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