Sgt P.s Armour

click on the images to enlarge. This is Sgt. P.'s armour...its a little skinny for me, but I think I am bulkier than he is. These go over a breast and backplate, and may need to be squashed or tugged into position a bit when he finally gets to wear it and see how it fits. Should not need too much modification however.
In this picture you can see how it articulates.

Above is a good view of the shoulder. I rather like the look. Obviously, some more work has to be done on the basic shapes, but this is functional, will work well and doesn't look too bad. Since this picture has been taken, the points on the lower spaulders have been truncated to match the back. I just rushed to get this picture taken while there was still some light.

Upon reflection, the bottom lame, the one at the elbow, might be a bit long. Though of course, its primary purpose is to hold the elbow cop. On the other hand, it is easier to shorten the leather holding the lames than it is to lengthen them. I will have to see how they fit him when he has them on before drilling out the leather rivets for a final fitting. But that fitting job is part of the contract, and will needs to be done.
This is the back wing. You can see the roll around the top edge where it goes up against the neck, but I gave up on that big outside roll down towards the arm and did a nice flare instead.

Lots of work with the english wheel, lots of hammering, and some funny leathering allow this armour to articulate well, fan together in front when he makes a strike, and all in all, work as a functional spaulder.

The black armour from Prague Castle

click on the images to enlarge.
above we see a detail of the sabotons. 8 lames in the soles mean this fellow would be able to walk just fine! I personally love the 4 lames at the ankles. This is a very sophisticated armour!
The knee cops are, well, competent. They are a sort of standard four lame knee cop which, like the rest of the armour, has been fire coloured black, and then gilded. I am sure the gilding added a lot to the price of this otherwise quite plain jousting armour. I am a little surprised about the thigh armour....these are articulated cuisses! Go figure! Never saw those before! Must have made the armour really comfortable to wear. The long articulated tassets are representative of that period of history. They stopped wearing the big faulds since of course, the lames were too delicate to withstand the impact of the joust lances, and the smaller tassets, in addition to being more comfortable, were less expensive to replace after tourney season.

The mitten gauntlets. I think I have made just the same sort of mitten gauntlet! This is for the rein hand, and uses straps across the palm to hold everything in place. This is a departure for this period and location since the standard was to have a leather gauntlet made with flanges onto which the gauntlet pieces were riveted. This very common mitten gauntlet works well for the left hand since it really does not need delicate fingers to hold onto the reins.

Thank you Pierre for this picture. Great stuff.

Pictures from Prague

Pierre took these pictures from his visit to Prague Castle. This is the biggest castle in Europe, and the armour is really quite interesting. It looks too new though! Maybe it is just being really well kept! click on the pictures to enlarge.


The above picture has in the foreground a couple of really pretty dog faced bascinets. And lower down a couple of the morions which became popular in the renaissance. These are northern European morions, and they don't have the little tag at the top, but the one on the left has a comb, and the one on the two lower down on the right are the tall "high hat morions" that must have taken a smith an uncounted age to make. The lower one has a flat brim. Very unusual.
The three bottom helms are clearly jousting helms....those very narrow eye slots. These are the helms you usually see on coats of arms, and is the helm which is assigned to an esquirry. The bottom helm is also a jousting helm, but there is something interesting going on in back of it! Maybe you get into it by opening the back.

Any single one of these helms is worthy of extensive discussion....we can only happily look at them and think about the times they would have had to wear these!

The top three are "spectacle helms", and they look like spinnings. You can even see the horizontal tool marks from the spinning tool in the middle one! I love the way the sides draw upwards on the sides of the skull in one big swoop! Wonderful! The little lathe turned spikes are kind of cool...one wonders why they bothered....but hey, it makes the wearer look tough, and maybe that was the point.

The nasal helms all down the right are clearly hammered out from stock of some kind. The hammer welds are really good, which implies they are actual iron, rather than the modern steel. The Norman Helm (second from bottom on the right) seems to still have a leather chin strap hanging off it. That would have to be a more or less modern addition since it is unlikely that leather would have lasted some 900 years! I like the shape of the nasals though....very nicely done.

On the left appears to be a grilled face Roman inspired Norman Helm. That mongrel would require closer examination. I have never seen anything like it. Again, it appears to be built upon a spinning, with some decorative brass spangens.

The middle bottom helms are clearly Helms...designed to fit over top of a helmet. They don't need to be pretty to be functional! These are battle helms, and would have been used in battle, not the joust.

SUNY Demo 08

I was not fighting at this demo, but I thought my readers might like to see the range of armours being used by the SUNY medieval club. Lots of good action. Check out the catapult in the background!

After Plating

And there we go. Not the best looking scabbards in the world, but then, you can't put metal back after it is gone! Hopefully this will be good enough from ten feet away. Most of the damage you still see is on the part of the sword you really can't see because it is between the sword and the wearer's pant leg.

