Irish Halberds and Daggers

I personally feel that the prettiest weapons in the world are Celtic Bronze Age weapons.  Below are four halberds....these blades are riveted onto the stick so they stick out sideways.  We know the length of the stick by the downward "droop" of the halberd.  

The usual love of the trinity comes out here...a re-occuring motif with trisekelions and such...most weapons of war seem to have been attached to their handles by three rivets.  

 All eight of these weapons are about four thousand years old.  

wow.....

As usual, if anybody wants larger pictures of these for whatever reason, I'll send 'em to you...just email me at marshalbill@gmail dot com 

Spaudlers

Some call these Paulderons.  Interestingly enough, I cannot seem to find a dictionary reference older than about ten years for the word "paulderon", so even though I think these tend to more "pauldron" than "spaudler", I will stick with the word which decribes the shoulder...the "spaude". 
This is the spaudler from the Imperial Museum in Malta, inside views.  Look how narrow they are in the picture below!  

And of course, they look very fancy with their outside edge roping and machine made fluting!

Below is the spaudler I came up with based on measured drawings I made on the ones above.  Very plain, very simple.  They are not designed to be the last word...far from it!  They are designed to prove the design.  These are the first of this design I have ever made.  As far as "proving the design, I am content with it.  There are a lot of details I need to correct in the templates.  

The shoulder dents need to be guided a little closer to the opening.  These shoulder dents are what normally make a piece of armour a "paulderon".  But then I have covered that ridiculous squabble elsewhere. 

and of course I will have to work on my outside rolled edges.  I HATE outside rolled edges...because this one was a sort of prototype, I didn't bother to roll the outside edges.  

 Above you can see the sliding rivets on the rerebrace lames.  I made the sliding barrels too, but got distracted, and have not mounted them on yet.  If I do barrels more often in the future, I have GOT to get a rolling jenny!  Next post, I'll show my sliding barrels.  They are not pretty, but they DO work.  Much to my surprise I might add!

All in all, as far as prototypes go, I am reasonably happy with this experiment.
All of this naturally goes neatly with my post from last year about these spadlers...

http://southtowerarmouringguild.blogspot.ca/2012/04/spadlers.html

Oh, and why do I call them spaudlers instead of spaulders? 
http://www.archive.org/stream/dictionaryofarch02hall#page/780/mode/2up

(actually, I think they are both right, or both equally wrong...English is SUCH a mutt of a language.  I rather like "spawde"...a shoulder in the same reference of obsolete English usage above.  (page 780) The Dungeons and Dragons crowd have made "spaulder" popular, but they apply it to polderons.  I think I should just call these "shoulders!" and be done with it!)

Vienna Armour Museum...a Saddle

 The beautiful saddle above is made of wood, covered with panels of ivory and painted with lapis lazuli paint.  The white looks very pretty against the dark lapis background.  Click on the images to enlarge them.  
      It doesn't look like the world's most comfortable saddle, but it is good enough for a short tour through the town I suppose. Below I have done some closeups of that magnificent saddle.  One could spend an hour just drooling over this one item!  But there are so many more, that all I could do was make a really good picture and analyze it later. 

Below is a closeup of the left side of the saddle horn.  The lizard like shape wrapping around the top is the body and tail of a dragon...whose head is found curling down to the right.  There is another on the right side of the saddle horn.  There is something written on a panel tucked underneath, but between the glass flare and the odd angle, I didn't get it.  To be honest, I had no idea it was there until now!  The Hapsburg shield is on a heavenly wheel...a cheeky reference to the importance of the Emperor!

And St. George with his Dragon.  

And the heavenly hosts down below.  These may be maidens being kept by the dragon for later, but just as easily, they are angels.

Even the bottom plaques are heavily carved...this cherub is tucked into the clouds down at the lower left of the composition.  

A damsel with a head on a stick, hercules with his club, and a couple of grotesques. 

Adam and Eve, and a rampant lion.  

The right hand side of the saddle....showing a little of the wear. 

 Above are the large plaques at the back.  No doubt they are biblical figures....I suspect Christ preaching to St. Jerome, but your guess is as good as mine.

Four figures dancing...a man dancing with a raven, and a woman dancing with a long eared animal with human feet.  The motif is continued the next panel down.  Interesting monsters!

 I am fairly certain we are looking at Hercules with his club...but perhaps we are seeing Sampson pulling down the temple.  Hercules is more likely, except for the lack of the lion headed cape.

