Old School Slingshot - Medieval and Roman style

[Music] hi its ton of Todd's workshop here and today we're going to talk about slings so these were used really from prehistory of course we know David and Goliath in the Bible the Romans absolutely loved them they were used right through medieval Europe and actually if you look at the injury records of castle sieges obviously there's a lot of ballistic weapons like arrows and crossbow bolts and Spears and things but there's also also an awful lot of sling shot injuries and they would absolutely devastating in their power and the distance is also massive but it's a volley weapon as well as an accuracy weapon so there's a lot of interesting little side notes you can go down but there's a good one to begin with is if you look on I'll try and put a link in here in modern times they have slinging competitions in the Balearic Islands particularly there's an absolute pride in it and I I believe I'm not certain about this but I've heard but I believe during the Second World War they used to hire the Allies used to hire Balearic slingers for throwing hand grenades further a particularly bunch of people doing that I don't know the truth of it sounds great now I learned to use a sling I wish I learned off my dad I didn't unfortunately but my dad was taught he just never taught me one of those things but he was taught because he was Italian and he used to steal apples from an orchard with his brother and eventually he was caught and the guy who owned the orchard said right ok I'll show you how to use a sling if you keep the birds away you eat the apples keep the birds away everybody's happy so my dad and his brother just spent their whole youth basically using slings and so he was good he was good never taught me that so what is a sling very simply you have a loop here that attaches on your finger and a cord then you have a pocket leather fabric woven many ways of doing it different cultures did it different ways and then another string line with a knot on the end so I'll just show this up close to camera so what you have is a finger loop here and then we have a knot on the other end the knot is there so that it just clamps between your finger and thumb that loop goes over your finger doesn't want to come off then you have a pouch this is after a medieval pan and it's got slits in the leather and that helps to sort of cut the leather a little bit do you see how it's just shaped that helps to stop stones and other projectiles falling out from the pouch Romans didn't do that but they tended to use a softer leather so there are just different ways of doing it I've had I went on a particularly boring holiday once where there was fabulous stones all over the beach and I wanted to sling so I went down the hardware shop and I just bought some string and I wove a sling and it worked really nicely so we can use a stone like this and that works fine and it's cheap it works free all you've got to do is find them I find a stone of about three ounces about 7-5 80 grams works well but it depends on how long your strings are and these are all the things you'll find out the Romans seem to think much the same as me and they used to use lead shot now this is I made a hole in the ground and I just poured some hot lead into it use your finger the sand works fine and it the the Romans used to do emergency ones like this but usually they've cast them beautifully will show a picture very unlike this but this one here weighs about 75 80 grams and it's just one of these that I just hammered down to make into a better shape and then I'll show you because we're going to come back to these later these just fit into the pouch like that it's not very big projectile [Music] so how do you use it well I have a cameraman right next to me and you may have seen and it is very true things go wrong you don't always throw out the direction you wanna throw it sometimes it comes out backwards the good news is actually if it doesn't go the direction you want it to go generally it doesn't have that much force to it it's not that you want to get hit by a an 80 gram of three ounce projectile falling on your head but it hasn't got the head splitting capability that a forward throat would have but you do need to be careful and learning new windows is not good so you make sure that it's well seated I rock back I rock forward and now it's going now I can maintain that well I get my aim but this is not at a full energy throw I do the speed up on the last release right what you'll also find is it's a strange thing you can just about go for it and suddenly it all feels like you've gone wrong and you just have to stop so that might happen and it's a weird little thing but I'm now getting ready to throw I'm gonna throw over that direction missing Greg I hope that was just a bit of paper with gaffer tape and it went 30 odd meters pretty much into the hedge it also makes a noise and the thing about this I think the Romans like they're shaped projectiles because a round one goes straight up but a shake one makes a hell of a noise when it goes through the air and if you ever throw a flat stone you'll hear that so I think that's why they use take one but what we're gonna do now is just take a little break and we're gonna move the camera away and then we're gonna start throwing at this board now that is 12 millimeters half inch of in England in UK OSB sterling board it's like a cheap grade plywood but it is half into 12 mil thick so I'll run through the