 Leonardo da Vinci is known for many things. Perhaps most intriguing are his many inventions. Some that were centuries ahead of their time. In all his drawings he envisioned a lot of war machines, many which seemed a bit crazy. In particular the specific design for what appears to be an attempt at a machine gun style crossbow device involving a wheel of 16 crossbows. It seems a bit dubious, crazy, and dangerous. In other words, a perfect project for us to try and recreate. So let's put his design to the test and see if this ancient weapon actually worked. In previous video I did exploration of the concept of the machine gun crossbow. A trope common in modern media of trying to make historical and antiquated technology comparable to modern weapons. With that project I recreated an ancient Chinese form of that weapon that had an actual limited use in combat. Surprisingly simple and effective, it still fell short of the rate of fire of an actual machine gun. After that project ended up diving into Leonardo da Vinci's drawings for a few other videos. But I discovered this obsession with the rapid fire crossbow actually dates back further to even him and some of his 1485 drawings. His drawings are pretty crazy and probably one of my favorite facts about da Vinci is that he's the original king of lying on your resume. After establishing a career and painting and sculpture for which he is often still likely best known, he decided he wanted to be a military engineer and wrote to the ruler Milan a description of all the amazing war machines he could build. Something he had never actually done before. The area where he already had established experience he only briefly mentioned at the end. Likewise in painting I can do everything possible. For his machine gun crossbow it's a pretty insane looking wheel of 16 crossbows set to all fire rapidly in a spinning motion. This is just too insane looking to not try and recreate myself. So let's give it a shot. But first thank you to the sponsor of this video. Most of da Vinci's drawings have some kind of notes written in his own somewhat cryptic mirrored writing. But despite being over 500 years ago he wrote in what is very comparable to modern Italian which would have made a mastery of that language very useful in my research. Unfortunately I'm not fluent but today's sponsor could potentially help you in that position. Unlock a world of possibilities with Babel. The language app stands out from the rest. In just three weeks you can start learning to speak a new language with the help of Babel. Their scientifically proven approach ensures you start speaking from day one making language learning an exciting and achievable journey. They do offer over a dozen different languages to choose from. Real language teachers meticulously craft each lesson ensuring you receive top notch expert guidance. Say goodbye to generic content. Their lessons are tailored to real world conversations. Babel prepares you for practical meaningful dialogues. It comes with a 20 day money-back guarantee. If you're not speaking confident within three days they'll refund you no questions asked. Choose a subscription that fits your lifestyle. They have options for everyone. Ready to embark on a language adventure? Join Babel today and make language learning an unforgettable experience. Click the link in the description to get 60% off and start learning today. The first step we basically need to build 16 entirely functional crossbows. Similar to my other repeating crossbow we're going to use bundled bamboo strips for the prod which is a little bit more economical than trying to forge them out of steel. Next the center spoke that all the crossbows connect to. Shoulder, round hole, round peg. Lastly the hooks to draw the bow strings back and fire. All right so we put together a little bit of a frame here to hold it. Should be able to start assembling it. This thing's going to be on this axle. We have the big wheel here. Cog. This is what all the crossbows will go into. On either side of that is going to be basically the mounting point for the strings that cock the arms. Cock. That's the right turn. Basically I'll go like this. These will be attached to the outer support so they don't turn. A little bit of an arms manufacturing to make 16 of these. It kind of makes it a little absurd I think that we have 16 basically working crossbows. You could just get 16 people and shoot them out once. As it spins rope attached to each of these will connect to the drawstring as it wraps around. Pull it back and then I think the challenging part will be when it actually fires. I think there's just going to be a lot of fine tuning. I don't think there's any way to like determine which angle and the full wheel that'll actually fire. It'll be a little bit of trial and error of getting the right length and kind of triggers that'll push the hooks off so that they fire. Ideally point it that way, not back at yourself. Dimenshi's drawings are a little big so it's not super clear exactly how to do this but hopefully you can figure it out as we put together. We did a little bit of a test fire without to see how well this is going to work. Some of the challenges though with this design though is just getting it so it actually fires at the right time and that's going to depend basically on the rope having it just the right amount of length so that when it gets to this point in the rotation it's tight enough and it's reaching the wedges to let go. It took a lot of force to actually get it to release it which is also kind of a pain and just spinning it with just one was took quite a bit of work. So there's some suspicion that if we put all 16 on here and we're trying to pull back a 45 pound bow on each of them that was a lot