Leather Armour - will it stop arrows?

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I don't see why he thinks people didn't put soft leather on some kind of form or mould, and dip the whole thing in boiling material to harden it. He seems to think you have to harden pieces of leather first and then shape them but i don't understand why. I would say it would be easiest to shape the leather, e.g. wrap a piece around some wood in the shape of your arm for making a bracer or whatever, and then do the boiling process to the whole piece of leather and wood tied together, whether it's being boiled in water, or wine, or oil, or hide glue, or whatever, and then untie your hard piece of leather from your wooden form.

But it is a cool video though, very impressive amount of work he went through.

👍︎︎ 7 👤︎︎ u/forlornucopia 📅︎︎ Aug 27 2020 🗫︎ replies

For those that haven seen it, here a good study on, Non-Metallic Armour prior to the First World War.

👍︎︎ 3 👤︎︎ u/funkmachine7 📅︎︎ Aug 27 2020 🗫︎ replies
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So it's chipped it. Sure it has chipped it, but that's a fence post, this is leather! Hi it's Tod of Tod's Workshop and Tod Cutler here and today we're back with the Lockdown Longbow and boiled leather. Leather armour, cuir bouilli, sorry French people, i just killed that word I know. I'll say at the beginning, a lot of this is my supposition and my guesswork so if you know that iIm wrong, or if you think I'm wrong, just remember even if I'm sound like I'm adamant, i'm not certain. But I think I'm right. It's stiff there we go, I'll give you a good close-up. It's shiny because of the process, I'll explain that, and same with the discoloration. It's definitely hard and that is four millimeters four mm thick. So what is going on well there's a lot to unpack here and there's a little bit of sort of material science so we're all gonna head back to school, but you know, I'll make it good. I'll make it the way school should have been. So I've got myself a piece of veg tan leather here, the same thickness as this, to give you some sort of an example. It's flexible, you can do all of that it's fine. Does it make good armour? Well let's just have a look. I've got my piece of veg tan leather here and I've got a block of foam and a Tod Cutler rondel dagger, it's the pointiest one that I sell. Now if you do want to support this channel buying the Tod Cutler range of products, it's a good way to start, because that really helps me and it helps fund all this stuff I'm doing. So rondel dagger; it's meant to be an armor penetrator, we've got four mm of veg tan leather here, let's just see what it does. Well there you go. I think that fairly convincingly goes through. Well perhaps no great surprise, but let's explain what's going on. Hardened leather, there's lots of speculation about how it was done whether it was treated with wax whether it was with the oils whether it was with water and so on, but the problem is, the name is boiled leather, cuir bouilli, so the assumption has to be that it is boiled leather but this is the problem. It can't be boiled leather, it could be all sorts of things, but it cannot be boiled leather even though that's what it's called. So this is leather that I have boiled and look at it this started as flat sheets, as hard as you like, hard as you like, but there you go I can just crack it. Okay and I've broken it. It's really hard but it's deformed you can't make sheets of armuor out of this stuff. So it's not boiled leather right? that we have now discovered. So what is it? Well you can see the manuscript pictures and there's like sort of big vats steaming that so I think the assumption is that it's something to do with heat. Well yeah. So I got to thinking one day, i landed a tv job, where somebody said "can you do boiled leather" I just went "yeah of course i could do boiled leather yeah no problem at all", so of course I put the phone down; it's like oh no boiled leather right what is it? And I got to thinking and I went back to a conversation i had with Peter Johnsson the great swordsmith and designer and he was talking about sword grips pressing the glue through the leather and it becoming impregnated and becoming almost like fiberglass, and I thought that conversation I just went "That's it. That is it!". So what's fiberglass? Well there is a point to this. Fiberglass is glass fibers, all right? There you go, glass fibers. In a mat, it's flexible you can do that. It doesn't crack, it's very thin that's why. You mix it with resin, polyester or epoxy resin, which is brittle so that's rubbish on its own, the glass is rubbish on its own; you put the two together and the resin fills the gaps between the glass and you end up with something incredibly strong because these fibers are really strong in tension. So I thought, well it's like fiberglass but obviously it's not. So you have the leather, which is fibrous you can see that when you rip it apart, it's full of fibers. So the idea is you fill the gaps between the fibers with basically a resin. That resin if it is brittle, it is hard and incompressible and combined with the fibres you end up with something tough. There are really important characteristics about boiled leather the way it can be decorated the way it can be molded and shaped for vambraces and breastplates and and little tiny pen cases and all sorts of things, that use boiled leather that means that it has to have a very specific set of properties. One of those is that you must be able to mold it, but then there's too much decoration on to do it while it's there, it will take days to do