Can Bronze Age Weapons Pierce and Cut Steel Armor?

Hey, I'm Thrond here. Hey, this is Eldgrim. And this is the Thang Thron Channel. Yo! That's my throwing slide technique. And we pair 20 gauge steel. Did you hit? You did. You hit double metal. I hit double metal and I went into both metal. It dented the other side. All right, what apparently happened here is I've got a hole, which I thought was quite shallow, but I felt it stop. And what we've done is we've hit the second brace in here of 20 gauge steel and it bent it back out and dented, dimpled it. So it almost made it through. It's got a nice hole. You see where the point was? You cut the metal on the back side, I can feel it. Yeah, and it was trying to come through. Yeah, if I would have not had that there, I would think we would have had one just as deep as before, if not a hair deeper, because I was trying to get full force. Oh crap, I hit the same hole. No, you did? Yeah, well, I was aiming for about the same spot, but I didn't think it would actually hit there. That's the Robin Hood stuff. Yeah, but I mean, it actually cut a separate hole into the other hole, which probably makes it look a lot wider than it is. But if you look at it, it was the same size hole. Yeah. And you saw it on the other side? Yep. No, we have photographic evidence. That's like Robin Hood or something, man. That was cool. Well, the other one I tried, I did potentially try a little higher. I just didn't know we had metal on the back. I wasn't trying to hit two layers, because this is bronze, and you do have it subconsciously in your mind that it might get damaged. But I'm sorry, this bronze is getting me so confident. I'm not afraid of damaging it at this point, even though Neil has told me on the phone that back in the day, they find pieces of bronze broken off inside people, you know, off the tip of the spear. But that may be from hammer hardening, you know, maybe they hardened it too much. I think he's got his just right. I mean, it's not to the point where it's breaking or bending, and it's not, it's sharp enough to cut the steel. So I'm impressed. I try to give this everything I got. Um, we keep getting the same kind of things. We've been playing around with it, and we keep getting, instead of that, maybe a quarter inch penetration actual depth. I don't know. I just, I'm not seeing the same kind of power coming from that. So I do agree. The throwing motion is probably the only way to get a major penetration or an enormous amount of force on the initial impact. And as Demoman Chaos had assumed, we got a pretty nice hold, didn't we? Well, that's very difficult to do, and it takes a full range of motion. All right, I'd like to explain the motion. The one that everybody keeps talking about out of Christopher Matthew's book, which I don't want to put down Christopher Matthew so much, is just that it's over the top of the aspis, however you hold your aspis, but it's over the top, and you have to open up pretty much. You're drawing it. You could draw it way back or have it just clutched under the arm, but he's seen it as a thrust with the body and the hip and just boom, you know, and you might have to open your shield up to do it, which I don't picture them actually doing that. And the shield would be in the way, even if you try to come up, you lose more and more power as the arm comes up here. So that's just to explain that one. This one that I just did is more like the overarm slide that I'm doing. I'm bringing it way back, and I'm finding a balance in the spear. You cannot do this soft balance at all. It'd be very difficult to do even the spear's balance here, way back here. It's very difficult, and it takes up so much room under like this, I see as a single combat technique. I mean, if I'm drawing it way back and trying to come under, like this, and hide it behind my shield possibly, this is a totally different motion. This is me like throwing this out there. I can even get more reach and let it slide, just like I do with the overarm slide. It is a throw, not a, I don't know if y'all can tell what I'm trying to say. I'm just doing this very lightly, but that is a throw. Now that's what a full throw would do, and that would be a full penetration, like I would say a kill, and people put down throwing weapons saying that they don't have that much force, and this didn't damage the bronze out of it, but I think in the time of the Iliad, when he talks about it, when they were using bronze in the good old days, which they had iron too at the time, it just wasn't as good supposedly, or at least in the middle ages they did. I honestly believe that the spear and the javelin were synonymous. They used almost the same techniques, so in their mind a javelin and a spear were kind of interchangeable. That was a throw not hitting the same spot, because a lot of people had said that we hit the same spot, and it wasn't that impressive, but a full out throw is even more devastating. That wasn't hitting