Wooden Pin Pilum: Is It Pointless?

Oh when it impacts something, that happens. Hi it's Tod of Tod's Workshop and Tod Cutler here and I'm back with another film about Roman pilum, throwing javelins. So these are the things that well the Romans used in the last few steps apparently before the two fighting lines engaged and they can be thrown with devastating effect. Have a look at this little clip of Michael. Oh so you can see that these things are absolutely awesome and they are made in the regular way that we do have archaeological evidence for of two pins holding on the long thin shank. It's long and thin so when it goes in a shield it goes through deeply, that's the whole point of it. But one of the things that I said was that I'd come across a reference to a breakable wooden peg pilum. Now it's a simple idea and that is that you have a small wooden peg in here, it keeps everything straight so when it impacts it hits straight but on impact this part shifts down, shears the peg. Now stupidly I didn't explain any of this in the last film, I didn't show you how it's done so I'll show you that in a moment. But what is also interesting is that I knew of the reference but I didn't know the source of it. So one of the guys in the comments section, Joshua Fair, he was the one who let me know. Lots of others did as well but he was the first one I came across. And this account was written by Plutarch a couple of hundred years after Marius, bear that in mind, and he was also a massive Marius supporter. Up to this time it seems that the part of the shaft which was let into the iron head was fastened there by two iron nails, just like this one here. But now leaving one of these nails as it was, Marius removed the other and in its place put a wooden pin that could easily be broken. The idea is that when it lands the pin breaks. His design was that the javelin after striking the enemy's shield should not stand straight out but the wooden peg should break, thus allowing the shaft to bend in the iron head and trail along the ground being held fast by the twist, that being the twist I suppose, at the point of the weapon. So interpreting that what he is saying there is that when it lands it comes in, it lands, bang, pin breaks, that happens. We're going to come back to that but I'm going to show you how I've done this thing first of all. So we have here a slight movement, so this top hole with an iron pin, this top hole is elongated, it's not round, it's lozenge shaped, so it's like that. The bottom hole here, this one is just a regular through hole. Now if I put my wooden pin in, you can now see that it's held fast. It is a good weapon but replacing that pin with a wooden one does this because it is now still a fully functional thing. Everything is still aligned, it's still going to penetrate hard and deep, but when it impacts something that happens, it breaks, it shears the pin. Now in my first trials this hole was just a hole straight through the wood and into here, but actually what happened was that when it did break that, it rounded the inside of the wood there because it wasn't like a hard cutting edge and what it did was it just pulled bits of the wood into the joint and actually it held it pretty fast. So what I've done now is I've just got two steel tubes that go in to just inside here, so actually it does create a proper hard shearing action and that seemed to be really important. So it's not just a case of drilling a hole through, it really does need to be supported. So you've got steel all the way to the edge here, obviously the gap for this, and then steel again. It can cut the pin. Hi I've interrupted this film for another Todd Cutler related interesting fact and here we have a bone horn and brass stripey handled eating knife based on one from the River Thames. Is it posh? Is it not? Well the thing is, it's all waste materials except the brass, so it looks to modern terms really posh. Historically actually not really so much, just a little bit of work in there. Anyway you'll find this and loads of other pieces on toddcutler.com. Back to the film. But this is the thing and this is apparently what Marius said, but also bear in mind Plutarch was a massive Marius supporter 200 years after the date, but what he said was that the pilum comes in, sticks into the shield, bottom falls on the ground and encumbers your progress. Well it does, it absolutely does. He does not mention, which is what I thought it was about, the inability to throw the javelins back. He doesn't mention that at all. He mentions the fact that it encumbers the shield, but this is really where it makes me a little bit skeptical because there is no archaeological evidence for it. There is one written source and I can tell you and I can tell you from these films that when this goes in, that happens. It pulls your shield down, you can't hold that out, that happens and it is already encumbered. So this actually according to Marius's description doesn't improve the utility of the pilum at all. So the one thing that they're writing about and saying that it does, it already does. You have to question it. Interesting, but you have to question it. Now the thing is, I did, this was my first development piece and it has to be recognized that Michael throws like a god basically and the ability for him to throw and therefore change direction because your arm is of course rotating around a circle. The spear doesn't linearly translate when Michael throws it, it will have an arc to it. Now the thing is, I did trial this and my walnut pin was perhaps a little bit too weak. Have a look what happened when Michael threw it. Oh! So what was happening was that as Michael changes direction, as