Glued Linen Armour- a simple test

[Dan Howard]

A good paper was in Barry Molloy's book The Cuting Edge. The paper, called "The reconstruction of Scythian bows", goes into a great deal of detail as to what sources they used for their reconstructions of ancient bows including Scythian and Bashkir. They ended up testing three bows all with a draw length of around 60 cm. Results are all recorded in scatttergrams rather than tables so it is difficult to extract data, and they use meric units such as kiloponds or Newtons to measure draw-weight so it is difficult to compare with earlier tests. Unfortunately they only measure arrow velocity at a distance of 1m from the bow so it doesn't tell us much about the amount of energy that can be delivered to a target.

Here is one set of data extracted from one of their graphs.
Bow 1 Scythian 60cm draw length 205N draw weight
34g arrow averaged 38m/s (1m from bow)
36g arrow averaged 36m/s (1m from bow)
38g arrow averaged 35m/s (1m from bow)