loading procedure again so you have the loop on one end of the cord and you put that on your index finger onto the inn's onto the back of the index finger but the shot into the center of the pouch slide your thumb and forefinger up until you pick up the knot all right so show you up close so I take the loop pop it onto my index finger on to the back of the index finger it feels a little weird at this stage but it works later on I then have the pouch and I put my shot or stone into the center of the pouch and I pinch it I then just take the other cord with the knot in it and I just slip that between my thumb and forefinger it just keeps everything managed and now we're ready to go so it's the same as before I go back I go forward and I can now go up so I'm now just maintaining the stone or the shot in the pouch really I have no particular intent at this point I find you can pick up and throw straight off but actually you need a bit more skill for that I haven't got much skill I don't use this very often haven't thrown for years so I'm maintaining it now and you get a little bit Zen you pick your target bit like shooting an arrow instinctively and you hope that your shot will go about there fluffed it so sometimes you get this weird feeling and you know that it's going to go wrong so you just have to stop so again I've just loaded up ready to go back forward and up and then the last one that's in here courts a bit tangled here we go back up and three so it's a simple thing simple but devastating that's 12 mil plywood it's the cheap grade plywood sterling board at OSP it's called in in the UK but it is still 12 mil of of wood so that is going to make a mess of you and they did break bones and they did pierce and you would need to extract them from the flesh they go in deep so let's get a different camera angle have a look well as you can see it's made a mess of the back great big in ballistic terms scabs of material who have come off and this is you know from these legs shot like I say they're about three ounces 75 80 grams in weight but they've made a hell of a mess of this now what we'll do is I'm going to put up a small piece it's only small bit I've got but of a better grade plywood and we'll just see what it does to that I don't know well look so this was a better grade of plywood here it's put a dent in it but it hasn't gone through so that was half inch of birch ply so that's the best player you can get 1/2 inch 12 mil of cheap ply straight through no problem I have a stone here that is the same weight as my lead shot now what we're going to do is I'm not going to be able to put this shot through a chronograph but we can work out how fast it's going by the time I release and the time of impact so I've got a hedge line here and a little sort Playhouse thing no children in it nothing unsafe behind the hedge line right there that mind now I can throw to that when the stone goes through the hedge line will hear it so that will give us a time distance it's 40 meters 40 yards ish so I'm not using lead shot because I don't really want to pollute the environment and Red's not a good thing to leave lying around so I'm just using a stone so here we go we shall see how this performs and the time 2.15 frack we'll do another one 150 so we call that an average of 1.7 at the moment 1.8 something like that let's call it 1.6 so one point six seconds we're going to do some quick math now I've now thrown the shot it weighs 80 grams I'm gonna do that all this in metric and sorry all you Imperial people out there particularly the US and Canada but I'll do it in metric I'll put it in foot-pounds at the end because it's the metric side that I'm familiar with so the first thing is to work out the speed of the shot well it's 40 meters it is 1.6 seconds we'll call it so we're going to get 40 divided by one point six so it's 25 meters a second is what that's doing 25 meters a second so using 1/2 MV squared so we've got 25 times 25 which equals 625 times the mass which in kilograms is point 0 8 so that's 50 divided by 2 equals 25 joules I'm really surprised actually I thought it'd be more than that but that is 25 joules which in foot-pounds is not that much a whopping 18 foot-pounds I can't help feeling that that doesn't feel right so tell me where I got my math wrong but going through 1/2 inch ply it's got to be more than 18 18 foot pounds or 25 joules or whatever it was I just said but anyway that's what the numbers show now what is interesting about that is I've heard it said that led shot for Roman links as powerful an impact as a brown bess musket I don't know what the energy of the brown bess musket is but I know it's more than 25 joules or 18 foot pound so as far as I'm concerned that's complete gibberish are they dangerous well clearly they're dangerous as hell are they easy to use yeah they are they're easy to learn how to use they're difficult to get good at but if you want to have a go just make one that's dead easy put a leather bit of string even a ball of string we'll make you one if you weave it in your butt in a bit of ingenuity go have a go they're great so the medieval Roman biblical sling fabulous invention dangerous as hell on the battlefield as a volley weapon thanks

Channel: Tod's Workshop

Views: 541,908

Rating: 4.8960428 out of 5

Keywords: slingshot, Roman, Medieval, tods workshop, david and goliath, medieval weapons, shepards sling

Id: FaQRNj0WpYU

Length: 14min 31sec (871 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 14 2019