Adam Savage Tours Medieval Crossbows

I'm getting really excited about the handle here. Nice turn. This feels like this guy's first day on the lane. Dude, no, I can't get over everything about this. It's compelling. Like, once you show me what it does, it's totally obvious. But until then, my guess is as good as yours. It's an alien doctor's tool. Hey, everybody. Adam Savage in one of my favorite places in the back rooms of the Metropolitan Museum of Art alongside Sean. How are you, sir? Doing well. How are you doing? Well, I'm super excited. Because every time we get to talk, we cover something I don't know as much about as I do at the end of our talk. And you said you were going to set up some crossbows. And I'm trying not to look too far ahead because this looks like an incredible roster of crossbows. Pulled out a bit of a spread for you, yeah. Tell me what the spread represents. So we're sort of doing sort of loosely a progression across time, but going also through different types. And we're going to talk about the different methods of spanning it, so like drawing the crossbow, show you a couple bolts, like the arrows that come out of it. And yeah, just sort of talk about it, talk you through the history of crossbows. Amazing. Yeah, so this crossbow here, the first one we have out, is from about, you know, between 1425 and 1475. So by this point, we're talking fully developed. Okay. Earlier than this, we don't actually know when the crossbow enters Europe. It could have come from China, could be an independent invention. We're not entirely sure. Wow. There's some evidence that the Romans had them, but nothing concrete enough to say, like, definitely the Romans were doing this. There were descriptions in Archimedes of... Things that are maybe crossbows, maybe torsion devices. Right, ballisticum close here and there. Yeah, they probably did, but we don't have enough to know this is the date. Earlier wood crossbows seem to definitely be in Europe in the 10th century, and they are widespread by the 12th century and the 13th century. The earlier ones are a wood bow, drawn back with very simple release mechanisms, and those you just generally draw by hand. Sometimes you would basically lie down on the ground with both your feet up against the bow and then pull back in order to span the crossbow. Mechanically engineering the strongest muscles in your body to do the drawing. Yeah, and this is a common theme. You've got that mix of giving your body more advantage over the crossbow and then introducing mechanical spanning mechanisms. So the next stage of development is the composite bow, which probably came from contact with the east, and a composite bow is made up of horn and sinew. Oh. And so we have a little cross section here so you can see. Oh. So you would take chunks of ibex or goat horn and you would sort of put teeth into it so that it would key together, and then over that you would wrap it in frayed sinew. So you have the horn sort of giving your resistance within the stretchy exterior, and you can make an incredibly powerful bow. Jeez. Draw weights in the hundreds of pounds. I was going to say, mechanically, this can't be that radically different than a monolithic fiberglass construction in terms of its strength and its hardness. Yeah. That's amazing. And you can make these huge, not exactly stationary, but nearly stationary bows for use inside of castles, siege equipment. And that represents what is in the inside of... Yeah, this is what you're looking at here. Okay. Because it's held together with animal glue, it's susceptible to moisture, so they would then wrap these in one or two layers of birch bark, often painted, so you could have these like this is black now, but originally it had little black and white dots on it, cross-hatching, painting. It really is a beautiful art form. And then here we've also got the inlaid staghorn in the stock. And that's what all this is? The white is inlaid staghorn? Yeah, so the tiller, which is the stock, is the core is wood, and then you've inlaid the staghorn just as a decorative element. Amazing. This is the kind of crossbow you might use in war or also for the hunt. This is a pretty big one. They come bigger. The trigger mechanism is pretty simple. So this is called the nut. Your bowstring keys up here, and there's a small notch on the underside which is held by this single access trigger. So this is under tremendous strain. These are often reinforced with steel or iron. And then when you pull the trigger, that releases it and just spins like crazy and your bolt shoots off. So it's like a pawl on a small little catch that holds that in place. So you're releasing that and it allows it to move. Yeah, and the problem with this trigger system, though, is that is a tremendous amount of strain on the trigger itself. So