Below is a tiger, grooming its cubs, and to the right, a pelican in its piety....hard to see, but the pelican is biting its breast to supply blood for the hungry chicks.  This is a common motif, or I would never have known what it was. 

 And a very fierce dragon up above.  Again, the lettering, and again, I failed to get a good shot at it.

Below, are two very nice and well dressed annunciation angels.  (The sroll in the hand of the top angel is a dead giveaway

And finally, below are an eagle and a unicorn.

I hope you enjoyed the closeup study of these as much as I did.  Again, if you click on them, you go to the gallery, and you can get right back here by clicking "off" the gallery, that is, by clicking elswhere than on the gallery itself.

Article in the Ottawa Sun

 http://www.ottawasun.com/2013/05/11/armoured-delights-vibrant-costumes-grace-comiccon

By Tony Spears ,Ottawa Sun

First posted: Saturday, May 11, 2013 06:47 PM EDT | Updated: Saturday, May 11, 2013 06:54 PM EDT

The Fourth Doctor, easily identifiable by his absurdly-long multi-coloured scarf, waited patiently in line for food ahead of a suspiciously feminine Robin, while the Mad Hatter dabbed relish on his hotdog in the company of a sexy White Rabbit and something purple with a tail.
Ottawa Comiccon burst into its second day on Saturday, packing the Ernst & Young Centre with a crush of colourful characters dressed to impress.
Some were out-of-the-box pre-fabricated costumes, others lovingly crafted.
But by far the best were beaten into being by blacksmith Bill Fedun, a brawny Metcalfe armourer busy strapping sexy dames into burnished steel suits.
“Can you believe it?” he grins through his white beard.
He and his South Tower Armouring Guild have been making custom battle armour for 22 years, and he teaches sword fighting at Algonquin College.
A woman peeps out from the neck piece of one of his creations; Fedun reaches out a hand to retract a piece of metal obscuring her face.
“We wouldn’t want to hide her,” he said.
She’s wearing what he calls “parade armour” — a comparatively light casing of steel “designed to shed arrows.”
“It’s a little light to be used for real combat,” he said.
It’s 18-gauge armour, or about 1/18th of an inch thick.
The more heavy-duty stuff is 16 gauge; a full suit weighs about 110 pounds.
But it’s fantastically mobile, with interlocking plates providing flexibility around the shoulders and elbows.
Fedun, a charmer, pauses to kiss the hand of a young woman asking about chainmail then starts to explain how he crafts a suit of armour.
It takes about 30 days, he says, and it all begins with a sheet of mild steel.
He cuts the shapes he needs based on an ever-evolving set of templates then he takes to a dishing stump — essentially a tree stump with a bowl-like depression — and gets to work.
Hundreds of hammer blows at long last give beautiful contours to what had been just a sheet of metal, and some time on an English wheel — “an iron for metal,” he says — smooths out the surfaces.
Fedun convinces the mild-mannered reporter for a major metropolitan newspaper to try on a chain mail shirt.
It sits heavily on the shoulders, but offers total freedom of movement — certainly more than enough to take notes with.
And they say the pen is mightier than the sword.
Twitter: @ottawasuntonys

Stephan Sejic

This is Stephan Sejic's work.  

 

 

 

This is his web site.  Stephan has conceived some very unusual types of armours.  This one is particularly striking because it seems almost organic...tendons and muscles. 
      It almost looks like I can build this armour...

Click on the image above to enlarge.  Its is worth spending a half hour dreaming and planning how to do it! 

Compare the the best I have done to date.

Yup...lots of room for improvement!

Watch this space...grin!

Apprentice to be an armour maker

A letter to me from a fine young man who wants to become a blacksmith.  Although I think this is a laudable goal, there is a right way and a wrong way to do it.  Often they want to "apprentice" to me.  I have talked to a lot of the old guys, and even at the turn of the last century, apprenticeship meant a lot of different things than it seems to mean to young folks today!  Nowadays, of course, you can take an apprenticeship course at a college to become an electrician, or a sheet metal worker.  Very often the unions get involved.  When you take an "apprenticeship" course in Ontario, you need to take courses to ensure that when you actually show up at a job site, you are worth the electrician's trouble to train you further.  That pretty much means all the "book learning" is behind you before you even darken the door.  Clearly there are no Trade Certifications in armour making!  But, the idea of learning as much as you can before you darken my door is pretty universal!

This is the answer I made to the very understandable request to take on an apprentice...
cut and paste follows.

