Brainiac - Archery Myths

[gwildor]

Originally Posted by Windknot

The arrow that was split on "The Adventures of Robin Hood" (the one starring Errol Flynn) was done the old fashioned way- by shooting real arrows. The archer was one Howard Hill- apparently an above average archer ;-) It took a few days of shooting, but he finally got a split that pleased the director. And a few that didn't.

Marcus, you don't need tons of power to split an arrow- what's more important is good arrow flight.

The grain runout that is so prevalent in POC now shafts pretty much precludes a good Robin Hood, but I'd like to see what can be done with something like Scots Pine, self nocks and a decent broadhead. Care to send us some Ribteks?

howard hill not only split the shaft, but also shot most of the stunt men to, they had peices of ply 2in thick under their tunics and were shot with a 45 poundish flat bow , from upwards of 40yrds. also if you look at the dvd or tape, when robin shoots the guard in the tavern, his arrow snuffs out a candle, pause the film as the guy falls and you can see several holes in the guys back, and not a bad group eather, the first few didnt snuff the candle,they dont make stunt men like that these days, daft or brave the money must have been good,there are a few more stories about mr hill which no doubt ill pass on and bour you all, or i may get a life

[English Bowman]

Originally Posted by Dave

IIRC, Marcus, it was AIUK member English Bowmen who was the archer on the Brainiac tests and I wouldn't say he was inexperienced

Thanks for that. It was me that did that programme.
I was asked what I thought was and what wasn't possible historically before I started. Then they had me "prove" what I said could have been done.

The William Tell was pretty much as you see on the screen. Replica mediaeval crossbow, I hit the apple on about the 4th shot, and could hit it every time from then.

For the Robin Hood, because I said that it could have happened, I had to do it. I emptied a quiver into the target at about 20yds, then kept shooting extra arrows until I finally did it.
It was shot with my longbow. I mainly used target points, but tried a couple of broadheads when it got the the point that I was getting tired and fed up. I can't remember if it was a broadhead or field point that did it, but it wasa POC shaft shot from an English Longbow.


As for the Odysseus one.

Originally Posted by Cimbian Quote

I thought is was the 'sockets' of the axe-heads. If this is the case then there would be no handles.

I thought that too, and when asked if I could do Odysses' shot using a similar bow to the one he would have used said that I couldn't due to the paradox of the arrow. At the ranges they wanted to shoot the arrow wouldn't have had time to straighten.
What they did was different, and I probably could have done it if that's what they wanted. They asked me to shoot arrows into the axe heads, and get a few through the first axes, but hit the second set to prove that an arrow couldn't go all the way through both sets. This was done with a scythian recurve bow. As you can see I did what they asked. I have this on DVD, and if I can I'll try to get it converted to MPEG and post it, but at the moment I don't have the software to do this.

Daniel