When I was about 9 years old, about 70 years ago, a gypsy family camped in a field close to my home. I spent many hours around their camp that summer and one day the father showed us how to make a war dart. He took a 2 in diameter branch and shaped it with his knife so it was about a foot long and bulbus at the front and tailing to about half inch with a cross shaped cut in the end. A sheet of folded newspaper formed the flights. A 3 foot length of thin string was the sling knoted and fitted into a slot cut just behind the bulbus front. He twirled it around his head and snapped back on the string and the dart flew about 150-200 yards. He told us that it was used in war thousands of years ago.
If I was a medieval soldier, the very first piece of gear to be taken from the battlefield dead, would be a helmet. Seems there was a lot of sharp, pointy things falling from the sky.
I heard a story about a lineman (electrical, not football) dude who took off his hard hat to wipe off sweat from his brow. He did that while under a pole being worked on. In that fragment of the work day a bolt fell and hit him right on the top of his head. He put his hard hat back on before the blood started flowing, and his knees started buckling. Imagine people intentionally hitting you with purpose-built weapons while also pouring chamber pots, dead animals, and boiling oil on you 😮 What kind of helmet do I need to protect me from rotten dogs and scalding pitch?
I love it when geezers do have the inginuity and energy to bung stuff together and contemplate the past ! It is fab and gives us all food for thought. Thank you very much.
As a geezer myself I agree, I might add if it wasn’t for guys like him all this will be forgotten.BTW this is one weapon that I never knew about until today.
This is fantastic. I admire you greatly for perfecting the mount and release of the dart. The distance attained is difficult to judge but looks 100 yard 'ish and with a pointy thing on the end would cause damage in the ranks. Thank you for furthering my education.
This was fascinating to watch. Few people know about the use of war darts in the annals of military history. We're not referring to bar darts. War darts throughout history around the world measured anywhere between 12 inches (Roman plumbata or martiobarbuli) to the 7-feet darts thrown by wooden atlatls wielded by Upper Paleolithic hunters. The Aztecs widely used atlatls projecting specially designed 6 to 7 feet darts with obsidian points and feather fletching. The ancient Hawaiians threw a slim, all-wood dart of about six feet, more like a short javelin. The Romans themselves used several types of darts besides the late 3rd century plumbata, of which five were attached behind a legionary's shield. One Roman dart was a light, unfletched javelin, consisting of a 3-feet wood shaft and a one-foot iron shank with a small, diamond or leaf-shaped point. Another Roman dart was about 3.5 feet long, of similar construction, and carried in a quiver attached to a cavalry horse's saddle. After watching this fascinating video, I kept wondering whether the ancient Greeks were better off simply using slings. It took some time to prepare the dart for slinging. Loading a rounded stone into a fabric or leather pouch is faster. There is no question about the distance this homemade dart could fly. It seems to have been an 'area' weapon, that is, intended for hundreds of men to disperse darts high into the air and raining down on the packed Roman legionary formations with a shotgun type effect. There is little wonder why this ancient dart dispensing system was not widely used.
Spinning the dart point first makes all the difference. I have tried various point-outwards methods and I hate them, I can feel the drag of the dart as I spin it and the fishtailing after the release robs even more velocity. Also, that first yaw when its flying forwards but pointing to the right causes a strong rightward drift that means it never flies to the point of aim.
According to Carl Sagan's "Cosmos", Europe was on the brink of the industrial revolution in around 400AD but the religious authorities condemned the developments as "Satanic" and repressed science for another thousand years.
When I was young we used to make darts from bamboo sticks (at least three or four times longer than the dart you show) We split the rear end of the bamboo and inserted several playing cards to form a sort of 'mortar bomb' style fin arangement and taped a two or three dud 'C' or 'D' cell type batteries around the nose for nose weights. We'd then cut a 1/16 to 1/8th inch deep notch into the bamboo stick in the rear third of it's length. *We used to throw them using a much simpler piece of string with just a knotted end.* When thrown in this manner, the darts would go much, much higher and many times further than could be thrown by hand alone. _To throw, the knotted end was placed along the notch, the string was then simply looped once around the stick then 'over' the knot and down along the bamboo to be held fast a little behind the nose._ You then threw the dart much as normal, _but in the split-second before it released, the string and notch would allow you to continue to apply acceleration to the dart for about a metre or so after the dart had left your hand_ (thus giving you a mechanical advantage of a broadly similar nature to that of an atlatl, _only instead of pushing, the string is pulling_ ) This allowed you to apply almost your whole body weight behind the throw and launch the dart with considerable force some very impressive distances. _We didn't twirl it around like a sling as you are doing however._
Yes, this is a detaching amentum. You can also use a fixed amentum loop which is much shorter, just behind where you hold the spear. These were used for javelin throwing through all of antiquity until the age of gunpowder. The fixed loops were for military use and the detaching ones were for athletic competitions. In Greek it is called the ankyle.
Mate, just made a very similar post and then read yours. We used to have battles with them with other kids from the estate. They were happy days, if you didn't lose an eye.