in order to have it be robust enough, you need to make the trigger larger and you need more grip, which means it's harder to pull. So you couldn't possibly trigger this with something that was right here. You need this mechanical advantage of the long lever arm. Yes, you do need that. But also if you were to try and make, say, a hair trigger or something like that, now it's so small that you're at risk of there's going to be some kind of a failure. And you don't want to run around with something that's going to go off. Yeah, yeah. Could cause serious injury to yourself. The wrappings here look in incredible shape for its age. Am I right? Yeah, yeah, this is in really good condition. It's one of those handful of things that are organic, really survive in great condition. This is one of them that's pretty good. The bow is a little loose, but actually I may be able to pick it up for you to show you. Is there a practical reason it's well-preserved, like it was stored well or prepared well? Oh, like everything is probably stored well. A mix of stored well and luck. You know, if you had it in the dry part of the castle and no one touched it, it survives. And so an important part about spanning these early on is the invention of this little piece here. So what you do is you can put your foot into that loop and that allows you then to pull up. Now, this is a big enough bow, I don't think you're doing, you're not doing this by hand. You actually have this little catch here for a winding mechanism of some kind. Ah. But earlier bows, you'd be able to put your foot in there. There's inventories that describe, you know, crossbow of one foot and crossbow of two feet given like a different scale difference. I've never seen one of these big enough for two feet, but they meant something. Clearly somebody made one once. Wow. I'm curious about the horn. Would they choose parts of horn based on its flexibility? Like is its flexibility built into its structure? It must be. So I know like they didn't use cow horn because it's not the right size or shape. Right, right. So now I don't know what part of the horn they wanted and was just the core of the obix or something like that. I don't know. It just looks complex enough that they were really, like there was a lot of institutional knowledge going on. Yeah, and the color difference. Yeah. That is a conscious choice. Yeah. It has to be. That's right. They know what the core needs to be, they know what the outside needs to be, and they know how much sinew needs to be around it. Plus the incredible regularity of the combing on the side for joining them together is amazing to me. Oh yeah, it's very impressive. And those are held together with like an animal hide glue or something? Wow. That's really thrilling. Yeah. And so now then we've got this single access trigger, which is sort of like the predominant way you use it through most of certainly the 15th century. But here we've got the next step up. So now this is really fabulous crossbow. Obviously it's had a rough life. It's got some insect damage. The bow itself is eaten. But it is a fabulous piece. So this, let me pick it. Oh, the carvings. Yeah, this is. If you'll see here we've got the coats of arms. So we have here, this is the coat of arms of Matthias Corvinus, the king of Hungary. And it has sort of the arms of Hungary, the arms of Dalmatia and Bohemia, as well as his personal family, the raven there. A raven with a ring in its mouth. Grabbing a, clutching a scroll. Yeah, beautiful. Oh my god. So it's dated 1489. You're gonna have to take our word for that. But yeah, this is a beautiful, beautiful crossbow. I mean, I'm just obsessed with this dragon right here. That is something else. And now mechanically this is interesting because this is the next stage, right? This is not a war crossbow. Oh, okay. This is for the hunt. Oh. So the decorations are part, are they part of the narrative of the hunt? No, actually this is, so it's, he was grandmaster of the Order of the Dragon. So it may refer to the knightly order that he was the grandmaster of, or it's just people like St. George and dragons. Yeah, sure. So it could have nothing to do with it. But it doesn't directly relate to the hunt. But what this has is a two-axis trigger. So this allows you, so the two-axis trigger allows the, a lot of the resistance to that bow to be taken up by the tiller, which then takes it off of your trigger. So it's more time consuming to set this, but you have a much lighter trigger pull. You're going to have a lot more accuracy. It just takes a little more time, but you handing it off to your attendant, he's going to wind the thing anyway, so. And you get, for that time expenditure, you get more accuracy. The arrow's going to go where you want it to go. Yeah. Is the, what is the, is the composition