Viking Spear / Javelin Vs 15th Century Breast Plate!

And I'm here with the Medieval Shoppe javelin head, Viking spearhead, and what we're going to do today is we're going to test it on a 15th century breastplate. I have it mounted as a regular spear would be on a long shaft or long pole. It's approximately, I would say, 8 foot, a little over 8 foot long. I can barely reach up here and put my finger where the rivet should be. There's actually a saga that states that's how long a spear should be or that they were using at the time period. So this would be actual length. This type of spearhead does not have the crooks on it. It's not the big broad-bladed spear for cutting. This is a pure thrusting, if you were using it as an actual spearhead, a pure thrusting retrieving spear so it doesn't get hung up easily. It doesn't have a lot of utility as a two-handed spear for hooking on shields and stuff. But that's a lot of speed you've got there and a lot of recovery. So what I want to see is how well it pierces that breastplate. I know this is not something you'd normally be doing. So people out there saying do not stab a breastplate, stab at an itch, yes, that's what you should be doing. But we had good results with the Iron Age Celtic spear, made out of modern steel but high grade quality from an Eagle shop. And even one of Neil Burrage's middle-age bronze spears was able to pierce that breastplate almost as well as the Celtic spearhead, but the Celtic spearhead was very broad. So I want to try this today. The narrow taper it has, I think it will have a lot better chance of piercing deeper. So let's get started. I'm going to go ahead and try that again. Just not quite as deep as what I was expecting from the other video on the other polearms or the other spears. But it's still able to pierce the metal. This is extremely thick gauge metal. We're talking about around 14 gauge, around 15, 14 gauge. So that's not bad. Slightly hardened. Actually making it to the padding underneath. Much deeper piercing. I think we have a much deeper piercing. That's more like what I was expecting. And no, you're not going to get deep through this type of breastplate. This thing is around 15 gauge, between 14 and 15 gauge. It was hand hammered and slightly hardened. So for me to be able to get through this shows the spear is of good quality. But it also shows that I'm getting enough acceleration from the overarm throwing slide. It's almost like throwing a javelin at the man. Would this kill him? No. But we were mostly doing this as a test. It's the spear against the plate to see what would happen. And technically if I were going to try to kill this man, I would have aimed under the armpit if I could get in and try to get him in an off angle. I would have aimed to try to get up under the mail. I would have tried to do something else. Aim for his, this guy's heavily armed. No one in the Viking Age would have fought anybody like this. But I would have aimed for the eye slit. Anything that I could hit. I would have aimed for his breastplate. This is just to show what would happen if you tried to go through a breastplate of this caliber. And that's a pretty decent piercing. I swear, it went into the actual cloth that I have under the padding. And we dented it in. If you look at the shape of this now, the denting is extreme compared to what it was. So he's actually caving in the metal and piercing the metal. I'll have to resharpen the tip. I'm going to be honest, this does do a lot to the edge. But this was a fun video. I hope you all enjoyed it. I think you got your little shield bearer coming up. Was that good or not? The last one was pretty good, right? Yeah. Alright, I couldn't leave it just at that. Normally, I try to show the extreme reach of the throwing slide. And honestly, you don't even have to slide it to get an extreme reach. If you do the actual pivot of the hip properly and throw the arm out with the throwing motion, you don't need the body to push the spear through. The acceleration is much more extreme at that point where you normally release the spear. If you want to allow the slide, you can allow the slide. But it does reduce the amount of power. So in this one, we don't want a full slide. But we do want maximum reach and maximum range of motion. And it dawned on me that I was standing a wee bit close because I was afraid of glancing on the front of the breastplate. The last test we did were on the back of the breastplate, which made it much easier to get a square on shot. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to try a little bit further range and see if I can get more range of motion and more of that throwing into the spear to see if we can get a deeper penetration. So let's get going and see what happens. Let's see what we've got here. It's piercing. We've got another one. It looks a lot the same as this one. This may be all we can do with the spear. But I wanted to give it a little more reach and see if I could get a deeper penetration. I might try one more time. I don't know. Looks a little deeper and better than the other one, actually. Ooh, we got another one. And instead of shitting a brick this time, it decided to ---- a blanket. Yeah, I think it did. But we got another one about the same. It looks like that's about where we're going to get with this. I was thinking maybe a little deeper because of the shape, but maybe the shape doesn't have as much to do with it as it would seem. This is a very tough breastplate. These are extremely wide, almost an inch or so. So this is pretty impressive. And I did get a little more reach with the technique, but like I said, you don't want to do the full slide, because the full slide will slow it down because you're slowing the spear and controlling it with the hand. So basically I'm throwing this into the target without it leaving my hand is what I'm doing. I hope you all enjoyed the powerful spear thrusting here, the overarm throwing slide. And I think it shows the spear is of high quality, and it did its job. It actually pierced this, even though that's not what it was intended to do. I hope you enjoyed the episode, and farvel.