that level of decoration. So you must be able to sort of bring it back it's not like heating the surface and hardening it you must be able to soften it again to decorate it and then let it re-harden. And I thought of all these different things about the way it had to work and I thought.... it's animal glue. So then what you do is when it's warm you put it over your mold and as it cools the jelly hardens, it is jelly, jello, it hardens, the leather takes its set, and then it dries over the next weeks and you end up with something that is like wood. And that is our material science story, but the thing is all of this is going to come true again when we talk about gambeson, because a lot of this happens the same way so i'll just show you. I have got a regular bit of gambeson here nice and flexible, 32 layers of linen, and then Ii have a much stiffer, wine and salt impregnated gambeson. We're going to come to that in another film, but the process is the same that you are filling up those gaps, those indices between the fibers with something. In this case wine and salt, in the other case animal glue. I can't say for a fact, not a fact, that I'm right, but in my head I'm certain that I am. But it means also because I can't say it for a fact, we don't have a recipe about it. we don't know how this stuff was really made so there is experimentation to be done and I've made a batch of stuff here where I think maybe, the jelly was too strong and so what has happened is we've ended up with something that has removed a lot the toughness but left brittleness, like a knife that is over hard, but I'm going to give you an example here look at this. That is a piece of leather okay? Leather and jelly. This is a fence post. Check this out. That is not something that you see every day, leather chops fence post. So it's chipped it. Sure it has chipped it, but that's a fence post, this is leather. So that is the end of our material science lecture so what are we actually going to go and shoot? Well we've got one layer, two layer and three layer pieces of hardened leather and you can hear, they are hard. Let's shoot them. Back at the range with the lockdown longbow and a single layer of hardened leather let's see what it does. Type 7 needle bodkin Whoah!! Right well that is straight through, straight through, so I don't think there's any point in doing any of the other arrows on that one so we will go up thickness and we'll see how we go. It's actually it's cracked right across. So maybe i cooked up my mix a bit wrong, you know, like I say no recipe, but you know it stopped it... hell actually you know what? let's just try type 9 just because. Goodness, okay well that is also straight through, uh cracked it, whole chunk fell off, so clearly single layer, hardened leather at least with that recipe no good at all. We're now going to go for two layers of hardened leather so this is about eight to nine millimeters of leather and of course jelly, or if you're in the states, jello, the magic ingredient. Type seven needle bodkin straight in but the penetration not so good and that is a needle bodkin. Let's just try with the type nine again... oh killed it! Right well I better go and correct that one then hadn't I? Now then; getting interesting! So here needle bodkin, type seven, it's cracked the surface I mean it's absolutely shattered it, so that says to me that my inexpertise of making hardened leather has just made this a bit too brittle and not quite tough enough. You know what? Experience would change that. This one, type nine, has not cracked it but again if we now look at the back side of these, they're coming through, the foam does stop it, does slow it, but it's not massive, it's not a massive game changer to it. What is interesting, is that two layers is making a difference that is beginning to make a significant difference to how these things penetrate, so we're going to try with three layers let's see what happens. Right here we go again i'm going to start this time with the type 16 to see if that makes a significant difference uh to how it goes through and then we're going to swap into the others, anyway I don't know why, I wanted to mix it up. Well that one's straight in but it doesn't look like the leather's cracked. Type nine, let's see if it can do its business with type 16 does i'm guessing this will. Let's find out well that's stuck in. Towton or Tudor bodkin. Last up, type nine. We're there! Four clean shots let's go have a look. This promises to be interesting. I love these tests, i just love them. Now clearly all four have penetrated. Question mark is, how deeply? So I'm just going to mark them off and then we'll pull the target off and we'll have a look what's what's going on. Here you go this is an unpacking video for you. And there we are let's give you a sense of scale there is my hand. So that's not nice! The other ones again you know not very pleasant. Type 16 actually, that's interesting it fared less well than all of the others which I wouldn't have expected. Um that is intriguing, that is intriguing, but all of them have really been caught and bound by this leather and this is you know three layers. There's nothing to stop you doing four or five layers. So I'm back at base and we'll have a look at what's happened today. Again I just love this series of tests because these are things I haven't done either and I've wondered about. So yeah, hardened leather, did it work? Well yeah it did, so let's just have a look. So clearly, one sheet of hardened leather to my recipe, whether that's right or wrong, it went straight through and actually fractured the leather, so not