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Randall Moffett




Location: Northern Utah
Joined: 07 Jun 2006
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PostPosted: Fri 20 Feb, 2009 2:18 pm    Post subject:         Reply with quote

J.,

I don't know if thats the case at least for medieval arrows. We hit 1-3mm steel, with bows well over 100 pound draw, quite a bit with our replica arrows and they are usually reused. You get breaks now and then but not often enough to think you'd not get them back most of the time. I'd imagine it less likely these arrows would be damaged on soft targets. In fact I'd find it highly unlikely much of the time a semi-soft or soft target would break one of these arrows.

Gary,

Not sure if the type 7s need to be hard. If they need get around mail or through fabric they might do OK soft. You also have production costs to add into the cost as well. If you get 3-4 out unhardened to one hardened or something like that. To be fair this type of arrowhead is undertested numerically in most tests I have seen for makeup and hardness to other heads.

Allen,

Good point. Context is king. When your life is on the line your costly arrows are much more important and useful, cost being then unimportant.

RPM
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Gary Teuscher





Joined: 19 Nov 2008

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PostPosted: Fri 20 Feb, 2009 4:31 pm    Post subject:         Reply with quote

Quote:
If there were a thundering wall of mounted knights (lances lowered) bearing down on me riding heavy war horses, my best arrows would start disappearing as they closed in.


You are being charged by a bear - do you want to use your best arrow or worst arrow?

I'd say best arrow would be my desire, but I would take the first arrow I could pull out of my quiver and hope it's not a fowling blunt! Big Grin
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J Gerg




Location: Pittsburgh, PA, USA
Joined: 17 Feb 2009

Posts: 6

PostPosted: Fri 20 Feb, 2009 7:14 pm    Post subject:         Reply with quote

Allen-
Oh agreed but more often than not it was up to the soldiers in front of you to stop that from happening, but I imagine it happened more than we know, and in most cases thundering warhorses and plated knights meant archer doom, in most cases you would, on the battlefield sling your arrows in an arched fashion to rain on distant targets and your arrow probably bumped into Joes beside you and it never really mattered

Randall-
Wow! I archery hunt in the United States and most cases if my arrows arnt Carbon they bust after impact, and its a 60 pound draw... So maybe they anticipated the fact that arrows will be piercing steel and made them of a different grade than to days standards.

Venienti occurrite morbo.
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Randall Moffett




Location: Northern Utah
Joined: 07 Jun 2006
Reading list: 5 books

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PostPosted: Sat 21 Feb, 2009 12:33 am    Post subject:         Reply with quote

J.,

Not sure if the tie to your modern arrows breaking now means arrows then broke the same or were the same. Not sure if this is a fair statement either way. Besides the arrowshaft is not the main issue I was talking about but the head which regardless of whether the shaft breaks the head likely would not.

RPM
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Steve Hinton





Joined: 30 Jan 2009

Posts: 9

PostPosted: Sat 21 Feb, 2009 4:29 pm    Post subject:         Reply with quote

Hi Garry

Possible reasons for hardened 'needle bodkins' having not been found.
1. Has some one looked. I presume you have looked at some from your discussions on the forum. How many have you examined and what was their state of preservation? Is this a representative sample?
2. They didn't bother. considering how easy it is (you only need the residual heat from the forge to do it and you can batch them) and the benefits to be gained from hardening it seems strange as to why they didn't.
3.The shape of the head would already defeat the armour it was used against. Which may exsplain why later arrow heads are hardened and early ones are not.
4.Time spent in the ground and state of preservation. As only a very thin surface layer is hardened it is easily lost due to corrosion. The broad heads you mention as being hardened where were they found? Are they from a collection which possibly never spent any time in the ground? As hunting heads were that little bit more special have these heads come from a source other than a battle field? I have seen some broad heads which were so corroded that to tell if they were hardened or not would be nearly impossible.

You could always try. It would be interesting to see if it made much of a difference.
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Steve Hinton





Joined: 30 Jan 2009

Posts: 9

PostPosted: Sat 21 Feb, 2009 4:41 pm    Post subject:         Reply with quote

Apologies for miss spelling your name Gary.

As for case hardening causing needle bodkins to become brittle, as only the outside layer is hardened the core of the arrow head remains 'softer'.

This technique is used on a lot of tools which have to be hard to cut and retain an edge yet soft enough that the blade/implement doesn't shatter.

With a hardened needle bodkin this could possibly mean that the corners/ridges running the length of the arrow head would have a better chance of actually cutting through the mail rings.
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Dan Howard




Location: Maitland, NSW, Australia
Joined: 08 Dec 2004

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PostPosted: Sun 22 Feb, 2009 1:48 am    Post subject:         Reply with quote

Dr David Starley has done the most comprehensive analysis on extant arrowheads to date. Last I heard he has yet to find a single bodkin typoology that was hardened. He has found other types such as the compact broadhead made of hardened steel or of iron with steel edges welded on. Based on this one would think that if bodkins were hardened then surviving examples would show evidence of it just like the broadheads. Of course this may change in the future. Considering the numbers of arrowheads produced in the past, the sample size so far analysed is very small.
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Lafayette C Curtis




Location: Indonesia
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PostPosted: Sun 01 Mar, 2009 2:57 am    Post subject:         Reply with quote

Allen Foster wrote:
Much that I have read about the English archers during the hundred years war had them pitted against mounted knights in a mass charge.

(snip)

In all of the talk that I've seen on this forum about whether or not an arrow was able to penetrate plate, I've always thought it missed the point because the archers were in fact shooting for the horses instead in order to dismount and neutralize the mounted calvary threat. Just my speculation though.


This only applies to some--perhaps a minority--of HYW battles, however; in most of the longbowmen's "great battles," especially Poitiers and Agincourt but also others like Verneuil and the Herrings, most of the chivalric opponents they faced were dismounted men-at-arms. Sure, Poitiers and Agincourt had instances of small cavalry detachments being shot down before the main portion of the battle was joined between the infantry lines, but these didn't seem to have been the decisive actions of their respective battles.
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