of this bow similar to this one? Is it? In its day, it would have, yeah, another composite bow made, you know, a comparable way. It's really neat to see the winding here so similar, right? Yeah. Such a, like, clearly like, oh, we've solved this problem, this is how we're all going to do it. And they don't really change it. Oh, wow, like they don't. There are other systems, but that winding stays in use throughout the period of the crossbow's use. That's really cool. And the little holes, is that the worm damage? Yeah, yeah. That's from insects. Was there, like, I would be terrified after setting one of these bowstrings of running around with this thing. Was there any way they had, like, I guess maybe they just put their hand between the trigger and the stock, so as they ran, there was no way you could pull the trigger? Yeah. So in this type, I wouldn't be overly concerned. Yeah. This one, I'm sure you had to be a little bit more careful of. Later ones, they do introduce safety catches because it becomes such a hair trigger that it's dangerous. Yeah. And those come in a couple different varieties. Wow. All right. And so, well, I should say with these. Yeah. By the way, this little squiggly coming out of the bow is magnificent. Oh, yeah, like a little flame pattern? Yeah. I love that. There's a few of these that survive maybe from the same maker, and I think a couple of them have the flame and a couple of them are straight. They're actually quite similar to each other. That's super cool. It's such a great detail. It really is. And I've even seen fantasy art or sci-fi art where they put that detail in. You know the artist has been looking at crossbows. That only appears here. Oh, right. You must know when you see some references, like, oh, they got that from us. Oh, yeah, absolutely. You'll even see objects where you're like, I know what object that is. One of our Charles V pistols upstairs, this big honking double-barreled wheel lock pistol, and it shows up in one of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies just on a background actor. You're like, oh, yeah, there it is. I know where they saw that. So I wanted to show you a couple different bolts. So we're moving from, we'll say, a war crossbow to then into the hunting. So the crossbow is really interesting because it is much as the bow and arrow is to England part of the culture. This is something that people really enjoy doing. It was a pastime. I think all British men were expected to be able to shoot the bow. On the continent, you had the crossbow. They did archery as well, but also the crossbow was a cultural phenomenon as well. And you can think of it, you have these shooting clubs or shooting guilds which had a sense of modern-day sports. So all the cities in Flanders might send basically their representatives of their guild to go to these shooting contests hosted by another city. And the term that keeps coming up is for the honor of the city. So the city would pay to send these people over. They'd pay for fancy new clothing. These guys would be shooting. And it would be not just the bourgeoisie, but there's fairly humble people, very wealthy people, and then even nobility would be members of these shooting clubs. It's like pop culture almost. Yeah. There's one nobleman who lists getting a charter for the foundation of a crossbow guild in his town as one of his greatest life achievements up with his marriage and the birth of his children. Oh, wow. This was a big deal in some areas, in Germany and in Flanders in particular. So long after the crossbow stops being used for war, it stays on being used for hunting and in these shoots and fests. So we'll get into that in a little bit, but I want to talk first a little bit about bolts. Yeah. So here are crossbow bolts. They differ from arrows in being significantly shorter. They're not an equal length all the way. They tend to swell toward the front, so they're front heavy. That may be to reduce friction as it slides along. Ah, to make it a more single contact point? Yeah. Okay. You generally have just two fletches, which occasionally can be feathers but are often wood or leather. Leather? I didn't even know that. Yeah. So this one here is made out of leather. Oh, neat. And I wanted to pull this one out because this gives you an idea of what an average war bolt might have looked like. That's a really standard sort of good example of what a war bolt head might be. It'll fly. Yeah. If, you know, they were shipping these out in barrels by the thousands. Right, right. They were churning them out, so a lot of war bolts are not, you know. Yeah, no. They don't put a lot of time into these. They're meant to stockpile arsenals to be shot out by the thousands, probably not even aiming in volley fire. So you don't spend the time grinding it. That's so cool. You