he brings it up and down, there is mass here, there's inertia, it was shearing the pin and it was breaking on launch. Now I have to accept as well with this whole concept of Marius's that unless it was 100% or as close to functional every single time you threw it, no soldier would be wanting to use that weapon right? But of course you know, yes higher ups do impose their will on low downs because they know better, but the point being even the higher ups are going to recognize that if 10% of their javelins which are thrown break before they even leave the hand, it's no good. So that massive direction change of Michael might not be a problem for the likes of you and me but in Michael's case it was. So you have to have a breakable system, if this is what they did, you have to have a breakable system that reliably breaks or reliably stays in one piece when you throw it and hopefully breaks on landing. Now even if 20%, 30% of the javelins break on landing, that's 20-30% that can't be thrown back, but at what cost? You're now gaining that which I would say is of pretty questionable validity because did they ever throw them back? Marius didn't think so, he never mentioned it. So the thing is you are now gaining that for added complexity and even if you are now going in the fight and you're all prepared up, so you've prepared your pilum, that's all fine, you trip over, the thing's broken and the guys are charging towards you, whatever it may be, there will always be an incident where your weapon now, because it can break easily, has broken easily. I have to question the whole concept behind it. Because of this necessity that it has to stay together on launch and preferably it will break when it lands, there's going to be a very delicate middle ground there where the pin is too big or it's too small or the wood's too hard or the wood's too soft or the guys have made the pins out of cross grain wood. I was very careful to make sure that the grain was very straight within the pins that I used. Well you know, mass production is less careful than that, so the thing is it's always going to be different and again that just puts the alarm bells up. But then you talk about the wood itself, well of course the empire was a massive area and so what is available in Judea or in Germania or in Hispania or in England are going to be different. So you would select the local wood that does what you want, so it's not that the wood is going to be olive or it's going to be whatever, it's going to be whatever has been tested and made to be available, found to be available here. I had to go looking for those woods, I chose walnut in the workshop, I wasn't anticipating the extraordinary direction changes, the inertia in the system that allowed the pin to break that Michael managed to subject these things to, so I went to the trial with one set of walnut pins and that was massively in oversight. I then actually just added a bit onto the end of the film where I tested different woods, boxwood unsurprisingly of course and I knew from my trials was much harder than the walnut. I discounted it because I felt that it just broke with too much difficulty, maybe it didn't. Anyway I was going to put it on a scale, I couldn't find my bow scale at the time so I didn't do that, so sorry about the lack of scientific evidence there. But the last thing that I have to mention now is quite possibly the solution to my problem and again it's come from the comments section and it's EB282, lovely name that, I think you might have solved it and it really annoys me because it is so obvious, so obvious the solution to this. I'm smiling because it's just great, but it's also, I have to say, a thing that nobody else came up with and I hadn't come up with, so you know, well done EB282, but here it is. That's the top pin, that's where my wooden peg goes, basically the same distance as my regular peelum, it's what I was making just a variation of, but we move that up now, put our pin back in. If I impact that, it has a force of whatever it is, I'm going to call it a force of one and it shears that. Right, great. Michael's throwing, the direction changes, there's enough inertia in this steel head here that it folds back, shears that pin. It's going to be the same force, it's a force of one. If you double the distance of this down here from that pin, now you're going to need a force of two to shear that pin with Michael's direction changes. I would warrant it's not going to do it, but on impact it is still exactly as it ever was and it would require that force of one and so I think EB282 has nailed it, that actually if this thing ever existed, that distance there would also be critical as well as the diameter and the type of the wood. So I am going to come back to this and what I'm going to do is just simply move that there. Unfortunately, and this is unfortunate, is I have a spear thrower so I can test a regular Pelham, but actually it's the direction change that Michael does because of the rotation of his arm and my spear throw of course is just completely linear and it is not going to demonstrate that. So we have to wait until basically Michael is available again and he's now back into his academic year and it's not going to be until the spring. So hold your breath everybody, hold your breath, it'll be a while, but this will come back. But before I go, I hope you enjoyed the video and if you did, you know, sign up to the channel, subscribe, turn your bell notifications on, come down to the websites because if you like this kind of stuff, you will like what we do and what we sell. Buy the merch, sign up to the newsletters, it all helps us keep going. Anyway, I'll see you again, thanks.