This is the best work I have ever done. Doesn't look like much does it?

Finished swords.

Having a heck of a time with this repair job. A couple of posts down, you saw how bad the scabbard was bent....it was smashed flat, perhaps by a horse stepping on it.
Now after 20 hours of labour, this is the result. Not perfect, but ready for plating.
I don't normally nickel plate big pieces like this....my tanks are too small, and so it is simply better to just have them plated by the professional plating companies. Unfortuantely, this week, the snow load destroyed the building the professional was in, and I had to step lively to retrieve this job from the wreckage. No further damage, but today, I have to repolish the pieces and send them to yet another plater.
Frustration does not begin to describe the feelings at this time.

Kenjuitsu Grad

A fine group of graduates! This was the spring kenjuitsu class, with Jean Vaillancourt in the centre, surrounded by his crew. I was the assistant instructor and got to hold the camera.

Coralie's Armour redux

This is not looking too bad. David takes really good pictures, and these are his work. (You can see Coralie and David in the picture below.)
There is still shoulders, arm harness, tassets, leg armour, and a host of other things that need to be done. But Coralie is really keen, and a dedicated worker, so she will get it all done with only minimal input from me.

Plant Bath Rec Centre Grad

Bryan--Vincent--Elisabeth--Pierre--Coralie--Katherine--David
Joel---Bill---Shayne---Kim

The Plant Bath Rec Centre is a City of Ottawa facility rebuilt on the site of the old 1901 "natatorium". They kept the delightful brick facade, but installed a real modern pool in an addition in back, and the gym where we work out (and took this picture) is actually built over the old pool. We are taking a break for a week, then going into a fabulous advanced session for the spring season. Should be great fun!

Shoulder Armour...Malta-Milan

Rare to get a look at the inside of the armour! Here you can see the fluting and decoration which goes into this general issue shoulder armour. Points to note is the narrow shoulders...the way the front actually goes inwards, and the back is larger to accomodate a flexed shoulder muscle...such as when you are fighting. The rerebrace goes all around the upper arm, you have to slide your arm into this armour like putting on a shirt. Also note the stunning roped edge. Often there are holes that used to hold picadills...those leather chafe guards which keep the edges from wearing grooves in the breastplates. And come to think of it...in the roped edges of the rather more expensive shoulder spaulders.

You can see the articulations really well in this inside shot! There are two lames, the top one of which laces onto the gorget, a large piece which has those nice generous wings, and four lames which lap down the outer arm to a highly decorated rerebrace ring. Note especially the high raised ring which goes all around the armour....the bottom part of the rerebrace would fit into that, and the two pieces would turn inside one another. You can see the mechanism better in the pic below.

The spaulders in the picture above still have the top and bottom of the rerebrace ring functional and serviceable. I particularly like the flute down the outside of the arm, and the fancy file work at the middle of each bottom piece. The filework "makes" this style of armour.

Swords

These pictures are of one sword which has taken me a whole week to fix. The bell needed to be totally stripped of nickel plate, dents and scratches sanded away, the incised designs needed to be deepened, and the whole bell was polished, ready for plating. That was a long, but fairly straightforward job. The scabbard is of course, a little more interesting, in that it was badly damaged. We suspect a horse stepped on it. The scabbard is steel, with brass tips, drags, and ring holders.


The above two pictures are of the left side of the sword, and you can see the deep crease, (deep enough to interfear with the sword inside!) and a totally unwarranted scratch in the plating. The nickel has done its job of protecting the steel though....no rust, and because it is harder than the steel, it seems to have shrugged off a lot of abuse. At this stage, I have laid it out on the bench, and am selecting which of the several irons I will have to use to get those deep dents out.

This is the right side of the scabbard. There are two major dents in it, and a lot of wrinkled metal. Sometimes things look less damaged in real life than they look in the photographs, but no...these dents look just as bad when you have them in front of you. The metal in the higher crease, that is, the one closer to the bottom of the picture, is almost bent double.

Here I have placed my tools all together just to give some scale to the job. Tomorrow, I'll post a few pictures of what they look like after the first 20 hours of work to bring these swords back to life.

Graduation Advanced CS March 08

This is Bill carefully describing the sequence to yet another nasty trick...this one involves pushing the pommel over the shield, and placing it on the opponent's shoulder. The next part is the "step through", as I step to my opponent's right side. The sword will slide around in front. Looks nasty, because it is. The attacker had better step lively though since there are way too many openings in his defence to hang about.

And here we have the fine looking graduating class. Marcus, Jay, Andrew, John, Dan, Karen and Ian.

And me and Shayne in the front of course.

Graduation Class

click on the image to enlarge.

This was the March 2008 graduation of the Basic Chivalrous Swordhandling class at Algonquin College. A fine group of warriors.

