Reginald's suit

Here is Reginald's suit. It has very clean lines, and the pecs are sculpted in. Well made from sixteen gauge cold rolled steel.
You can see the thousands of hammer marks which remain even after the irons have rolled them out. The marks by this point don't exist as "marks" but rather variations in surface texture. If I was to paint it at this point you would not be able to see a single hammer mark.

As you can see, Reginald is a very fit and solid individual...he has a barrel chest and a reasonably slim waist. The chest is easily pulled out or pushed in as required if Reginald desires to wear padding underneath the armour or not.

The back is pretty. See how I shoved it up a bit...there is plenty of room for mobility.

Nothing fancy, just simple curves. But it IS made from 16 gauge steel.
From here, things are going to get a little more interesting since Reginald is actually not getting me to make medieval armour at all, but rather an interesting personal design.

More as I make it....

Armour finished.

click on images to enlarge.
This is the new brass. Looks not too bad...I think it took about 4 hours all in all. But I think it was worth the trouble....it really makes the armour look nice.

Here is a nicer pic of the armour...with ME in the picture. As you can see, I am a little bit shorter than the client. And there are picadills behind the tassets and behind the faulds as well.

Not too bad...those oxblood straps really set the armour off well. That red lace. hmmm. Must tuck that away. The big round buckles are "home made", while the centre strap, buckle and lion are "off the shelf". I might let the outermost buckles on the tassets out one hole, allow them to hang more straight down.

The back has more than enough room for expansion...the client will cut down the straps when he sizes it to him. Right now, they are, like, way too long. But better long than too short.

The back is a little lighter than the front, not much, just a shade, and it has a high gloss lacquer finish on it. The shadow lines turned out really well. And of course the top tabs need to be bent down a bit.

So I can call this portion of the job finished.

Kelly and Erik W's Armour

Above is Erik's gorget, all lined with foam and strapped up.

From the back you can see the difference in this gorget....because it goes under what amounts to a poncho, I had to make the back a lot longer. If it is too long, well, that can be trimmed off.

From the side, you can see the nice keyhole locking mechanism. The keyhole just keeps everything neatly in place, the belt is what holds it nice and tight.

The leather body armour is based on an armour dug out of a trench on the site of the battle of Wisby. It is leather, with steel plates. I don't like this armour much....it is hard to make it look nice, and because of the ridiculous price of leather, it is often more expensive than steel of the same coverage. For some reason (that reason being that it can be made in your basement apartment with minimal tools) it is popular with the SCA, larpers and such medieval organizations that don't use live steel. We know a real sword will go right through this armour because, well, we have the original with the skeleton still inside, with a severed spine.

The original was cobbled together in a real hurry...which although period, doesn 't make it right. When you take your time with this armour, it has the potential to look, well, not so bad. Even downright good. And make sure you use good quality fasteners (the copper rivets are period and look SO much better than the modern two part dome rivets being used for (ha ha) medieval-like armour.

Erik is lucky...I found a nice piece of Italian top grain cowhide which was destined to become a couch but was probably considered to be too heavy. It is a nice ripe plum colour on the outside, and is tough as nails. Such a deal doesn't come by every day! Normally a piece of leather like that would set you back a couple of hundred dollars....this one was half that. And no, the leather used is not period...this leather is much tougher than period leather.

There is no secret to how to lay out the plates inside the armour, and I don't mind showing the world how it is done. SCA regulations demand overlapping plates all down the spine, and overlapping sideways around the kidneys. The key, I guess, would be to ensure that all the plates are properly rounded on their corners, and all the sharp burrs are sanded off. This is the step normally skimped on by the basement armourers, and is the source of the majority of scars and cuts caused by this armour. Note that every single plate is rounded, and painted to prevent rust from coming off onto your clothes.

The bottom edges are simply scalloped...Erik may want to stiffen these scallops to prevent them from curling....some people do that.

So, even though I don't normally like making such simple armour, I found, as I got into it, that it was not so bad. Careful alignment of the holes for the belt attachments and a good choice of buckles and straps results in a pretty good looking armour. I would be proud to have a man (or woman) wearing such armour on my team.

Pauldrons part 5

This is the finished pauldron, now all that is left is the lames. See the blue templates? Most important part of a job like this is to keep templates in order. Make changes to them depending on what you find out about each job. The copper rivets attach to leather belts on the inside, whose purpose is to limit the movement of the three sections.

