generally you would probably whip all the way but the sake of this I'll just show you how to do the ends I'm just going to find the center of the string so two chords again just gonna start on one end and then wind it away and here is our finished string so later on I'll give it coat of wax but let's just see if it fits the boat so at the moment it is almost exactly the right size when the bow is slack but of course we're going to brace it so we're just gonna pop some twists into it and we're looking for about eighty millimeter three-inch brace height something like that 85 millimeter brace hi so we've got the string on the bow brace height so we're just gonna draw it back down so that's probably where we'll run it maybe a little more we've got enough in the bow so it's about 11 and a half inch power stroke something like that so come down so 28 centimeter 29 centimeter 11 1/2 inches we'll run the bow so now we're going to take our bow and fit it to a stock so the first thing to do is find the center line on the bow and then mark the width of that on the stock here you want a little bit of depth there and then you put an angle in maybe about 10 degrees or so so that's the first thing we're going to do we're going to cut that in position the bow and then we can get the brace on the bow and market from there [Music] [Music] so now cut the socket for the bow with a slight angle on it I'm just going to pop it all in breaks the bow and make sure that all sits well so now we've got the bow into the stock the string is sitting on top of the stock very nicely the angle looks good so I'm now going to mark the brace height of it so that's the brace height of the bow and the string at full draw is going to be 11 and a half inches back from that about 28 centimeters from there I'm just going to measure and Mark that distance so it's that point that the string is gonna be pulled back to we're now going to build in the very particular shape of the quality of the sheriffing bow so we're going to bring that line back this part here you just want a slight return on it that is where the string the cord that locks the bow into place sits so we've got that line now and we're going to start to get the string notch in as well so I've just marked the position of that and we'll actually drill that down now and cut through that so that that can be our next step and we make sure that that works fine [Music] so just drilled through for the the trigger notch here so we'll cut down with a saw there and file it up and make sure that the bow and so the next step now is just to cut away the bits that we don't want to give the the bow that very distinctive look of the you know quality I do sheriff in bow [Music] so now we've got the very distinctive shape and we've got to get the trigger in there so the trigger is actually just like a bent piece of wood they're just pivots around a hole here and pushes the string out of the notch now you could cut it out of any bit of grain wood ash wood is good box wood is good they're very tough but I've actually got a bit of box wood here with a natural bend in it so that's going to help us strength wise so I'm gonna actually use that the curve of this wood so that the grain is kept true so I'm just going to cut this down now and latch is actually going to end up being our trigger here [Music] so now we've obviously got a somewhat bent and horrible looking bit of wood so I'm just going to flap this off on a sander easiest way for you to do it would be to foil it if you haven't got a sander back in a moment so here we have the trigger and it's working with the grain of the wood there because of that branch so it will be nice and tough so we have a pivot hole here and we're gonna drill one into there and it's gonna sit there push up [Music] [Music] so the next step now is to cut down a groove for the trigger to sit into so I'm just going to pop it centrally not using any measuring tools because of course our thousand-year-old compatriots didn't have verniers and I'm just going to cut a tiny little bit out in front of the notch as well just to make sure that that will seat properly under it so we'll just drill down we can always make it deeper if it's not deep enough so it'll drop right so let's start to clean that [Music] popping the trigger into position just using a drill bit as a pivot so that looks like it is going to work perfectly so now we're the next thing we're going to test the bow actually with the trigger system but this corner here of the notch is very very sharp so obviously we don't want that we want this whole area to be sort of polished and waxed and nice so I'm just gonna smooth that off a little bit so just putting a bit of a radius on it same on the other side and then we will run a little bit of sandpaper in there just to smooth it all up and make it loveliness of course our thousand-year-old cousins were short of sandpaper but they did use shark skin and then what we'll do is we'll run a bit of beeswax into here before we shoot the proper just make sure everything's looked after we don't want it to where the string it's in quickly so it looks like it's no work let's all cross our fingers thank so draw it back into position that's good it's nice and secure I'm just going to push down on the trigger now that's it so far as I can tell except for the groove on top that's now going to be a working boat so let's cut the groove so we've now got a central groove I'm just gonna run a chisel down it start they certainly used wooden scrapers scrapers for doing worden and even metal as well as they're very often Fuller's and sword blades and saxs the Vikings used to do it a lot are actually scraped in ground so the scraper tool it's just in this case a 12 millimeter bit of steel bar with a sharp edge on it not blade sharp and because of the length of it it turns a bit like a plane to straighten itself out so the fact that the cut was not quite straight actually doesn't really matter because just like you can sort out a bit of wood and planer it will find its own straight line so we now have the working pieces of the bow we've got the bow in the string we've got the trigger the stock with the bolt groove so now really we just got to sand the thing down smooth it and then we'll start to assemble one thing to note is you've got a sharp corner up here again that's gonna wear the string so we just want a bit of a curve on the top here and then the rest of it you just curve it to make it comfortable tilt one fin wouldn't pick it doesn't matter that it's spin because it takes barely any load at all and peg is in trigger works on the boat so lock this and all of this is to put the binding on to hold the boat so it's a simple one hook that round feed it through and then you've got to splice it the right length now anybody who splices ropes is going to know that splicing exactly the right length is gonna be difficult so we splice it basically the right length and then if we need to pack this bow out we can just put pieces of very thin leather behind it just to get it to the right kind of time so there is where we're gonna splice it I think to be honest go and have a look on youtube if you want to see how to splice ropes it's probably going to be the easiest thing this is about bones it's not that splicing broke so we're going to put the bow on now with the bridle so I've spliced it in through the boat up the bow into position around tight White's be fairly tight and then we're on the bow is now in position and ready to shoot so we have the bow everything is assembled so it's time to shoot so just span it by hand throw it back putting the bolt in [Music] [Applause] so you've got to be careful not to get the back of the bolts over the top of the trigger peg otherwise it just clips it out the way you know streets nicely [Applause] you

Info

Channel: Tod's Workshop You Tube

Views: 477,773

Rating: 4.9201956 out of 5

Keywords: Colletière à Charavines, making, how to, Dark Ages, history, experimental archeology, Crossbow, todsworkshop, todcutler

Id: wWiZpenRGx8

Channel Id: undefined

Length: 36min 8sec (2168 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 14 2017

Reddit Comments

Tod/Leo Todeschini is an incredible craftsman, specializing in medieval weaponry (obviously). His attention to detail is amazing. I have a simple knife built by him and even that small object is incredibly well-made and authentically detailed.

I love that he's been building a youtube presence because his work deserved wider appreciation.

👍︎︎ 13 👤︎︎ u/MoonSpider 📅︎︎ Dec 15 2017 🗫︎ replies

The Pope needs to do something about this kind of weapon.

👍︎︎ 13 👤︎︎ u/Durania 📅︎︎ Dec 15 2017 🗫︎ replies

That's really interesting

👍︎︎ 3 👤︎︎ u/supersonic-turtle 📅︎︎ Dec 15 2017 🗫︎ replies

He wields his bandsaw like a jacknife. I mean, he starts out to cut a rectangle at a 30-degree angle to the stock piece, holding the piece in his hands with no bracing, no fence, no mitre, just zzzziiiiippp.

👍︎︎ 2 👤︎︎ u/fernly 📅︎︎ Dec 16 2017 🗫︎ replies

FYI they call it the middle ages now. There no such thing as the dark ages anymore.

👍︎︎ 3 👤︎︎ u/B0NERSTORM 📅︎︎ Dec 16 2017 🗫︎ replies