don't spend the time polishing it. Mass production. So then a nicer bolt, you might, so there are some specialty heads that are used in war that you might take the time to polish, but a lot of times they're also used for target practice. Oh, okay. Somebody's going to see it. You know, you're going to be going on one of these shoots. You want it to look nice. Everyone's going to look at it. Right. You want it to look nice, right? And then for the hunt, and often for the hunt is where you get really, really nice ones. Now, the shaft here, I think, is a replacement. But this one, they've even taken, the maker has put his maker's mark into it. He has a little armor mark. Yeah, so it's a little bishop's miter with a cross inside. Oh, cool. And this type of head is used for, say, a hunting game. So you shoot this into a deer, possibly hamstring it. It does a lot of damage. It's like the early broadhead arrows for hunting. Yeah, and so that's why you can kind of tell the difference between something meant for war and something meant for the hunt or for, because it's the amount of time they then put in afterward. These are a sort of broad representation of the size that comes out of these guys. Yeah, they tend to be shorter. You've got a much shorter sort of draw length on a crossbow than you would a bow. Which is one of the interesting, it's hard to equate a crossbow to a warbow because you're drawing them vastly different lengths. Right. So a bow and arrow, a powerful warbow might be 150-pound draw weight. They found some on the Mary Rose that are like 180-pound draw weight. I mean, extremely powerful. And you're drawing that, then 20-something inches back and shooting a much longer arrow. Crossbows can be a few hundred pounds to well over 1,000-pound draw weight, but you're only pulling them back a few inches. So while the draw weights aren't necessarily one-to-one, but you're getting, out of it, you're getting similar distance, similar range, similar power. But one of the things, the differences in the arrows is quite, or the bolts versus the arrows, is the arrow is very long and thin, so the bolt being shorter and heavier is gonna pack a bit more punch when it lands. Right, right, right. It's gonna do more damage on the point where it lands. Yeah, so now how does that, how does it feel getting hit by a, you know, 180-pound warbow arrow versus a 1,200-pound crossbow bolt? I don't know. I'm guessing both suck. Yeah, yeah. I don't know which would ruin your day more. I love the mass-produced one. I love the idea of this. I felt I had to pull that out. Get him out the door. Keep on going. Stop filing. Yeah, like, this is, I mean, take pride in your work. Like, come on. They gave that to the board. They gave that two visits to the coals, and that was that. Done. Not wasting any more fuel on that one. But yeah, that's why I wanted to pull one out to show you, like, it's not all just the perfectly beautiful filed. The comparison between, like, the bow and the crossbow is really interesting because, like, on paper, a bow is a better weapon, which is hard to say, because the rate of fire is so much higher. You can lose eight, nine, ten arrows in a minute whereas a crossbow, four to one, depending on how powerful it is and how you're winding it. But yeah, these are immensely popular. Even in England, which has bowmen everywhere and very skilled, and it's part of the culture, and they're shooting all the time, they still stockpile huge numbers of crossbows. Amazing. And I think it's a mix of a bow can be an amazing thing, but you have to be training with it constantly. You have to be immensely strong. Right. You know, drawing, you know, 180 pounds with your fingers like this, how many times in a row can you do that? Yeah, yeah. And a crossbow, once you've spanned it, you can take all the time in the world to aim. You can hand that bow to a milkmaid and say, protect the back door. Exactly. Not that you should. They can. Richard the Lionheart is, he's mortally wounded and eventually dies from, the guy I think was delivering, like, food to the actual soldiers on the wall picks up a crossbow and takes a pot shot and ends up killing the King of England. So you don't need to be a super strong, you can take the physical element out of it. Which isn't to say the people who are using these aren't, you know, training with them a lot and are very skilled and are professional soldiers. That's interesting, though, about the action at a distance with skill versus without skill, or with the threshold to skill being lower on one than the other. Well, yeah, you're taking the strength out of the equation to a degree. You know, you don't need to be, you know, a top athlete to use a crossbow. You just need to have a good aim. I read those stories about 150 and 180 pound draws, pulls, and