16th Century Inspired Spanish CROSSBOW Build

I built this crossbow a little while ago because I wanted to learn how the trigger mechanism worked. This is like a level one crossbow. Today, we're going to level 10. Introducing, well I didn't build this part of the crossbow. This is a collaboration with the Modern Arm Bruster. What's in this box should be pretty equal to this exact piece right here, except it's going to be much, much nicer. My job today is to build the prod, to build the limbs, to build the part of the crossbow that shoots it. I've had this for three months and been waiting specifically for this moment to make this bow. So, let's jump into making the best crossbow I ever have. Well, just the limbs. I probably should give more credit to, yeah. Here it is. This is pretty exciting. This is so much more robust than what I built. Now, the basic trigger system is the exact same, except this one's going to be much stronger. So, this will be really nice for stringing the bow so I have a good foothold, but we also have a couple more things with the main body of the crossbow. First is the sweet little bolt. Now, there's something here I have never, ever seen. I've never seen before. Wooden fletchings. That's really interesting. And then we've got a super beefy, super strong string. I need to go double check and see what poundage of limbs would be proper for me to make on this bow. Check this out. So there's this wedge system right here where I believe if I pushed in on opposite sides right there, that is going to tighten this. And then you can pull them apart and it'll make this completely loose. And I believe that is going to assist in me putting the limbs right through that gap. That's a pretty clever, good job. I like that. So for now, I need to go out and do a little bit of planning and a little bit of drawing up how long my limbs are going to be based upon the string provided. I think the reason the string is so thick is because there is no notch in the arrow. So that arrow is going to sit right in between the trigger. And then that really thick string is going to just sit over the entire end of the arrow so you don't need a knock. So before I continue here, it's time to do some research and I'll get back to you with the plan for today's build. Duncan Hill of the Modern Arm Bruster is the one who sent me this bow. He uses both historical and modern techniques and materials with the goal of carrying on the European tradition of crossbow making. His website, themodernarmbruster.com and on Instagram, modernarmbruster, I'll leave links in the description to his information. Thanks so much for sending me this stock. We're going to make an awesome bow out of it. I pulled up the information on this crossbow from the maker of it. Here's what he told me. The stock design is based on a 16th century Spanish design and uses the bow irons to secure the bow to the stock. The advantage to using the bow irons is that it is very easy to swap out a new bow. He's talking about the limbs there. The bow irons also secure the stirrup, which is very helpful when you are cocking the crossbow. It means that you can step through it with your foot and hold the crossbow to the ground while pulling back the bowstring with both hands. Let me show you what he's talking about. Here's the stirrup. That's where you can put your foot through. And then the cross irons are right here. These little guys. So basically with the tap of a hammer, I can put these wedges in and out and that allows you to swap out the bow. So you could have different poundages of bows that you could swap out really fast with the same stock. That's pretty sweet. So now we need to grab this string and figure out exactly the length of the limbs we need to make. And then from there, we need to build a bow form. We need to build some bow limbs and then have an awesome working crossbow. I'm going to make two prods today. One's going to be from fiberglass and bamboo, maybe some Osage. I'm going to put multiple materials in there. The other one's just going to be from bamboo and I'll either do Ipe or Osage. I'll grab some wood from around the shop. So I'll have one more natural material one and then we'll have a stronger, more powerful fiberglass one. But the first thing I need to do is figure out exactly the form I want to make and how long the limb should be. So I've got the string right here and the math isn't going to work the same as a traditional long bow would work or else I could just take three inches off of this. I don't know if that's going to work or not. So what I'm going to do is grab a piece of bamboo I've got that's got a little bit of defects in it. I'm just going to make a really quick bamboo bow, a little bit shorter than this string and keep shortening it down until I find the exact string length I like on this crossbow. So right now let's make the bamboo bow. I mean who said you can't tiller with a belt sander? Actually the tiller is terrible, but that's a really good reference point for me for how long I need to make the prod. So I think I got it figured out. It's time to grab some of this plywood to make some bow forms and then we can glue up these limbs. The bow form is now ready. It's very simple. It's just two pieces of plywood with some glass on top so that it flattens it all out. And what we'll do is we'll grab some of this bike tube tire and from there we'll wrap on the bow. So