very good. Two pieces of hardened leather so that is about eight millimeters thick, and needle bodkin is penetrating from back of the leather to end of the point 23 centimeters. Type 9, back of the leather to the end of the point, 15 centimeters. But then let's go and have a look at the three layers. Three layers needle bodkin, this time. 11 centimeters, short bodkin, 8 centimeters and this one i ran the Towton Tudor head, uh six and a half centimeters and the type 16 five centimeters. Now that's interesting now this armor type is not particularly heavy, but throughout history men seem to wear roughly the same weight of armour they're prepared to wear roughly the same weight of armour. And so I couldn't tell you exactly how heavy a breastplate made of this should be, but actually if you did it all at three layers of leather, and then maybe on the front you upped it to four or five, I can see that being completely viable as a piece of armour. Can they make it? yes I've showed you how you can make it how you can do exactly this. You can mold it, you can shape it, you can decorate it, you can do all the stuff that you want with it and it is pretty darn resistant to arrows, four layers would this have gone through? maybe marginally five i think it probably wouldn't. There's one more thing we're going to do we're going to go back to my stab test with the rondel. So these are going to take some getting out so we're going to break and I'll be back in a minute. I've removed the arrows from the two-ply piece and we're going to go for the stab test again with the Tod Cutler rondel, remembering these are all available and they really do help support the channel buying these things. So, that's penetrated about a centimeter. Good defense. So you know, anybody who says hardened leather is not good, they're wrong. We'll try that again with a three-ply just see what we do. And that one maybe about six millimeters through, so again that one without a doubt is not a killing blow well nor is the other one um neither of them are. They're gonna hurt a bit. So what have we learned about boiled leather, cuir bouilli and arrows? Well, one thing we learned is i can't pronounce it, I've given you a recipe and a methodology that I am almost certain is how they did it, if it is done that way, it works. It works pretty well as a three-ply but arrows can still poke through, we saw that as a four ply I doubt it, five ply almost certainly not. Actually you know what? Let's go back to the range I'm gonna set this up with the five layers and we're gonna see what happens. Because you know what, they would have protected the front of their breastplate because a normal steel breastplate or iron breastplate was thicker at the front for exactly the reason that's where the shots tend to come from. So scratch this. There's going to be a conclusion, to the conclusion. Let's go shoot stuff! I just had to shoot this. I need to know. So we've got five layers of hardened leather according to my recipe. Type seven needle bodkin. Well it's through. Type nine plate cutter, short bodkin, call it what you will. And that's through as well. Let's do two more just because. So we've got another type nine. That's annoying. Type seven. Let's go have a look. Oh I'm slightly annoyed. I was sort of hoping that they were going to bounce off, but they didn't, but anyway how far did they go in? Ah, i'm not annoyed anymore I'd love to show you, but I'm not. Let's take it back to base and we'll have a look. And here we are for the great reveal. Five layers of hardened leather. The type nines went through 30 millimeters and 28 millimeters type 7 needle bodkin uh 78 millimeters and 65 millimeters. And there we have it type 9 needle bodkins, well slender point, but you know you're not going to be happy if you get that in the chest. These ones, clearly you're not going to be happy, but you'll almost certainly live from those you might even have other padded garments underneath, who knows? Again what's interesting here is that these are bent. Well don't forget, most arrowheads, we have no evidence that they were made of steel, so they would have been wrought and wrought is softer than this really, these are mild steel that i'm using in this case. So bending arrowheads like that, there's nothing wrong with that, that's just a realistic result to hitting something that is really quite hard indeed. And there we go. Boiled leather; can't tell you they made it like this but i'm pretty sure they did. If they did make it like this, would it work? Yes it would. So what I'm going to do now actually is i'm just going to remove the arrow heads and I'm going to weigh this sample. I've got a breast plate, I'll calculate the areas and I will tell you how heavy I think a breast plate would be for it to be made of this material on the front surface and thinner on the sides. 500 grams for that piece, so bear in mind it's there, I think that you could probably do a three-ply breastplate with a five-ply reinforcement on the front for around about two and a half possibly three kilos so round about six to seven pounds something like that. Boiled leather; right good protection! See you next time for another lockdown longbow. Don't know. Maybe gambeson's, maybe maille. Who knows
Info
Channel: Tod's Workshop
Views: 406,798
Rating: 4.9523864 out of 5
Keywords: Medieval, Tod's Workshop, History, lockdown longbow, longbow, archer, archery, arrow, leather armour, cuir bouilli, boiled leather, tod Todeschini
Id: RO_nG6OpCKg
Channel Id: undefined
Length: 15min 56sec (956 seconds)
Published: Wed Aug 26 2020
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