The Armour Archive

James Arlen Gillaspie

For rivet heads on the outside, you can take nails with the right shank diameter and hot forge the heads into a dome shape. The thicker the nail head, the better. This may be the way some dome heads were made back in the day, forged first with a flat head then knocked into a dapping block. I've seen...

James Arlen Gillaspie

Oh, and here's another sort of like it.

James Arlen Gillaspie

Kolbenturnier helms don't have to make sense as field helms. The shape reminds me a lot of some shapes Koloman Helmschmid played with. If the crease does what it does on these helms, the shape makes sense for a field helm as well.

James Arlen Gillaspie

Francesco d'Arezzo?!!

His grand daddy, maybe. Unbelievable...

James Arlen Gillaspie

Centuries from now, someone on a board like this one will exclaim, "Oh, I had no idea the word 'file' also meant THAT back then!"

James Arlen Gillaspie

Have you considered rental? You should post your measurements if you go that route.

James Arlen Gillaspie

MediumAevum, did you search 'Dowgate' or Downgate'?

James Arlen Gillaspie

I tracked that Pisanello sketch down. This is scanned from a bad photocopy. I hope someone can find a better version of it. As well as the greave suspenders on the left, there seems to be a fellow with full legs, or at least one complete leg, on the right grasping an opponent's arm.

James Arlen Gillaspie

I do not believe file cleaning was done when armour was in use, as it would have been downright daft. There is no question that many of the pieces I have worked with have had it done since, however! Some of the Hanover stuff was particularly bad that way.

James Arlen Gillaspie

Mac wrote: It's sort of funny that we so many pics of Italian men at arms who are wearing greaves without cuisses. I wonder if they really did that, or whether the artists are styling them as ancient Romans. Either way, they are not shown to have any additional padding around their knees. If additio...

James Arlen Gillaspie

My point was very specifically about breastplates . I have seen some very beefy figures for the frontal surfaces of some bacinets in good condition, MUCH thicker than that 'breastplate' on the pig (IMS, over a tenth of an inch). Even in highly refined wrought iron, the breastplate thicknesses we hav...

James Arlen Gillaspie

It just occurred to me - I hope this doesn't come across as snarky - that the French had had since Crecy to figure out how thick to make a breastplate. Then de Wavrin says that many of them had very long mail shirts under their armour to make sure they were arrow proof. Being dismounted, they knew t...

James Arlen Gillaspie

In my experience, I have never seen a breastplate that thin that hadn't had the living hell 'file cleaned' out of it (for those who don't know, this was a way, common in many places, of removing rust from armour for quite awhile. Not bad if you are cleaning anvils and hammers, but armour?! Sometimes...

James Arlen Gillaspie

The pauldrons that I have built have not been restrictive at all, and I doubt I am smarter than the old smiths. :wink: They do, however, add more weight, and the Germans in particular seem to be very weight conscious in the late 15th c. The 'Sigismund gothic' harness, for example, weighs in at 47 lb...

James Arlen Gillaspie

: Stadtmuseum2d0b1045a9_z.jpg (93.92 KiB) Viewed 59 times

Hmm, this doesn't look too promising. I hope they've changed it since this photo was taken.

James Arlen Gillaspie

Hello, Jacob, The arms and armour section was closed for a long while, and rumor had it that most of it went to Ingolstadt. No trace of it in people's photos, though. Stuff I found on flikr.com showed the Max harness and the wall of breastplates, though, so that stuff is still around, for sure. I wi...

James Arlen Gillaspie

Don't forget the Zeughaus in the Stadtmuseum in Munich, which had a very interesting collection in 1993, and much of it is still there, as Flickr.com has shown me.

James Arlen Gillaspie

Okaaay, then, moving right along, Graham, that's a very interesting question. The study of the late 15th c. German style has been a bit of an obsession for me for a couple of decades now, and my impression is that the spaudler was the usual shoulder armour, mounted or not, and spaudlers that have a ...

James Arlen Gillaspie

Just brainstorming; perhaps the latten-edged items above the mail brayette are for the elbow. The orientation is problematic, however, unless perhaps the artist was simply presented with the objects in the illustration that he had been commissioned to illustrate but was given no explanation as to wh...

James Arlen Gillaspie

Sean, that's a good point. I was thinking it might be a garment made for baton use. No need to change the male to female button hole direction. When did that start, I wonder?

James Arlen Gillaspie

I seem to remember one of the sleeves wanting to bend the wrong way. Where are my notes, doggone it?!

James Arlen Gillaspie

A typical projectile point, on impacting iron or steel, will tend to blunt a bit, with greater impacts causing greater deformation (extremely hard points will tend to chip where they would not blunt, too). This will make the cloth beneath the plate more of a factor. I believe the flat top helm was n...

James Arlen Gillaspie

The material itself is problematic; the old charcoal smelted irons and steels (note my use of the plural!) do not behave like the modern stuff. Concluding that the old stuff is inferior or weaker due to the silicious inclusions and its layered structure is overly simplistic. I work with the stuff al...

James Arlen Gillaspie

Wow! Color makes all the difference! Thanks, Tom!

James Arlen Gillaspie

It is the left rear panel that has no padding, and never did. When you fence, you lead with the right hand, which means that the right rear of the torso can be struck. The thing reminded me of nothing so much as one of those heavy padded sabre fencing jackets, though longer, I think.

James Arlen Gillaspie

Dibs on the sword on a stick!

James Arlen Gillaspie

I have an old Toledo etched wall hanger, and maybe another sword. I'll send pictures tomorrow.

James Arlen Gillaspie

I am more than willing to pay the postage. Will Paypal work?

James Arlen Gillaspie

And me! English or not!

James Arlen Gillaspie

Hello, Ugo! I'm up in Albany, but I get down to the City every now and again.

James Arlen Gillaspie

Wade, I would assume the slots for sliding rivets on the right side of the tail indicate those lames were made from some other piece of armour?

James Arlen Gillaspie

Three HUGE innovations in plate armour; the conical visor, the globose breastplate, and riveted articulation. The last two could be considered two of the most significant innovations in the history of warfare (I think they had a lot to do with impeding Turkish expansion into Europe). The conical vis...

James Arlen Gillaspie

Wade can chip in on this, but it seems to me that the overlap between breast and back on the matched pieces I have examined have been a good two inches or so, which also holds for the mismatched ones I have worked with, too (and there have been a lot of them! :lol: ), if the turned edges on the armp...

James Arlen Gillaspie

Dibs on 'Firefly'.

James Arlen Gillaspie

My experience is with a 95% Cu 5% Sn mix (called 'phosphorus bronze' because it had a dash of phosphorus thrown in to improve castability) that was workhardened by being rolled. It was very red, and often confused with copper when it picked up a bit of a patina. It reminded me of nothing so much as ...

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Re: From when and where would this be?????

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