we'll take both laminations, we'll glue them together, we'll put them on here and then we'll wrap it tight as our clamp. A key thing with the laminations like this is that the material you're using is thin enough to be able to bend to the form. I've done it before where I left this material too thick and when I tried to bend it on the form it broke and then the bow was ruined. So if you ever do a glue up, that's something to keep in mind. I'm super glad I'm doing this version before I do the fiberglass version for a few things. One is I don't know if I should have a power lamination in between these two, kind of for a handle to stiffen it up. I'm not sure. I'm assuming it'll just be a bend through the handle type of a bow. But you know, I didn't really do my research on crossbows very much, which I probably should have before building this. But experience is a good teacher as well. Secondly, it'll be interesting how this turns out here. The nodes on the bamboo, so these little guys right here, are upside down to add the reflex. And I don't know if that's going to cause this glue up to not be very good. We'll see. Hopefully the pressure of the rubber will do a good job and it won't twist much, but I'm not sure. So now I just need to put the rubber on and then we'll let the bow cure. Growing up, my dad ran a summer camp and we had a lot of canoes because it was on a lake. So he had an engineer friend of his help build a canoe trailer. I think it was at like an old pop-up camper, stripped it all, and then built a canoe trailer if I remember right. And I remember strapping those canoes on and a bunch of other things to go out to the lake. The trailer probably had 10 ratchet straps on it. And this engineer would just go get another ratchet strap and he's like, you know, let's put another strap on just because we can. And that's what I feel like right now. I know this rubber tire is plenty of pressure to hold, but just because we can, let's throw clamps on. Okay, I'm going to throw this in the heat box so that it will cure really, really good. And we're going to call that a day on this project. I'll be back working on this tomorrow. I'll see you then. We're back at it. Here is the finished glued up limb. Now we just need to shape it and tailor it and install it and shoot it and everything like that. Before we do that on this one, I'm going to go ahead and create the next limb. That way I can go ahead and get it curing in the heat box. And as that one cures, we'll start shaping down this first one. But right now let's jump in and start working on our fiberglass limbs. There's going to be multiple laminations in this limb. We'll have two pieces of fiberglass, three pieces of wood. I think I'm going to do that idea of a power limb in the middle, just a little thicker section right there to make the limbs shape and bend differently. And we'll see how it performs. So let's jump right into it. You might be thinking, Kramer, that's a really thin power limb. Can't that bend? Yes, it can. But that's totally fine because it doesn't matter how thick the power limb is, but the thickest part of the bow will not bend relatively to the other parts of the bow. So in the middle, it's not that I'm trying to build a handle. I just want a little section right in the middle where it doesn't bend. And I've got it tapered up on both sides so that it gradually bends less and less. Because that clamping power in the middle, when I hammer those wedges in, I don't know if I want that to bend or not. And I think the safest bet is to make it not bend. So on this one, we're going to insert this power limb inside the crossbow limbs. This is the order we're going with. We're going to have the back of the bow here. So we've got 40 thousandths fiberglass, then we've got bamboo, then we've got our power limb, and then we've got another hardwood, I forget the name, and then fiberglass. This hardwood on the belly of the bow is going to be good on the compression, and then the bamboo is going to be good on the tension, hopefully providing a really fast crossbow. And something that's quite interesting is this bends super easily right now, but once all of this is laminated and glued together, I probably won't be able to bend it at all. Like this is about the same thickness, and there's not a chance. So that glue makes it so rigid, which is pretty cool. But what that allows you to do is bend this, or recurve it on a form or something, and then once it's glued up, it's hard, and it will stay reflexed. Ha, pretty cool, huh? Let's go ahead and glue this up. All right, so the second product is going in the heat box. We're up to about 130 degrees, should get up to about 140 for about six hours in here, and it'll be good to go on that one. Now this other one, we can start shaping. I don't have experience building crossbow limbs, but I do have experience building a lot of normal longbows and recurve bows. And a general rule that I like to keep in mind is that the length of your limbs should be twice the draw length that you want to draw the bow. And that's going to be the length of the working limb. So you'll minus out the handle there. In this scenario, I don't really have a handle on this first one. On the second one, I did put the power limb in, so that's going to be that handle section. So I measured from where the prod's going to sit into the bow, and then where I'm going to draw it back to. And