Thanks! Most of my channels views come from RU-vid suggestions. I get a lot from strategy video games like Rome Total War because they have slingers in.
@@davidmorningstar I don't think I even searched anything related to this, youtube was like "hey want to watch an interesting video on days" and I was like ya know what, yes I do. And I was not disappointed, I never could've figured out how to come up with anything close to that
@@brettridings5594 Somehow RU-vid took my searches for the 1981 Addams Family movie trailer, the Fishhead Song and Father Ted and suggested this. And I'm very glad it did.
Hi David, we met 10 years or so ago at a bow making gathering. You were making a flatbow from beech if I remember correctly :) Good to 'see' you again haha! I've watched a few of your slinging videos and will be giving it a go myself.
Thank you! This is actually my first attempt at talking to the camera and editing together a proper short film to explain something. I did another two and got better with each one.
David. You directed me here, following my comment about throwing arrows, in one of your slinging videos. The setup we used was simpler than yours, in that we used a single length of string with one knot in it. This was tensioned along the shaft of an 18" - 2’ flighted arrow. The string was wrapped around the throwing hand, which also gripped the arrow head and the action was an over arm throw. The opposite end of the string was held in place by looping it round the shaft, in a notch below the flight, and over the knot. The string effectively lengthened your throwing arm. Not sure, now, what kind of distances we achieved but they were far beyond our unassisted capabilities. Maybe you could test this out and compare distance, accuracy etc. I don’t think a short arrow would be much good as the length of the string is the force multiplier and this is governed by the length of the projectile. Nice videos, by the way.
Nigel thorpe'our throwers were very simler to yours we used length s of dowel cards for flights n wire wrapped near the point length of string one groove near flights n hours of fun the boys just come out in me time to play again throwers n gadders
@@johnbattista9519 Go away. You don't understand what a joke is. His 'joke' was about using lawn darts on his peers. My comment wasn't related to that, it was related to his use of the name 'lawn darts.' Seriously, illiterate people have to be one of the worst parts of RU-vid comments.
Well done, top drawer stuff. I don't know how many slingers there are. What do you think about a big conflab and competition for distance and accuracy and such? More power to you...
Have a look at Tods Workshop, there's a video on there all about the various ancient war darts, including how to launch a plumbata with a staff sling. Very impressive, but I do like your take on the Cestros.
Yes, like the chap below. Length of straight round tree branch. Dart flight stuck in one end and tied in. The tip of the dart at the front. A groove towards the rear. A length of string with a know. Wrap it and sling it. Happy days.
Like the stone sling it would have most likely taken quite a bit of practice in order to use it effectively but this is still a pretty cool little weapon.
Thank God we never knew about these when we were kids. Half of us wouldn't be here today if we did lol. It was bad enough being chased home and shot at with a BB gun or chased thru the woods by one of your "mates" with a catapult lol
We did, just had make shift versions using crushed bottle caps as arrow heads. We just didn't die lol or we did and there was no FB around to tell everyone
We had lawn darts to kill family and friends with. Worked well. With enough baby boomers in the streets, chances are a errant dart would hit someone. I’m interested in all the knots. 💕🐝🇺🇸
Yes; I found it odd that this information wasn't included. Obviously, different slings and darts will produce different results but it would still be interesting to know how far this combination will shoot.
It depends hugely on the weight of the projectile, and I was never the best. There is a guy in the USA with a channel called IronGoober going over 250 metres with stones. A UK channel called Archaic Arms has detailed weight/velocity readings from radar.
I've just watched it again because it is so interesting, the sling illustrates that concept of asymmetric battle and how ideas travel (or not) . I was wondering how many other sling setups did you try for the dart and could you show how the idea evolved to this end.
My first version was attached to the tail, this gave a very poor release with the dart fishtailing wildly and flying to a different point of aim from conventionally slung stones. I abandoned this and went to the mid attachment point, this was immediately much better ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-0mMUOZZBDuY.html
@@shanedude91 I have, it didn't work very well. The dart does not have time to stabilise during the short throw arc and so it fishtails wildly after launch, losing a lot of energy to drag. It was also quite a handful when reloading.
Bonjour,il faudrait mettre en français les explications car je n'ai absolument pas compris du début à la fin ,et comment faites vous pour libérer le projectile ? Merci pour la réponse !
David, could I encourage you to invest in a collar microphone so we can hear what you're saying above the surrounding noise? It would help tremendously. Rode make a very good and economical one. That said, well done on an excllent and entirely workable approximation of the sleing used over 2000 years ago. Very clever!
Hand thrown darts of various sizes pop up at various times and places. The plumbata in particular seems to be about rapid fire, with five darts being carried inside the shield instead of the usual one or two javelins.
Could you use the same knots and a different material in the 2 cords if the cord holding the dart was able to stretch even 5 percent more then the mechanism cord you could tie it to dart cord and anchor and train to find the inertia point to activate the mechanism ?
The maximum point of stretch would be when the dart is behind you moving sideways, you have to hold on past that and release with the dart moving forwards.
It is very challenging to catch small fast objects on video. I used the sky to silhouette the darts because they werent showing up against the background.
