A few months ago I took a class on building and using atlatl from the school www.Practical Primitive.com.  It was an all day class on the Atlatl.  I was amazed at this weapon.  The simplicity in making it was only rivaled by its power.  We each made our own atlatl and then used "practice" darts.  Basically 4-5 foot pieces of bamboo with no tip and duct tape fletching.  You would not believe the distant we were launching these darts, at least as far as an arrow with a bow.  Keep in mind these were not practice darts.  A well designed and made dart would have went farther.  Throughout our practice one of us hit a wooden fence post (about 4"x4") the blunt dart knocked a chunk of wook from the post.  This was from a distance of about 25-30 yards.  There is definitely some power behind the atlatl.  My accuracy was terrible but this was my first time with an atlatl by the end of the day I could hit the foam deer targe from about 20 yards.  I am more comfortable with the bow because I have used one a lot more, but I definitely do not short change the atlatl.  Think of the bow as an arrow launcher and the atlatl a spear launcher.  I will try and get a picture up of the atlatl I made.

Here's some pics of the atlatl I made.  I still need to get the wood stained.

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That's a very interesting atlatl you got there Sharpdogs! Never seen one quite like that  before.

walter

very nice, sharpdogs! why don't you post that in the 'let's see your atlatl' thread.

theres another point, atlatls can be made extremely fast and still very deadly. as far as i know, it takes a while to make a good bow beacuse of seasoning the wood, and i dobt a bundle bow will beat an atlatl

my cousin did make light metal arrows with holes along the length (the holes were shaped in a paricular way) but the effect when fired into a dead cow was horrific the holes were filled with flesh and it acted like a cheese grater. For use against a person with light or no armour it would be devistating the head of the arrow was shaped so as to be hard to remove and as it was hollow quite a bit of blood pumped out of the end. Now the point to all that was being metal albeit some light metal it traveled a drasticly shorter distance than a normal arrow, if a similar atlatl dart was made then the increased power behind it would probably make this a viable design. But the dart may need to be shortened.

I thought once about the oscillation of the atlatl dart that it has so much amplitude that I can imagine that it's point at massive penetration would cut in zigzag.Would this be possible?