 on this continuing quest to try and work my way through all historical innovations of humanity and work my way up from the Stone Age to the Modern Age and right now I'm just at the cusp of gunpowder with the procurement of salt peter a very crucial ingredient but before the invention of gunpowder you ever wondered like how good of a gun-like weapon could you make I wanted to dig a little bit deeper into pre-gunpowder weapons and see how good of a basically machine gun like crossbow you can make this is a really common trope in a lot of different forms of media where you basically have a crossbow that is in the place of a gun and basically in a lot of media it's a stand-in for a gun and time before guns were invented I think is most interesting is that there's historical existence of this item it dates back to roughly 300 BC in China with the Chukonu and use a really ingenious design to allow you to draw and reload a crossbow in one motion however they ended up having a lot of drawbacks preventing them from really have many wide-scale use because of their design the draw strength of them wasn't that strong it also was a bit more awkward and bulky so it was rather difficult to aim so it's found very limited application however some later designs did make some improvements against these setbacks large versions will be mounted on stands such as depicted in the screen painting with the stand it's easier to operate an aim and with a larger size a more powerful draw strength is possible so I think that's gonna be my goal let's just make a pretty big one but to get a little hands-on inspiration for this device I did see that you buy your own model of it on wish.com so that's what I did so it's a little bit smaller than what I expected um the website made no mention of its size kind of a neat little toy because it's a two-piece at the same time the overall design is impressively simple a single lover when you drop forward holds back and then when you release it it both fires it and allows the next shot to drop down which then when you drop back it fires that one as well so step one is going to be making the stock of the body and this is basically what holds everything together holds the bow in place allows the track for the arrows to be launched from and uh it's basically what you hold on to starting first from a decent chunk of wood these steel hardened chisels I made in one of our last videos will be very useful the first step is going to be carving out the rough shape of the body that makes it a bit more ergonomic to hold on to then using the hand auger we can start the hole that the bow will go into then the last part will be carving in a channel for the upper portion to slide down next I need to construct some sort of stand to hold the body the next step is going to be the this upper portion or kind of an arrow holster this is going to be the device that holds the actual arrows and allows them to drop down to be able to slide back and forth on the rail that we carved into the stock slot here for the bolstering to go into including a notch that it gets stuck to so then when the whole device is pulled back it fires first we'll start with the bottom of it there will be the sliding part that corresponds with the notch we carved into the stock then putting together the sides for the box next to the notch for the drawstring all right so now it's time to do the prod or bow for the crossbow here for our more traditional one we did got a european style which used a forge steel prod wasn't traditionally done much in the east instead they often did a recurve bow or a bamboo I did make a recurve bow before but it's a bit crispy now so I'm going to try and use bamboo and have a variety of different split bamboo here they require a bit of finessean to get the right amount of draw weight generally these do not have a huge drawstring probably because you needed to be able to do the reloading motion all at once too heavy of a draw way probably hinders that it's just going to bundle them together at various lengths to offer enough resistance we'll put it in the hole we put inside the crossbow thank you to the sponsor of today's video lavoit lavoit is the number one air filter brand in the united states and on amazon they sent me the lavoit 600s now the workshop is finished i've been able to use the filter in the new space i was a little skeptical at first we do have a couple forms of dust collection and an air filter already to remove any sawdust and other particulates in the air so i wasn't sure how valuable another air filter would be but i actually found it to be really useful because one of the biggest health risks which i work like this is the small particles get in the air and you end up breathing in it was really important to take care of that caught up in a project and sign something there's a bunch of dust in there not even realizing that i'm breathing it in but the lavoit system actually detects it and turns it on and starts filtering even nicer the fact that it's synced to an app on my phone it gets dusty in the room i get notification and then when i should turn on the other collection systems or put on a mask this is definitely a really important tool in our workshop thanks again to lavoit for sponsoring our video check out some of their products in the link below and then the last piece we need is the actual lever that connects the two devices and is what is basically the firing mechanism you make mine out of steel so it's a little bit stronger so let's start forging that so you will need our ammo the bolts we'll basically use the same design as the previous set of bolts we made for the regular crossbow except with some of larger shafts to attach them to which we'll attach by heat setting them then let's put the last few pieces together and see if it works all right so we've got everything assembled here this one's just got to put tension onto the prod here and then we can see if it actually works and how well it fires just give it a shot okay just to draw strength same for over 50 so that's it's pretty good actually so this is out and draw a fire the thing you're not supposed to do there we go all right so I think we're all set now it adds a little handle thing easier to help push the string out but it looks like it's all set to fire now we've got a decent draw strength to it so let's take it out and start firing some stuff see what we can do so let's just start with one for now there's a chance that my clog will back right in the head it fires it worked got him right in the head got a misfire there I think that's the biggest issue I see is they slide back so it doesn't hook onto it so I probably just need to put a little block there to stop them from falling back that far so probably that's the only issue I see then it should fire oh hit the tree didn't look like there's some penetrating power there and we lost your head by the way I got a couple tweaks here let's hopefully get things to line up so we got two boards on the edges kind of wedge it into the middle and just one at a time and we have this block at the very end here to stop things from going and dropping in past the drawstring yeah hopefully that should work out hopefully start to load that with a few more arrows a little bit of alignment issue uh the tip stayed up and it's just rammed into here two tried to go in at once and that wound up with it tilted up so then when it released it just jammed it to the front of it knot out the hole a few more tweaks got some uh shims in the front there to kind of force the arrows in one at a time so hopefully that should address the last issue here and maybe get some consistent rate of fire that was all of them just one misfire that is definitely an improvement I say a lot of my little front all right so I took a little bit of tweaking but I think I have this guy all set and able to fire repeatedly now fun device to shoot and it packs some decent punch I'm very satisfied I was able to get at least 60 pounds of draw strength with this that puts it in the realm of a kind of a standard crossbow a little bit on the low end I think a hundred pounds would have been really ideal but the fact that it stood up to this and it's not too hard to cock and everything I think it's a good sign that I can actually increase it the advantage of doing it with the bamboo is it going to just add more layers for more resistance and it kind of makes it a little bit more adjustable as far as I can tell this is a pretty accurate recreation of the one depicted in the Korean painting with the naval armament and I have to say I think this would make a pretty effective weapon to use in an actual war once it was tweaked and ran a little bit smoother it was to get a pretty pretty decent rapid rate of fire and with the increased size and on the mount I was actually able to aim it pretty well so I think in a stationary conflict where you're like stuck to the bow of a ship this is a pretty effective tool but this is just the first iteration and I want to try and kind of raise the bar even further because this is not really a machine gun this is just kind of semi-automatic like you still have to manually fire each shot so the real goal would be to make this fully automatic which is going to take a lot more sophistication and for that I've been talking to someone who's kind of an expert at this of yours from the slingshot channel who has made a few different versions of repeating crossbows including the normal size version of this of course he uses slingshot technology and elastic bands which were not invented until the 1800s so to try and do this historically he's gonna require some extra challenges and a little ingenuity so I'm gonna consult with him try and get some advice and try to make this a fully automatic machine gun thanks again for everybody for watching this is one of many different projects that I pulled at the beginning of the year to see what people interested in and this one right relatively high up there moving forward if you are a supporter on patreon me kind of conducting small polls continuously allow you to import what projects I do and don't do so look forward to that coming up and you can have a little bit more say in the type of content we end up doing otherwise thank you to everybody for your continued support thanks for watching if you enjoyed this video be sure to subscribe and check out other content we have covering a wide variety of topics also if you've enjoyed these series consider supporting us on patreon we are largely a fan-funded channel and depend on the support of our viewers in order to keep our series going thanks for watching