You missed showing the most crucial part of this bow making, bending it against it's natural curve and stringing it. That's why it's called a recurve bow..
that + horses allowed them to conquer a percentage of the planet and kill around 2000 heavy knights in Poland !, if they managed to use chinese-made siege machines and destroy castles, they could have reached Portugal...
I've heard that one Khan shot an arrow over 1200 meters. Turkish, Scythian, Slavic, Indian and Middle Eastern composite bows can fire up to 800 meters if the bow was well made.
They obviously didn't have a time to wait so long for filming of the whole process of making in the scenes thus I believe several cores were prepared in order to show basic things to average viewer. That's documentary not manual for making Mongol bow, editors choose cuts without asking 😊 I like how it was done.
The manchurian bow is much larger compared to the earlier mongol bow, the one shows here seems to be a mongol bow and not what the mongols adopted after the manchurians took over
simple physics mate - same pondage bows the composite will be faster because of the shape ( it "gives" the power to the arrow faster ) but even if it is 10-15 fps difference it is not a base for what is best/better. There are more and proper metrics for what suits your army, shooting needs, preferences etc.
Chronograph data are everywhere, since Stephen Selby first studies. A Manchu 80 pounds bow outperform a self-bow of 110 pounds using the same arrow. That's not chauvinism or misplaced pride, it's just a more efficient (and more recent) way to make bows the same way a modern fiberglass bow outperform those horn and sinew ones.
The modern Mongol composite bow is not the original type used by the Mongols. It is actually modeled on the Manchu composite bow. When the Manchus conquered China and Mongol during the 1600s, they decreed that only their bow design be the standardized bow design. There are depictions of pre-1600s old Mongol bow design. It is a much smaller bow without the large siyahs, prominent string bridges and a long draw length. Of all the composite bow design, the Manchu bow is the biggest in size as shooting the largest and most massive of arrows with maximum kinetic energy is the objective.