I just, it's hard to conceive of someone who could take that. I know that they can. Yeah, but not many of them. If you're in England and Wales, you can produce large numbers and great, but for most of Europe, they can't produce those numbers because it's not a part of the culture in the same way. And then with crossbow, okay, the winding takes a lot longer, but there's ways around that. If you're in a castle, you pass one off to the attendant who's loading it, passes another one back. You do volley fire. There's all these different ways where you can sort of, oh, yeah, it's a slower weapon, but you can adapt. I'm guessing that the progression will also decrease that reload time as we get towards more and more advanced crossbows. You would think the opposite. I love being wrong. Yeah. So then, well, let's move on to the next one. So the next big development, and this comes in pretty early on, is the steel bow. Oh, my gosh. Look at the size of that thing. What? That is an immensely powerful bow, and it is not even the biggest by far. The amount of, I mean, I see it's only coming back a little bit, so the flex here is relatively small, but holy cow, I can't conceive of how much worse that must be. Yeah, it's a lot. I don't know how to calculate it, but if you told me this was 1,000 pound, I'd absolutely believe it. So these come in pretty early on as a concept. Like in the 14th century, you've got steel bows, but it takes a very long time for them to actually catch on, and it's the metallurgy simply isn't there. Oh, right, because you can't just do this with iron. You need carbonized iron. You need some ductility and flexibility. Yeah, you need good quality steel, full of, you know, understood carbon content that you can heat treat and not have giant slag inclusions running through it or one side being high carbon and the other side being medium carbon or medium carbon and low carbon or whatever. You need to understand the raw material you're getting and then how to work it. So it does take a long time to catch on, but it does eventually replace the composite bow. You reach a certain point where you can get the quality raw material that's understood, you heat treat it, and the price then suddenly drops because it's so much easier to make one of these than it is to, you know, take slats of horn and carve them and wrap them in tin. So eventually the price just blows the composite bows out of the water. I also love the topography here of the relaxed little place for the string to rest without any strain on it. Yeah, and the taper. The taper is crazy. When you taper steel like this, as you span the bow, that force is distributed evenly, whereas if it was one solid chunk, it would be stressed toward... Right, right, right. Yeah, so they're really thinking about this. They know what they're doing. They've kind of gotten it down by this point. And what period is this, roughly? So this is a very late one. So this is about between 1720, 1730. Okay. So by this point, it is purely for target shooting and fun and having a good time and look how lavishly decorated it is. The lavish decoration is really quite insane. It's so beautiful. I want everything in my life decorated like this. I mean, there's vignettes and there's animals dancing and people riding horseback and fighting. There's a bear hunt. Oh, my God. Up here, you've got this braided cord. Now, that's not just decoration. Oh, really? That is a safety feature. What? Because if the steel fails, if that's not there, you get slapped in the side of the face with 8 pounds of steel moving at God knows how fast. So that holds on to the steel if it's sat. If there's a catastrophic failure, that would hopefully prevent you from being seriously injured by your own weapon. It's not a bad solution to that problem. It's a great solution. It's totally reasonable. Wow. And that might go toward explaining why you have such a short draw length is they could draw farther, but you're just increasing the risk of this dangerous failure. And of course, you're probably going to push it right up to the edge. Reasonable. This bowstring looks to be in incredible condition for its age. It appears to be an original, so that's in really good condition considering. We have a few that survive, but they tend to be all frayed and nasty. This one's got, I believe, it's a leather reinforce there. Just, I think, for smoother release of the bolt. And this one has all the bells and whistles. So this piece here is not the trigger anymore. It is meant to look like a trigger. It is to evoke the previous triggers, but it's the trigger guard, which then protects the actual trigger, which is almost like a gun trigger at that point. Oh, I just noticed that we also have a sight picture. Yeah, you have a little sight on this one too. And this is a nice little