Making Pauldrons part three

The top part, closest to the neck, ready to be rolled down a bit. I often don't shape these over the anvil in preference to shaping them over the lower ball of the English wheel. This is the old school way, and it seems to work, as the picture below seems to indicate. At this point, the fold is pretty much arbitrary...you try it on your shoulder, and if it sorta works, then fine. It can be fine tuned later.

Above I have dropped a six foot ball into the wheel, and after making lots of dents in the middle section, and then rolling it on the wheel, this is how it came out.

This shows that there is a fairly substantial compound curve in the centre section. I was originally thinking of mounting the haute pieces on this section, but after due consideration, I decided to mount them on the bottom segment of these spaulders. But that comes later.

Below, I have taken the cut and sanded bottom segment of the spaulder, and put a row of hammer dents in the sixteen gauge steel. This will be the first row of many.

Above you can see that there are lots more dents in it now. This armour is a little different in that I will be using two different balls on the English Wheel....a two foot ball on the top and a four foot ball for the part that goes over the shoulder blades and pectoral. I don't usually bother using the ball of a ball peen hammer for this job...I have hammers I have shaped with quite a bit of roundness to the peen, but I like to use the ball for the two foot diameter wheels.

And above, in behind the glare of the flash, you can see the two foot wheel blending out all the ugly old hammer marks. A characteristic of South Tower Armour is that there should be no visible hammer marks from the outside. The wheel will assist in this process. Beats planishing and sanding all hollow in my humble opinion.

And above is the finished piece. Salient design features include asymetry front and back, with the back flange much larger than the chest flange, and the angle formed by the arms is very much angled forward. It is no where near finished, but it looks good. The flanges to line up on the arms have yet to be done (a simple job in the vice, would have beenishin simpler if I had bent the flanges up before dishing the metal, but then there might have been problems in dishing. Six of one half dozen of the other.

Above is the nearly finished piece....you can see the roller marks. Those sand off pretty easily. Below is a lovely nosegay of pieces ready to be assembled together to make the upper part of the shoulder spaulder.

Oh, and before I forget, below is the bashing out of the flange. Clearly making just flanges instead of rolling all the edges would speed this job up remarkably....the flange I pounded out below was done in less than three minutes. A roll would have taken fifteen.