of resistance that might not be practical to draw everything back. So I thought now is to go back to the more traditional crossbow where it has a notch and then basically you're gonna we're gonna notch each and every one of these individually and then load it with the arrow have that held on and then basically have a triggering mechanism to push it out of the notch as it gets specifically pointing forward. It seems a lot easier to control the winnage fires I think will be the main advantage puts less pressure on the whole device to crank 16 crossbows all at once. It does make it harder to reload but I think even with the if we got the other design to work it would have been a pain to reload get each of these hooks back on the bow string and all adjusted correctly. So I think no matter what this is going to be a one-time fire thing we for a run at once and then that's about it. Doesn't make a nice team. So we've got that rigged with our our new design of the triggering mechanism where we have two boards here on each side and then we have a little metal trigger basically they'll go here as it goes down it'll push it up and release it from the notch and fire it. We're not really sure which way it's going to fire there's a lot of uncertainty in there so the arrows we've got tennis balls on them so we hopefully don't kill anybody. You try to minimize casualties by doing it indoors and targeting towards the wall here and then Elliot's going to catch it. Yeah I'm going to take all 16 of them. We'll load it up I don't have any of them fire in our face after that then we can put in the actual bolts see if we'll shoot all right so we got all armed up all 16 crossbows each with a cute little tennis ball on this is the most elaborate dog toy ever ready straight up snapped it off there huh yeah they either were too thick or too thin too thin and they fell out and left it rigged and too thick they ripped the whole thing off that way there's a little problem there all right so we made a few tweaks here repair the arm that broke kind of widened out some of our trigger mechanisms it seems to be the main issue and I think we can do a little bit better this time all right we are all loaded for round number two with some improvements hopefully this will work I think we had a higher fire right? Oh yeah really? Just two of them the trigger slipped out and two of them I just didn't have enough to fire them one two two with a bit of tweaking we're able to increase our fire rate to a little bit over almost 90 success and I think we got some real good proof of concept that this design does actually work looking back at the footage in calculating its rate of fire we're about 540 rounds per minute and the only real thing that keeps the rate of fire that low and not any higher is just the how fast that you can spend the wheel so if you get a little bit of momentum going you're able to get an even higher rate of fire then the obvious issue is that no matter how fast you shoot it it's only shooting 16 rounds so it's definitely a pretty limiting factor especially with the reload rate for us it it took over eight minutes to reload it although we were getting faster with each attempt I think if we went back a little bit more to the original DaVinci design with the actual hooks pulling down each one potentially you could make that still work at least as a separate loading step and pull back all the draw strings at once for us we're averaging around 45 pound draw weight on each of these so multiply that by 16 that's a lot of weight that has to be pulled I probably have to reinforce a lot let's actually pull that off and ideally to actually use this for more machine you probably want over 100 pounds so that is a lot of force to pull back all at once but you could potentially speed up the reload rate however you still have to manually place each bolt into it there's no reloading mechanism so even with some improvements it's still going to be a pain to reload so coming in at 540 rounds per minute actually puts it really comparable to the first machine gun the maximum which you're averaging rate of fire around 550 to 600 rounds per minute so this is right up there with actual machine gun rate of fire so that's pretty impressive so compared to my previous project of the chinese repeating crossbow that one had a much lower rate of fire so in terms of getting a machine gun like crossbow this is definitely succeeding a lot better that one I think is a lot more practical though because it's easier to reload you know a useful feature is you can actually aim it this thing is uh kind of stationary so there's definitely advantages for that and that's why it had some use in military but overall this device and that one never found wide-scale use and I think it's really evident just in building this when we realized that we made 16 fully functional crossbows would not be that difficult to just pick up 16 people to fire them especially because a crossbow takes a lot less skill than say a bow and arrow you can get a much faster rate of fire just 16 people loading and reloading these so in that regard I wouldn't say this is really the most effective war machine I think it definitely has an intimidation factor which is probably a pretty big motivator for actually building it but nevertheless it was really interesting to recreate one of the vintage more interesting war machine designs he has a lot more designs some as crazy as this so if you are interested in this type of content I definitely would enjoy exploring this a little bit more in depth and trying out some of his other crazy designs thanks again for watching thanks again to all my supporters on patreon without you this will be possible 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