we've got about a 12-inch draw length. So in that scenario, I wouldn't want to make the limbs any shorter than 24 inches. Now this rule goes for natural materials, and what I mean by natural materials is going to be any type of wood or bamboo. But if you get into any composite materials or any fiberglass or things like that, you can definitely have shorter limbs, just because that material's a lot stronger. The limbs I'm making today are about 28 inches for this specific string. So the string length that was provided for me is really good. I think that's an extra grace period there, so that I can make the limbs a little bit heavier with the natural material, and I don't have to worry so much about them breaking. Especially on a crossbow, it's going to be a little bit different than a normal long bow, as far as the time you're going to be at full draw. On a normal long bow, boom, two to three seconds, right, and you're releasing the arrow. On a crossbow, you're going to string that bow. Who knows how long it's going to sit there, so you would want it to be able to hold for a little while. With that being said, the glass bow is ready to start working. The more natural material bow, I've got the tip overlays on it. So probably grab the glass bow, get the tip overlays on it, and then continue with the bamboo backed bow. That way that one will be ready when we're done with the bamboo backed bow. So, let's jump right back into making this bow. We're getting really close, it's getting really exciting. We're a few days into the project, but there's a chance we're shooting this thing today. So let's jump right into it. One of the really interesting things with a crossbow is you don't need a positive tiller at all. It can be the same on both limbs, because the arrow's going to be going right up, right up the gut, and right over prod. It's a little different type of tiller, a finished tiller. Concept will be the same as we go, but I'm making it even on both sides, and that should allow for the smoothest shooting bow. So we're making good progress. I should be able to get a string on this very soon. As I was tillering right here, I realized I made a mistake, and it has to do with brace height. So on a normal longbow, it's good to have your brace height high enough that you're not slapping your wrist, and that the string doesn't go all the way down to your hand and hit you when you shoot the bow, because that leaves a big welt, and it's no fun. Crossbow is different. You can have a much smaller brace height on a crossbow, because it doesn't matter how far that string goes as long as it doesn't invert the bow and go the opposite direction. So I could be wrong on this, but I believe the lower brace height, the faster the arrow you're going to get as well, because it allows the limbs to work for a longer period of time. Because if you have a real high brace height, those limbs are going to stop a lot sooner. But if it's a lower brace height, those limbs get to continue to travel further, allowing the bow to shoot faster. So that being said, I was going to go with a lower brace height. I just made the length of the bow wrong. I made it too long. Both of these are too long, so I'm going to need to shorten them. It's not a massive mistake. It'll just take a little bit longer. I'll just have to redo the nocks. But let me show you right here. So I've got the crossbow strung up right here, and if I grab the actual string we're going to use, you can string that flat, but check how short we are. We're about three inches short. That's not good, which means I'm going to need like a six to seven inch crossbow brace height for this to work. A brace height of four inches, three or four inches, should be perfect for this bow. So I'm going to have to shorten these nocks. I'm going to have to redo tip overlays, and I will cut off about an inch on both sides to make this work. So I'm going to have to do that on this bow, as well as the other bow over there. In the end, that's going to make a much better bow, I think, than if I went ahead and had a six or seven inch brace height and drew the bow back six inches. But if I have a four inch brace height and draw it back eight to nine inches, the travel of the limbs will be further, making it smoother shooting, I think, and faster. So I think that's the way to go. And with the magic of video, here we go. We are back at it. Now this is looking pretty good. So there's six inches, and again we need to get to a 14-ish. So, I can get this down to about nine right now. I'm going to continue tillering, and this bamboo bow will be done in no time. Here it is. Now I got this shooting... Well, not shooting, but I got it drawing to the correct draw length. Let's go ahead and put this together and see how it does. After reaching back out to Duncan, he said that with this 16th century style Spanish bow that wooden fletchings were the most common in that time period for crossbows and bolts. Because on a crossbow, this is just going to go right over the top, where if you were shooting a longbow, it just wouldn't work because the wooden fletching would deflect off of the bow. So I found that really interesting. I don't know anything about the history of this crossbow or crossbows in general, but that's pretty cool. So one second. Ha! We're ready to go. I'm actually going with about a two and a half inch brace height. We're going to see how it goes. I