next to, right next to a hole, is more devastating than the overarm or underarm slide, because there's no control. You're not controlling it. You're just giving full force and acceleration. But I love the spear. It's so versatile. I mean, you could do the throw overarm in all different ways. You could come in close with it, and if you overextend and you're pulling it back, what would you do? Could you parry with the top part? There's so many things you could do. Just flip it over if you have a butt spike, like a serrata, and at the same time you're able to reverse it. But ah, that's another video. We'll come back later on that one. Hey, you know what? I remember when Deadliest Warrior said that a bronze spear would bend on a Japanese breastplate. You know what? I don't really think that would happen. It didn't. It actually made it through. I need to resharpen it slightly, but we actually have a hole in the gandeson. I'm quite impressed. Deadliest Warrior, we may not be done with you yet. I would say that is a nice penetration through one millimeter steel, and I hit right next to the barrier. I just didn't quite hit it. I'm lucky I didn't. Otherwise, I've been trying to go through double metal, which had been two millimeters, which it's not really like going through filament two millimeters because they're actually one right behind the other. But I think if you were wearing that with gandeson, took a cloth below it, and it was only one millimeter bronze, I think that you could be in trouble depending on how hard the bronze was. We got almost four inches of penetration. Yeah, about four inches of penetration. That's quite impressive. Oh, not bad. Oh, check it out. It's that throwing body mechanic. Oh, pretty. You can actually see where it went clean through. And if you count the, what is it, the fiberglass insulation in there as some kind of a gabasin, it went through that as well. Pretty interesting. It means it still had plenty of speed and forces it was traveling through. The shape of these blades, since they're shaped like this, make them more likely to pierce than having the ridge down the center of the spears that reinforce them. The reason why is because they're more likely to bend possibly, but these are hammered hard and properly. But they're more streamlined, like later century thrusting points. So that's one of the reasons we're having so much success today. They don't have this big triangular cross section in the center you're trying to make pierce the actual metal. So that's impressive. Very impressive. And it doesn't look like it did hardly anything to the edge. I don't believe it did. I mean, you could touch it up a hair, but still, that's beautiful. Do the Viking challenge, much like the samurai challenge. In this case, I guess that would be the Mycenaean age challenge of bronze against a steel plate. We also had a viewer who pretty much has been arguing with us saying that if we used a Viking age sword, meaning a pattern welded Frankish style sword, anything from that era, Ulfberht, the famed Ulfberht, that it wouldn't be hard enough or wouldn't withstand the cutting through a steel plate like that, a 20 age plate. I really don't believe that. I'm sorry. If it's harder than the steel that it's cutting and the sword can withstand the stress, it's going to slice clean through it. But anyway, today we're going to go ahead, test it out, and hope that answers his question of whether a Viking sword can do it or not. Because this sword is approximately, what, about 2,000 years before the Vikings? Yeah, about. About, yeah. Yeah, so this is a very ancient sword. Instead of just doing something pattern welded for that time, people are trying to get ahold of one. I think this is a better test. I think Neil Burrage is going to love it. So, without further ado, let's get going. Let's get it on. Yeah! Nice! You know, like a little curve there. Didn't do much damage to the blade whatsoever. Matter of fact, it's still sharp where it cut. It did deform it slightly, but the actual edge is sharper than mild steel. We can see here. That is a actual cut. So people saying bronze doesn't have a sharp edge, if it's hammer hardened properly, like Neil Burrage does it, I think would be wrong. That's why bronze was actually more popular than iron, because iron, wrought iron was around when bronze was still being used. It didn't replace it, not until it became much more advanced and cheaper and actually could stand up to bronze. We did make it six inches instead of a foot because a blade of this size and weight wouldn't have probably made it through a whole foot of metal of this gauge. And not on account of it not being sharp enough or anything, but because of its mass and length. Right, just like a hand and a half or two-hander would have a better chance because you actually can add more momentum or mass with the actual cranking motion. You can add more to it. But anyway, I think it was beautiful. Yeah, well done. Surprised me.