The basic class is a course created by Jean V. and myself, and Shayne D. (on my left) has been "in" on it from the beginning, and this class has had an unprecedented three instructors for every class since. We teach 2 hours per night for 8 nights, the first half is all Kenjuitsu, the second half is all Chivalrous Swordhandling. We have the best "retention" rate of any general interest class, and have graduated well over 500 students in the last few years.

The basic Chivalrous Handling class is a prerequisite for the Advanced Chivalrous swordhandling class, and the advanced Feudal Kenjuitsu class, each of which run at the same time as the Basic classes, but of course, on separate nights. The advanced courses are a bit more techniques intensive, with a lot more drills, and a lot more sparring. The "Basic CS" is a lot more fun...all fundamentals and straightforward techniques, no philosophy, no history. We occassionally bring in armours and swords for a show and tell session, and it provides a perfect introduction to the skill involved in handling a sword.
Note that we don't teach sword "fighting"! The fighting comes within yourself. I don't believe that I can teach you how to fight, but I CAN teach you how to handle the sword with grace and skill, avoiding dangerous muscle and tendon pulls, and how to be light on your feet.

The Last Samurai

The back story of "the Last Samurai" (the movie that is) is quite right....the Emperor of Japan, a young and progressive individual wanted to do many things, including modernizing the military. This involved an upset in the status quo which was great fodder for a movie. The part where delegations from Japan went all over the world looking for really good military training cadres is accurate enough....they went to America, Italy, Germany, England, and to France. France was the country they eventually chose to guide their army into the 20th century.


A delegation from Japan arrived in Malta sometime in the middle of the 19th century, and as part of a general gift exchange, the Japanese donated a pair of Samurai armours to the collection in the Palace Armour.

I had seen pictures of the Palace Armoury during the latter half of the 19th century, and the museum was upstairs, in the sunlight, where the members of parliament meet now instead of downstairs in the damp stables, and the samurai armours were proudly displayed along side the Wigancourt Suits and suits of armours from Grand masters and infantry men alike.

World War II had a great effect on a lot of musums all over Europe, and much of the material which was stored upstairs was hastily crated and stored in safe places all over the island. In the general re-building and confusion of the post war period, these samurai suits were overlooked, and to make matters even more difficult, Malta became a republic only 20 years later, and they needed a parliament. The old Imperial Palace was perfect...the Governor General was sent packing, and the armour which had not been unaccoutably given away, or was not needed as statuary was sent downstairs into the stables to form a shadow of the great Palace Armour Musum which existed in the last century. And the process of looking for, and finding bits and pieces of the armours began. Some were in excellent shape. Some were in deplorable shape. But there is still lots of bits and pieces of armours stashed away in people's basements, and some of which has been lost for years.

In the mid '90s, Mr. S, the curator found these Samurai Suits, and was aghast at the damage which half a century of poor storage had done to them. All that is left are one helmet, and the fragments of the armour you see in the pictures above. It is actually not quite as bad as it looks, clearly the silk is crumbling (it would have done that even in good storage conditions) and the neat hexagonal silk sewn plates are as delicate as can be. Rust has penetrated the protective paint, causing it to bubble and blow off the thick patterned lacquer.

I won't talk about each of these pieces in detail, rather, I suggest you click on the pictures, enlarge them, and perhaps think of this as a sort of "grey's anatomy" of the japanese armour making craft.

Ron B. helm

Nice simple Viking helm. I used old steel, which looks IMHO kind of antique-ish. I like the effect. The template is a standard one I have used for years, and normally the occulars project outward more than this. Without the fancy shaping then, the corners stick up like horns. A horned Viking helmet at last? Nah...thats just the way it turned out. Its got me thinking though of making the sides into wings maybe. Why not...I have deviated from "period" plenty already.


I fire coloured the skull....it came out this nice deep rich blue colour. In the sunlight, it is VERY striking.

Not much to see here on the inside, except of course for the welding. This was made by cutting the bowl in half, and welding each half together. One thing is sure, this is a very strong helm. You can see the thickness of the steel really well in this picture.

Once upon a time, the top had a bead of weld on it just like the underside. A lot of judicious use with the side grinder, and it all ends up coming up smooth. In fact, you have to turn it over to see that it has been welded. And no, this is NOT my welding...this was a professional up the road that welded that. I just grind the weld nice and clean and flat, and look for voids.

And a nice shot of this armour from the top quarter.

I am not quite sure yet how to finish this armour. It is a real helmet...that is, it is strong enough to soak up a hit from a baseball bat without denting, but it might yet need some flaring at the base of his neck, and maybe some chain maile hanging from the occular (spectacle looking mask) Hanging chain mail will mean lots and lots of little evenly spaced holes in the occular, so I made it nice and wide on purpose.