Sardinian Warrior

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A broadsword manual, William Wood

from the Internet Archive....


As you can see in the above diagram, the cuts are the same as we teach in class...more or less. His one and two are diagonal downwards, his three and four are diagonal upwards (rather than into the legs), and fives are horizontal instead of vertical. I don't teach horizontal strikes at all since they just slam into the shields and are therefore ineffective.




And this is just to see if you are still playing attention....





A perfect number five parry. Wood calls it a number seven cut.
And of course, like us, he advocates getting the leading leg back as quickly as possible.

Copper leaves

Just before I sent them to be nickel plated.
These life sized leaves take a little more than an hour each to make, and it cost a hundred bucks to have them nickel plated. This is about half of them. In other words, about 1200 dollars worth of leaves. So far.
The copper is actually NOT copper, it is aluminum with a copper coating. I was really nervous about having all my work being rendered useless in the acid baths, but they came out okay. They look like leaves in that pic, and now they look like leaves which have been chrome plated.

Maple leaves, oak leaves and laurel leaves. And I think dandelion leaves.

Hope he likes the results. He is paying me in gift certificates to his restaurant. And it is a VERY nice restaurant! And he is getting a VERY nice mirror!

Grads

Vienna Armour

This is armour in Vienna. I rather like this particular style. I don't like that they painted it all black, but I suppose it protects the metal. I think the armoury made it black on delivery, and judging by the paintings of the era, the customer would then paint it to suit. This is paint, and NOT niello.
Click on the images to enlarge and see the detail.
Salient features might include the total lack of faulds. The long breastplate does not need faulds, they just go straight to multi lame tassets. Though the leg armour looks like it joins neatly into a knee cop, a closer examination merely shows that the cuisse is multi lame, same as the tassets, which gives the impression that they are joined together. Fact is, they cannot join for real...it just won't work.
Another interesting feature of this particular armour is the infil on the gauntlet. I don't think I have ever seen anything like that before. (Just kidding....its a trick of the light...grin!)
The armour has never seen a wheel...the hammer marks are all there.
The spaulders are fairly straightforward Italian style shoulders. Good competent work.

Above, a similar armour as far as faulds and tassets are concerned, however the breast plate treatment is different...instead of the German squared off breast plate top edge (which depends upon a really large gorget underneath!), this one goes up and scoops out at the neck. A beautiful top edge roll is a welcome feature.


What a stunning variation on a standard theme! Those lames in the shoulders...wonderful little scallops. posts in holes attach the tassets to the breast plate....the cotter pins seem to be missing...and check out the inside of those arms! Hundreds of little thin overlapping lames! OMG that would be hard to do! Another kind of interesting feature might be the little vent holes in the spaulder wings. Thats pretty cool, and something I had never seen before.


I think the shoulders are the most interesting part of this armour. The gentle ridge down the outside. Very Italianesque. I suspect that this was built after the Italian Design school went north. I love the cannons, the mobile bicep slides, the three piece articulated elbows with the big wrap around wing.