>How can I say this without sounding like a total dick.  Hmm.  Please bear in mind that I am not as grumpy as I sound in an email.  That I am not mean and nasty at all, and understand totally where you are coming from. I sympathize with your position and understand your needs.  Probably more than you do since I went through this already both when I was learning the trade and several times since with enthusiastic students.  I get a half dozen requests just like yours every year, and to put it mildly, these schemes rarely work out.  So consequently, I have an alternative.  Three of them actually.   I'll get back to that in a bit.  The fact that I am taking an hour of my precious time to answer this email alone shows that I have a great deal of sympathy for your position.


   If you are injured on my premises, I am responsible, so I cannot just point to a pile of steel and say "I want to see a dozen helms built when I get back".  I would come back to a pile of unsaleable junk and a load of broken tools, and likely blood on the floor.   No reflection on you of course...it is what would be expected of an unsupervised individual.
    Working in my shop requires supervision. You can't work unsupervised. You don't give me one hour or labour, I give YOU an hour of supervision. I cannot afford to take three weeks off to further your educational goals, nor can I afford the "changing horses in mid stream" way of working which would be required of me for that three weeks.  When I am supervising the new guy, my production goes from 100% down to about 20%. There are ways to limit this, of course. I could put you to digging over my garden, or trimming cedar hedges, grinding stuff "over there out of my way".  Doesn't sound very much like an educational opportunity to me, and you would rebel rather quickly.  Nor would I blame you. Obviously if there were to be "armouring work" I would utilize a human resource for that first, but then we are getting back to the supervision thing. My helpers are better if they are trained.



  You stated in your letter that you have not communicated your goals correctly.  Thats true.  You have not stated any goals at all except that you want to work in a blacksmith shop and be educated (so far pretty undefined) through osmosis instead of by lecture.  You have not stated any educational goals at all. Did you have a curriculae in mind? I know I do. My curriculae don't involve digging over gardens.

   As I state in my "requirements" on my web site, the "payment in kind" method is the most difficult. How you going to eat?  Pay for a place to stay?  Were you going to pitch a tent or kip down on a cot in the back of the shop? Sleep in your car or your mini van?  These are the devilish details which have collapsed "payment in kind" schemes in the past. These details are supposed to by YOUR problem, but they become mine far too easily.

http://www.southtower.on.ca/armour/Requirements.html

Oh right, I said I had an alternative.  A couple of them actually.

Alternative 1, assumes you already know all this stuff and are just looking for a place to work, say to create your own armour for fighting, in which case, working "in-kind" is a piece of cake.  You look after your own meals and accomodation, and work for me in the morning as a trained helper and on your own in the afternoon.  No lectures, little or no instruction involved, and you can go for as many or as few days as you like.  We do this on Saturdays on a first come, first serve basis already, and I have a shift worker who drops in during the week building an armour worthy of a museum.  This is a method which is favored by people who have had my lecture series or are already fully trained in metalwork. Self guided and beautiful armours result.  This method has a history of success.

Alternative two...  Assumes you don't know squat about how to work sheet metal and don't know the difference between a tippet and a tasset.  But you want to learn all there is to learn about making armour from sheet metal.  Find a grand somewhere, take my lectures.  Work in your field, build armours. Refine your skills as an armours' helper, and then as a full fledged armourer. Make yourself into a person who is useful.
     The question of whether I would have a grand worth of work around the estate would be a serious question.  It would depend upon my plans for the spring, and whether there is sufficient work on the estate to justify taking on a hand for a couple of weeks.  That would be two weeks of doing stuff possibly not related to armour making.  This was your idea....and as you can see, it is fraught with difficulties.  I see problems...not solutions. But, it IS an option.

Alternative three.  You don't know squat about how to work sheet metal, and you don't give a hoot about armour or history, but you figure the skills you learn here will be applicable elsewhere.  Find a grand, take my lecture series, and then work here or anywhere else you fancy.  Build your own workshop.  Make stuff. Take the skills you learn here and build cars or motorcycles or airplanes.  You would need your own shop for that because mine is solely dedicated to making armour.  This is an excellent choice.  By not depending on me to find you work, it goes much more smoothly.


    There is pretty much no way to work in-kind as payment for a lecture series.  They take six days to complete and take at least that much more for me to prepare.  You don't get one-on-one instruction...you are in there with two or three other people. On MY schedule.  During that time, the only thing I will be creating is an armour maker.   This lecture series is a prerequisite for working in my shop.



http://www.southtower.on.ca/armour/metalworker%27s_test.txt


Well, I could go on and on, but this should give you something to think about.