feature. So this screw here would have held a little bolt holder. So on an earlier crossbow, let's say you want to shoot down, well, there's a risk of it just sliding right out. You'd put your thumb on top of it, which doesn't, you can do it, and it's not going to kill you. But having a little thing to hold it is just a nice touch. So that would just be a little tab just to grab. Yeah, just a little whoop tab of a horn or something to hold the bolt down. And this has a four-axis trigger, and there's a safety mechanism. And again, it's all the bells and whistles, but you're not taking this out in the field and fighting with it. It's just to shoot with your other wealthy friends. Of course, crossbow's no good if you can't wind it. So of course, the earliest version, you put your feet up against the bow, and you pull it back. With both hands. Both hands. Not ideal. Foot draw one. Again, that one can only get you probably a couple hundred pound draw weight at best. So they start using different mechanisms. So one of the earliest ones is a hook that hums from, you have a belt with a little hook on it. So you can kneel down, get that under the bowstring with your foot inside of the stirrup on the front, and then you stand up, and you're using your legs in your lower back. The longest right. Amazing. And that can knock it. Or there's plenty of depictions of them having it up, and they put their foot in and basically stomp down. Oh. And really just using your leg. It's a little better for your back. That took some work to get used to doing that one. But that's a pretty quick way to do it, right? Yeah. You just clip it in and drop it down. Once you're getting into certainly the bigger composite bows like that guy or the steel bows, you can't do it really on your own anymore. And there's modifications to that. The belt hook, well, they'll include pulleys. So you can essentially double your strength by adding a pulley into it. Right, mechanical advantage. Yeah. And then early on for sort of siege bows, you would have winches, and they then sort of shrink this down to become what's called the windlass. So now this is an inch. I'll pick it up here for you. Trying not to bump into anything else. Yeah. Oh, my gosh. Now, I'm not going to wind it because the string's not in great shape. Fair. So this socket here goes over the butt of the crossbow. Gotcha. This would hook over then the bowstring. Oh, right. Okay, and it has a space in the middle so the bowstring can be captured by something. Yep, by the nut. And then two hands, you start wheeling it. And these are bone handles. Yep, and this is incredibly powerful if you want to span the very, very big bow. This is the way to do it. It's so slow. Is that a three-to-one advantage on this one? It looks like... It looks like it... Yeah, it looks almost like it's... My pulley mechanics are rusty, but it looks like a pretty amazing advantage. This looks awesome. How old is this? This is fairly recent because this, again, stayed in use with the future. So this could be 1600 but may even be 1750. Wow. It looks so modern. It's construction. Yeah, but they were making things like this incredibly early on. And so that, you know, again, put your foot in the stirrup and then you're just wheeling it. Yeah. But you're only doing one, maybe two shots a minute. Right. I imagine, you know, there's guys who get pretty quick. I mean, it takes only so much amount of time to wind the thing. But again, if you're in a castle and your guys are camped out there and you're in a year-long siege... You can make it part of the building. Yeah, yeah. Right, right. You know, it's not a big deal. Or if you're on a ship, you wouldn't use this out in the actual battlefield. You'd just use other methods. Oh, okay. Yeah. This wouldn't be a solution because you don't want to be... I get you. Everyone, wait a minute. I'm just kidding. I'll be right with you all. Yeah, but again, siege or target shooting or maybe a ship. So around... And this comes in relatively early. I'm not sure exactly how early it is. But certainly by the 15th century, they're using it. Sometime in the 14th century. Okay. Also coming in either at the very end of the 14th century or early 15th century is my favorite, the kranikin. Oh, yeah. Now, this one comes from sort of the armory of the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I. Which is why I pulled it. We have plenty of them, but this is the one I had to go with. And this... Often, it is just like a hemp strap. But in this case, we actually have a piece of filed metal here. This sockets over the tiller. Okay, the end. Then hooks go over the bowstring. Oh, look at that beautiful hook. If I wind this in the correct direction, yeah. And then you wind it, and it pulls the string back for you. And again, this takes a little bit of time, but