did put a little spacer right here in the back because the limb is so thin, it wasn't clamping down all the way. Plus, I thought to myself, maybe, maybe it'd be a good thing to not wedge in this metal section into the back of this bamboo bow, especially because it's bending there. So added a little spacer there. We've got this bow in nice and tight. Now it's time to draw it to full draw for the first time, throw the bolt in it, hope the limbs don't break and take a shot. Let's do this. Okay. So something, I just went to go string the bow and something happened. As I put my leg in and bent over to string it, my knee hit the trigger, releasing, releasing the trigger right here. So I need to keep in mind that once I lock this in place like that to pull, but don't let the crossbow ride against my legs or else I'm going to dry fire it. Okay. Let's go string it over here and then we'll take the first shot. I don't know why it's always so nerve wracking on the first one, but it's part of the fun. Okay. We're good to go. It's been strong about 15 seconds. There we go. Check that out. That's pretty sweet. All right. Let's take a shot. Oh, trigger didn't release all the way. That's a little scary. I'm not sure if I did something wrong, but the trigger didn't, it didn't release. There's just not enough clearance. Okay. So I'm thinking this might be user error. This is different than the trigger system I did. Check this out. You can actually pull it out. There's no pin through this. On the one I used or I made, I did a pin through it and this design's quite, it's different and I think I know what happened. So you've got that right there, spring loaded. And what I did is I pulled the trigger and I slapped it, I think. We'll find out in a second. But when I slapped it, it started to go, but then the spring came back up and caught it when it wasn't quite all the way around. So I might've just messed it up. So when I shoot, I'm going to need to pull and hold and then allow this to rotate all the way around rather than me just slapping it. And I think it just caught barely on the edge still. So let's give it another go. Okay. The bolt's in. We're going to hold it down this time and see if we can do better. Oh, that was sweet. Did you see that? Oh man. I was scared this was broken, but that was just my fault. That is pretty, pretty sweet. But before I shoot this any further, let's finish out this fiberglass bow because it's going to be probably twice the draw weight. This one I'm guessing is around 50 pounds by the way I was pulling that back. I didn't test it, but the fiberglass one could be 70, 80. I don't know. We'll see. But I made it thicker. Plus the glass is stronger. Let's go make that fiberglass one and then we can shoot it. The low braze height worked really well. I feel like that's right. I don't know, but that shot well. Okay. We'll do more testing in a minute. Let's finish this glass prod. Well, I've kind of messed up and I've concluded the better option is to not have a power lamp and if you do have a power lamp in the middle, you got to make your limbs longer so that the stress can be distributed better. I made this one way, way, way too strong. I don't know the poundage, but I felt like a hundred pounds just to get it to this point. So I made them as thin as I could and I didn't feel comfortable going thinner. So I removed fiberglass on the belly, which is a no, no, I would think to not do that. The reason I don't want to remove the fiberglass on the belly is the way I designed this was so that that fiberglass would take that compression. Now that compression is going to be on this wood, which is fine unless the wood can't handle it. And in this case, I don't know if it can handle it or not. Might be too powerful still, but we'll give it a shot. But if there is fiberglass on the belly and the back, you can definitely make a heavier poundage bow. So we've got a very short, short working limb and we're out of fiberglass. So I might just break this, but we might as well give it a shot and see what happens. All right. I've got it securely installed. Time to make this work or time to break it. So let's just do it. It shoots pretty good, but I had to take the poundage down. All right. Now I'm a little more comfortable with it. That's the fiberglass limbs. I messed up on that one. Maybe later I'll have to make one that's much better. I like the bend through the handle actually better. So I'm going to throw that other bow back on, put the other prod back on and see what happens. I will say that Duncan makes a pretty sweet crossbow. Now I believe he sells, you know what I'm saying, some of these on his website. So you can go check him out. I have a couple of links to his stuff. Thanks so much for collaborating with me on this. It was super cool to see something much, much, much more professional than what I made a while ago. It was super cool. I really enjoyed making the limbs for these bows or this, this bow and learning a lot more about crossbows. This is the 16th century Spanish inspired bow, so to speak. Maybe I'll have to make a historically correct or as close as I can prod for this bow and look at the materials they used and as much information as possible. Maybe I'll do that in the future. Let me know if you want to see that. But for today, that's all the time we have. Thanks so much for joining me. Stay shatterproof. I'll see you on the next video.