Here is a good view of the spaulder. In the forground is the front part, goes over the chest. It is more narrow than the back part.

And you can see how it falls forward to match the shoulder ball.

Above is another view of the same thing....the shoulder is not symetrical front to back. It took months to figure out exactly how to make these pauldrons, and several beta tests. Actually, this will be the second set I am making after all the templates were corrected. (and not surprising, I did a slight mod on this template this time too!) The other pauldrons you have seen on these pages have actually been those test pieces. It looks like I should get that fence onto the anvil and straighten out the top edge...grin!

Above is a close up of the fence where it is attached to the pauldron. I just followed the line of the bottom section of the pauldron. The rivets were tricky...I had to counter sink them on the back so that they didn't scratch up the middle section.

Above I am installing the "top lame" which actually is not a lame at all, but a sort of "fake lame" which gives some shadow line to the joint where the arms attach. It is pretty rigid, what with the three rivets holding it in place. It should also provide a bit more rigidity at a point which will get hit a lot.

The bottom lame looks like this. I rolled the inside edge so that Charles can bend his arm without cutting up his biceps. The long part drips down almost to the elbow.

And this is how they will look when I assemble them all together. Some leather on the inside, and these will be ready to attach to the pauldron.

Making Pauldrons part 5

The first step is of course, like making any armour, is to lay out the pattern on cardboard. In this case I am using a file folder. It is the perfect weight, cuts easily, and is easy to mark. The first line below was made by laying the shoulder piece onto the card stock, and tracing the bottom edge. Then I traced a larger circle with my compass...that would be the red line.
But wait...there's more. There has to be a way to attach the fence (or haute piece) to the armour, so I created tabs. These tabs will bend 90 degrees, and will be used for riveting the haute piece onto the pauldron.
Also note that this method will create a haute piece which will be at 90 degrees to the armour. If you didn't want it to be exactly 90 degrees, then you would make the opening an extra couple of centimeters wider. Forget formulas...this will be a matter of winging it if you do that. Maybe another time.
The last thing you have to do is to design in a roll allowance of 2 centimeters (half inch) and to provide straight sections near the ends. And below, I have laid the above template onto the steel, cut and sanded it, and designated which will be the inside. They look symettrical front to back. Right.....sure they are.

And here is the collection of tools required to do this little job...the power shears and dcompass. I have decided to not use tabs, but rather, to just bend the inside curve up 90 degrees, and get on with rolling the outside edge. Nothing new there...just a lot of careful work. Laying out, cutting out, shaping, and rolling took about four hours per side, including drilling and rivetting the haute pieces onto the spaulders. Not too bad. Not a beginner's project either!

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.

Mr. Bourland's armour...reprised

Mr. Bourland had vanished for half a year or more (It turned out he had been deployed) and his armour was stored fairly neatly up in the showroom. Except for one detail....it had been stored under the air conditioner. It got rusty. Darned if I was going to ship a rusty armour. So I tossed the ratty old faulds and tassets and made new ones. This is what I came up with.
They are sitting on the pic-nic table, letting the lacquer dry. Then I had to duck out, and by the time I got back to them, it was next morning. The armour is all covered in frost! Oh no, (I thought) I just made his second set of faulds rusty too. But no, it was all good. The sun came out, the frost flashed off, and the armour is all assembled now, and ready to ship.

Above is a closeup of the new tassets I will be making. I stole the design from an armour I had made a few months ago, and put my personal spin on it.

This week in armour

A bit of a rush job, but not so bad all in all. This is an articulated left arm with hinged vambrace. Kind of a nice bit of kit. I probably made the hinged wrist section too short...but better short than too long.

This is a left shoulder. Actually, it is a beta version that I had made, then discarded when I had learned all that could be learned from it. I went back to it because a customer wanted one but didn't want to pay for a really good one. So I went with this and he payed half price.

The six lames in the rerebrace make this armour quite distinctive. Actually, they were not designed to even BE rerebrace lames, but were rather, cut out originally for use as lames in an articulated knee or elbow cop. You can see the similarities in the lames here and in the lames in the elbow cop at the top of the page. I don't think that they look all that bad, but the lesson learned is to use larger and fewer lames...these just make the armour look busy.

These bottom two pictures show how much articulation you get by using lots of lames! I used a king post attachment this time...it seems to be very effective. In this case, for the king post, I used one of my handy dandy lions. They dress up even the plainest of armours!