you can do this. And this is like a little advantage with a little roller gear that's going into these notches. Yep, a little gearbox and then a little rack. Wow. And this allows you to span some pretty powerful crossbows without a whole lot of effort. You know, every time I see something out of Maximilian's armory, I want to make one of it. He has the best stuff. Those shield throwers, right? Like, it's just... The mechanics are incredible. You get the sense he liked it. And I love the belt hook. Oh... Yeah, isn't that great? Some dude at one point was like, I gotta go to work. I am so jealous of that dude. Yeah, so you're out in the hunt. There's depictions of people using this on horseback. Yeah. And then here's another one. This comes in also in the 15th century. And it gets the nickname, the goat's foot lever. Because it appears like a goat's foot. And this is my favorite one in the collection just because it's so ornate. There's all this carving. And so this, you have... This was probably not spanned by a goat's foot lever. It's too powerful. But you would have posts quite close to the nut in which these, we'll call them legs, would sit on. Okay. And then the hooks would go over the bowstring. And then as you, of course, pull back... Oh, look at that! It brings... Spans the bow. Brings the string back and knocks it. So this thing is just for comfort for your hand. That's not grabbing the bowstring. This is. Yeah, yeah. This is grabbing the string. This is grabbing essentially the tiller. Right, right. And then this gives you your mechanical advantage. And now a lot of these have just a simple T-bar at the end. But what I quite like about this one, it's a belt hook that retains the legs so they don't pop out on you, right? It's so beautiful. The belt hooks is like rockin' my world in terms of the convenience of like, well, I got to carry it on my belt. Yeah, somebody thought about that, right? They're going to be wearing it out for the hunt or they're, you know, fighting even. I mean, these are really widespread use. This came over with the Spanish into South America used by conquistadors. You can span a pretty powerful bow with just this. That's amazing. Okay, moving on to the final two. Yeah, the final two. Oh, I didn't even notice this one. Okay, I'm going to ignore that for a second. So kind of killing two birds with one stone on this one, which I quite like. Most crossbows are shooting bolts, right? Arrows. There is a group of crossbows that shoot pellets. So these might be clay or even stone. And the idea is you are hunting small game where it has very valuable fur. So you don't want to pierce it. So you hit it with something moving very fast. You're still killing it, but you're not going to damage the fur so much. Fair. So this one, this appears to be maybe the original bowstring. There's one other surviving one like this where it has a little cup on the end. So it probably had a cup that allowed it to launch the pellet. Most of these, they actually split. You've got little spacers here, and then those join together and you have like a pouch in a way. Now this one is extra weird because it also has essentially a pistol barrel inside. Right, that's a flint. Yeah, that's a wheel lock mechanism. I thought I recognized that. Unscrew this. No! And you have your, it's a pistol length barrel inside of here. And this is what you would call a self-spanning bow. So I'm going to not do this the whole way. Oh, I see. So you keep sliding this forward and it eventually catches on the nut and then you load it back in. And so this would, you would sort of pulling back on the cock here would then also, there's an internal wheel which this also sets. And then by pulling the trigger you would first launch the bolt and then fire the pistol. So you or your viewers may be wondering if this is a pellet crossbow meant to not put a hole in something, what's the point of also having a pistol in it? I have no idea. This makes no sense to me. They just wanted all the functionality. Yeah. You imagine someone's like, oh, look what I've got there. Very good, Lord. Very good, my Lord. The thing I find really, I guess the thing that feels most incongruent is when you opened up that mechanism, these long, perfectly square, really beautiful steel beams all look totally modern and contemporary. And again, this is 200, 300 years old, somewhere in there? Yeah. Or just later? Well, this is so 1570 to 1600. Amazing. Yeah. And you have that, I mean, that self sort of spanning crossbow is not a more recent idea. They have very early ones. There's certainly depictions of 15th century ones. I'm not sure how old the most, the current surviving ones are. But it is certainly a thing that existed, and probably in some number, though there's only two in this combination style that survive. Wow, only