Bill Fedun
Armour Maker

These two separate helms from Austria are worth the time to examine, in only to clearly get an idea of the "form" of a real helmet.  They are salets with visors of course, very heavy ten guage or heavier, though it is a little hard to see that from behind the glass!
        These helms are for jousting.  The wearers were up on a horse.  Way up there.  Take a look at the second picture...how narrow the frontage is.  How narrow the eye slot is.  How sharp and defined a keel it has.
         What can we learn from this?  Well, among other things, we can learn that any serious impact on the "nose" would rock the helmet up.  Pushing the helmet back would cover the eye slot. 
         But.
         A more over riding question would of course be "Why have two parts, a top part (salat) and a bevor.  Would this not risk a lance head being shoved under the helmet?" Well, when you consider that they would employ a Grande Guard to prevent that eventuality (sometimes), they clearly didn't worry themselves about it too much.
         My thinking is that they were prepared to lose the salad if it got hit hard enough...better to lose the armour than to break your neck.  But that does not explain the popularity of a helmet form which you can get a lance head under!
         I may have to revisit this line of thinking...perhaps some of my readers have an idea or two on the subject.


 Oh, and the one below?  Well, I just had to include the most beautiful helm in the collection!  Click on it to see it in all its glory!

"plain" breastplate

  

This "simple" breastplate is a very serious piece of armour.  The only pointless decoration on it is that fancy fan out in front.  But piercing is a nice decorative touch, there is no etching or other silly fripperies as a part of this piece.  

It is in Austria, and part of the collection there, it is generally considered to be "Gothic" on the basis of its fluting and pierce work.  Closer examination reveals it to be more Burgundian than German, the flutes are not s deep as is generally found in German work, and the fancy dented safety rolls are positively Belgian!  Sliding rivets allow this armour to tuck under the pot belly. Often there is a "turn in" at the top of the placquart which makes it look thicker than it is...this feature is totally lacking.

  

The more you look at this piece of kit, the more things you can learn from it.  Salient points might include the deep pot belly, the lack of a keel, the ninety degree out turn at the neck. 

This was a sort of "erratic", an unlabeled piece of armour in the Austrica Museum.  One could do worse than to make armour like this.   

This armour was better seen from the side like this.

Roman Vienna Tools

 Vienna was once a Roman City.  Water came in aquaducts from the Vienna Woods, and boats cruised up the Danube River.  A large city grew up here.  The Roman city is still here, albeit pretty much underneath the present city. Since this is an armouring blog, I thought I would post some of the pictures of the tools which were used by those Romans far away!

Above a Fransica style curved axe, paired with a mattock.  The axe might have been a war weapon, though I doubt it, but it IS a little small to be a hatchet.  The hatchet below is more what I think of when I think of a hatchet.  The swept lines of the "beard" are a joy to behold!
      Click on the pictures to embiggen them, of course.  Feel free to download them and use them in your own collection. 

Below shows the very modern looking needles, and stuff for net making.  The antler shows all the wear one would expect from a career of net making.  

Below, a knife with a VERY robust tang.  Roman knives are almost never so robust, so this little knife was made for very heavy jobs.    The chisels we use today for cutting and shaping stone look exactly the same as the wide bladed one below!

Another mattock.  This one as well was made from iron, and therefore could not have been cast...the Romans never cast iron.  But this is a pretty heavy lump of iron!  Remember, iron was much more valuable then than now.

This beautiful adze is an absolute work of art! I wondered about that spine on the top face for some time, until I realized that the re-enforcing spine you can so clearly see does not come even close to the actual cutting edge.  

Templar Video Game Armour

 click on the picture to badassenize.  

This was an email from Rico.....wants me to consider making the armour in the above pic.
Fascinating idea.

But problematic.  Could I MAKE such an armour?  Well, maybe....its not that spectacularly difficult.  Elaborate though. 

 By the way, you can get these pictures in a much larger size suitable for computer wallpaper here...

 Rico met me at Fan Expo, and this was was he emailed me...  I have juggled them to put the oldest at the top....
I dunno.  Any armour makers out there think I over quoted?    Should I get into this world?  That is to say, does anybody think there is a future in it?   I figure by the time I built this armour, it would be as obsolete as Gimli's helm in LOTR.    It would be old news rather quickly.  Or maybe not.  Any feedback? 



