Armour of the Week

click on the images to enlarge.
This is a standard three piece armour set. Although it is really basic, bottom of the line armour, I decided to do some upgrades....I uced better buckles than I was going to use, and I picadilled the armour.
The client specified that he wanted the armour to buckle in front. I don't think that improves the looks of the armour much, but it does make it a little more functional. In the below picture, you can clearly see the rivets which hold the picadills in place. So what are picadills you ask? They are little pieces of leather under the armour which keep the layers of armour from sliding upon themselves. Prevents scratches in the protective finish, and of course, gives rust a bit of a run for the money. They also keep the armour from clanging together when you move...
I also did another couple of things to this armour which are out of the ordinary....I flared the bottom plate of the plackart, and english wheeled the surface into nice fluted shapes in the back.
Looks quite nice in the side light.

Below are the faulds and tassets..The faulds lace onto the breastplate, and the tassets lace onto the faulds. Those eyelets along the top of the top lame in the fauld set below match up with the eyelets on the bottom of the breastplate in the very bottom picture.
Below are tassets which lace onto the faulds above.
Above are the fairly standard tassets, rounded to prevent injury, and eyeletted rather than buckled. The buckles look kind of nice, but the client can do that himself next year when he has some more cash.

And the nice three piece breastplate. I also picadilled the breastplate, so the scratchy surfaces which have plagued my armour all these years might be a thing of the past.

My only real regret is that the picadills, like the tongues of leather under the shoulders, don't really show, yet they take more than an hour to install. So these nice additional touches are all fine and good, and will get me more work, yet they add a lot to the time it takes to make the armour.

The classic battle between quality and price I guess.