The Armour Archive

Konstantin the Red

The early bascinet will fight best, and likely cost three times what the sugarloaf or barrel helm will. All of these will protect well.

In the SCA game, a hat with corners will catch more hits.

Konstantin the Red

<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><HR><font face="Verdana, Arial" size="2">Originally posted by ArtemisGreen: <B>Thanks for all the help Rob. I'd love to make the Sinric one, but ill start out making the more simple barrel as a prototype (maybe 18 or 20 ga) and move up fr...

Konstantin the Red

Hammers: you will probably want three or four. Armourers accumulate hammers, but an armourer can have literally fifty hammers and do ninety percent of his hammer work with two or three of them. You will be pretty well served with three or four out of the following: one large hammer, with rounded fac...

Konstantin the Red

Sallet's going to show up in the fifteenth century. Sounds like Leeran is decoupling armor from persona. That often happens in the SCA -- my 15th-c. Russian SCA persona fights in armor of a date sixty years before him and a thousand and more miles further west, because I like how an international-st...

Konstantin the Red

And that sort of thing didn't happen in the fourteenth century in any case. There were travelers who got that far by then, but they weren't armor people and they didn't try that kind of mix. Really, though, the SCA isn't going to make any kind of fuss beyond "hey, cool suit" if you have both a compl...

Konstantin the Red

There are a lot of coil winding rigs. Most of their variation is in how they control the wire. So, which one did you have in mind?

Konstantin the Red

I'm a silver-blackener myself -- can't wear the stuff on my skin without rhodium plating or other corrosion stopper. Feed me on Italian food and you can just about watch the tarnish spread across fresh-buffed silver like the progress of a minute hand around a clock. That gold jewelry was definitely ...

Konstantin the Red

For light general surface rust, it is hard to beat the 3M brown scrubbie. It doesn't break up the way steel wool will.

Konstantin the Red

Rebar tie wire works best for riveted mail, and that stuff is for the advanced mailler who is after high-performance, low weight mail, because it takes three to five times as long to make as the butted stuff. IMO, tie wire is too soft to make butted links from. Galvanized wire is better stuff for bu...

Konstantin the Red

You can get the basic method from the diagram in Oakeshott's AoW, p.241. Next, check out memorial brasses -- most of the examples date from the 13th and early 14th century, though -- for variants on the theme. Apparently, deerskin was the favored material for making such swordbelts, because of its l...

Konstantin the Red

The helm as pictured and described is legal for metal thickness. The rivets for the faceplate may need to be doubled up -- they may be overly widely spaced. Check Society standards for maximum rivet spacing. That won't be hard to fix. What will be trickier will be seeing out of that spangen/sugarloa...

Konstantin the Red

Armourcake.

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"The Minstrel Boy to the war is gone..."

Konstantin the Red

And where exactly are you putting padding? We may be able to offer some specific pointers for particular locations.

Konstantin the Red

We are talking two to three inches' depth of chord, not radius. But yes, the bend need not be excessively deep.

Konstantin the Red

Chicks dig tights, especially with working codpieces.

Konstantin the Red

On a related note, bar-grilling in this fashion works every bit as well (or poorly, depending on the view you take) for 15th-c. armets and closehelmets. To my eye, it seems to fall in more naturally with this type of helmet; the bars mimic the orientations and angles of the slots cut for breaths and...

Konstantin the Red

I've been interested for a couple of years in this kind of design feature, in the hope that it could make the bargrill better integrated with the historical outline of a visored bascinet -- square stock and all -- to achieve the... Barbeque-face bascinet! (It's a grilled pig, you see...) But I still...

Konstantin the Red

Patterns that work for metal work for leather too. 15th century? Was that not the Albigensians?

Konstantin the Red

Armourcake, sir. I'm going to have to go scope out your site soon and get some tongue tracks on my monitor screen.

Konstantin the Red

And we convey our best wishes for a speedy recovery. Gangrene is nothing to fool with.

Konstantin the Red

I'd say seek your proof in the manuscript illuminations dating from the 14th century onward -- those illos showing whole battlefields full of dark armor may be meant to depict blued armor. Eventually, by the late 16th century, we have at least one famous suit that is indisputably blued, and a handso...

Konstantin the Red

Any hope of taking a welding course at the local community college?

Konstantin the Red

Building "an awesome suit of armor" is probably going to take you five to seven years in any case -- to make awesome armor, you are going to have to put in some time learning how! To shorten the learning process, one early-on investment should be in Price's TOMAR. Fifty-three bux from Amazon isn't h...

Konstantin the Red

There are some variations on circular yokes or "mantle-top shirts." A completely circular yoke like a big metal doily works well, or one can make the yoke more oval, in a racetrack shape, by building it with straight, unexpanded rectangles of mail front and back. Master Knuut likes this approach in ...

Konstantin the Red

Renaissance Wax, Otto. Pricey, effective, beloved of museum curators. Superb for storage, exhibition, or tourney prizes. Somebody who doesn't want to spend about ten bucks a tube can get much the same result with a high-end auto paste wax with plenty of carnauba in its mix; the more carnauba the bet...

Konstantin the Red

DU is primarily U-238. It is very depleted in U-235, hence the name -- although it does have some left. U-238 isn't ferociously radioactive with its halflife being about the age of the Earth. Alpha decay, which is no problem outside of you, but bites back if you ingest any. ------------------ "The M...

Konstantin the Red

I think the word Aidan is looking for is "topfhelm," and the second pic is of sugarloaf helms, probably visored, as the sugarloaf's shape would make the visor easier to use -- though probably not for the king with that coronet in the way.

Konstantin the Red

A lot will depend on how heavy you want your shield to be. Some people endorse rimming the shield first and then gluing the canvas facing down overall, thereby making a shield that doesn't look like a shield that's had heater hose grafted onto its edge. The critical area of the shield is less the ce...

Konstantin the Red

Buy Price's Techniques of Medieval Armor Reproduction: the Fourteenth Century, "TOMAR" for short, fifty-three bucks from Amazon.com, read it through several times, then build 14th-c. harness. This will give you the metalworking, metalbending experience to attempt the fancier 15th-c. stuff, which bui...

Konstantin the Red

Though the results will be spotty, Swordsmith: Babelfish and like programs aren't very good at choosing which of several meanings a word is intended to convey. The software seems literally to go word by word, without reference to any concept that has gone before, or to context. I'm pretty middlin' o...

Konstantin the Red

Now, that's a whole smÃ¸rgasbÃ¸rd of armourcake! Well done, guys!

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"The Minstrel Boy to the war is gone..."

Konstantin the Red

Aha! You've built a mace with "clackers" -- with which you should get better blow acknowledgement than a simple, quiet "gooshmace" will get. Now your sparring partners will have a distinct sharp noise to help them determine whether it is good or light.

(W)rap 'em good!

Konstantin the Red

Corazzina. Try also Covered Breastplate. There's at least an illo in AAOTMK, p.76. There should also be some pics somewhere in archived threads, for some few of these have been made recently.

Konstantin the Red

Clipped nail heads make good small rivets. Of course, you end up wondering what you might accomplish with all those nail shafts. One, they make good flush rivets, a method not unknown even in period armoring, but rather rare as they were inclined to use it only for specialized purposes. Okay, now wh...

Konstantin the Red

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