Quoting Rico
Hi Bill.  This is Gxxxxx.  We met at FanExpo2012.  I showed you the Templar

Knight Statue from the Hellgate London videogame.  How are you?  Can you
please give me a price and delivery on how much a full suit would cost,
and
what material you would make it out of?

How far is Metcalfe from Downtown Toronto?

Thanks  

Gxxxxx

On Tue, Sep 4, 2012 at 5:23 AM, William Fedun wrote:

Hellgate London is currently owned and distributed by HanbitSoft and
NAMCO.  It was originally published by Flagship Studios, and because
Flagship Studio is defunct, some people seem to think that copyright
regulations have lapsed.  They have not, HanbitSoft owns them through their
development studio in SanFransisco, Redbana.

Back in 2008, they released this report...

"(1) HanbitSoft is an exclusive licensee of both Hellgate and Mythos in
Asia, with rights to sublicense the games; (2) in addition, HanbitSoft is a
secured creditor who has been pledged the Mythos (but not the Hellgate)
intellectual property as collateral for a loan; (3) Comerica, another
secured lender, has been pledged the Hellgate intellectual property as its
collateral for a loan; (4) Flagship Studios does not currently own the
intellectual properties to either game, which are held in separate
companies subject to the security interests of lenders, and Flagship
Studios’ interest in those companies is also pledged to its lenders; (5) it
is unfortunate that Flagship turned down additional investments HanbitSoft
offered to make that would have allowed it to keep its doors open, but
HanbitSoft hopes to work with Comerica and some of the team at Flagship to
see if there is a way to continue to generate content to keep Hellgate
online in Asia and to finish the development of Mythos."]

Clearly now, we would have to contact HanbitSoft's attournies to obtain a
licence to build an armour based on their intellectual property. Since they
are in Korea, this may prove to be problematic.

http://hg.hanbiton.com/Home/**Home.aspx<http://hg.hanbiton.com/Home/Home.aspx>

Such licensing fees may be cheap, or expensive, depending on many factors.
You must obtain a licence before I can make this armour.



A suit this large would require a design work-up out of cardboard.
Several fittings later, we would have the first of many collections of
templates.

  Then the second step is to make the individual pieces out of steel.
This is the design test stage, which is used to modify the templates.
This is still part of the alpha design, and none of the steel is actually
used in the final product.  (edges are not finished, hammer marks are not
removed, etc.)

The third step is to fit it to you, the wearer.  This will require
modification of sizes and dimentions, and a decision on materials.  A
jouster would require heavy stainless steel and an actor would require
light aluminum for instance. Material selection will have an effect on the
time it takes to do this work.  Factors used in materials selection would
depend upon how much maintenance you would be prepared to do...aluminum
will be forever denting.  Steel will be forever rusting. This third step is
the final set of cardboard templates.

The forth step is the simple one...actually MAKING the armour. This would
be a beta version and might well require some modifications to keep it from
pinching you or otherwise render it unsuitable.  Such modifications will
allow me to deliver a serviceable package.

And then there are the license fees.  There were representatives of NAMCO
at Fan Expo, keeping an eye on costumes and making sure that nobody was
ripping off their work.  They don't care about one person doing themselves,
but they REALLY care about a company such as me making them for sale to
somebody else.

I could make you a perfect templar armour exactly like the one in the
video game out of steel for twenty to twenty two thousand dollars.  (plus
licensing fees of course.) The second one would be a lot less (about seven
thousand including helmet)  of course.  The work to accomplish this task
would take me five to six months of shop time.

Bill Fedun
Armour Maker

Quoting Rico

OK Bill.  Thanks for replying to my inquiry.  I'll see about getting the
license for the armour.  This may take some time and I'm not sure if I'll
be successful.  I'll let you know.

You seem to really know armour, and the quality of your work is amazing.
You're definitely at the top of my list.

How far is Metcalfe from Brampton?

Thanks again.

Gxxxxxxx


Easier to build you a car.....

Less complicated!

As you can see by my reply that I took this question seriously.  However, I suspect that there must be a reason why you would want to get such an armour.  A car...you can use to get around.  An armour?  An actor would need it as part of his job.  A jouster would need it as part of his job or hobby.  Advertising companies need armour to make movies or adverts.  I fear that this project may fall on the fundamental problem that there is actually no real use for it in real life.

OTOH, there is no real use for purebread horses, yet people get them anyways.  Oh well.  Let me know how the license hunt is going.

Bill