two. And they're very similar. Do you think they're the same maker? I don't know. But they are close enough that I think it's possible. Right. Or a similar area, even. Yeah, I mean, I can't imagine many of these were made. Probably not. A lot of guys turning these out. Okay. Is this the Derringer of crossbows? Yeah, this is a bit of a weird one, which I mean, I love, and I think you'll like it too. So we call these balustrinos, which is like little crossbow. We really don't know much about these. There's only a handful that exist, and some of those are very probably like 19th century. We call them forgeries. But there's enough of them around that seem plausible to have existed. So this is probably 17th or 18th century. Could be later. I'm not claiming it's not. Sure, sure, sure. But it seems to have been a thing. The draw weight on these are apparently impressive given its size, and it operates in a really cool way. So by turning it counterclockwise, it slides this whole thing forward. And this is not a more recent concept. They're very ancient pieces that operated on the same principle. It hits a little riser and pushes it up, catches your string, right? Right. So now we've caught our string. Pull the trigger down, and that allows us to then wheel it back. Now you're putting it under its tension. They had to have tempered these lobes carefully to get the right amount of elasticity out of them. You really have to understand your raw material and what you're doing to it in order to have this function and not fail miserably. And then that allows you to then, of course, pull the trigger and release your tool. Now I don't think you could have had fletches. Right. So I'm not sure what the range was, but, again, it's got a belt hook. Someone was carrying this around. That's what this is. It's a belt hook, yeah. I was going to tell you that before I leave today, I'm taking a picture because I just want to make that piece. I just think that that is so beautiful, and I think it is within my wheelhouse, and it is just so beautiful. I think you could make this. No, I want to make the whole thing. Of course I want to make the whole thing. Yeah. But, I mean, it's the pierce work that always gets me because the amount of time you have to put in to do that is, you know, it's not just, you know, filing doesn't take that long, but to actually, like, pierce something and then file it and then do all the polishing, it is that extra step that I think really sets a maker apart. Well, and it's very, like, again, because I have access to such different tools than they did, their design language of when they make the decision to break up a surface with a file triangle or angle or bevel, I still don't understand it, right? Like, I still, like, oh, I see these, that kind of repeating pattern, and I get that it's a design language, and it's still sort of foreign to me, which makes me compelled to actually try making stuff with it. I'm getting the impression from you that this is not a representative sample at all. It's just a chunk of a much wider range of executions and explorations. I mean, there are small child's crossbows. There's any number of different appellate crossbows. All the examples I've pulled out are Central European. There's Western European, which is called Spanish-style crossbows, which don't have the swell. They're actually very slender and narrow. This is just sort of what I had that sort of checked the boxes of the different trigger mechanisms and the bow types and the absurdity. Dude, I really appreciate this deep dive. And the mechanics are just, the mechanics and the modern look to the mechanics is just blowing my mind. Thank you, man. This is amazing. Oh, my pleasure. Thank you guys so much for watching. One of my favorite things we make in our test tube store are demerit badges. These are like scout badges, but for screwing stuff up because screwing up is not just a part of the making process. It is intrinsic to it, and we like to celebrate that. We've got 27 so far in these supervisor's bundle that you can go buy right now by clicking on the link in the description. But we also have a booster pack of some brand new patches. This is the demerit badge for burning off your eyebrow. I am proudly sewing that to all of my clothes. This is the demerit badge for having a messy workbench, which I do not get today. My workbench is super clean. And we have new octagonal patches that are, yep, merit badges. This is the merit badge for sweeping up your shop. Congratulations. I'm so proud of you. And this, oh, my God, this is great. This is the merit badge for creating a clean space on your bench. Hey, we got to take our successes where they come and meet them there. Go to the Tested-Store.com or AdamSavage.com to buy any of these or click on a link in the description.