The Armour Archive

Russ Mitchell

Guys, you know that you're helping out a liar who has defrauded several Archivers, don't you?

AG, go crawl back under your rock.

Russ Mitchell

Kali will get you into trouble in heavy harness, unless you start doing squats or something to acclimate your hips to the extra weight you'll be carrying in those lower postures. Otherwise, the best stuff about Kali translating to anything else is in the footwork and angle-cutting. And whoever said ...

Russ Mitchell

Sounds to me like a good compromise-for-the-purpose would be a quarter inch of felt (can be machine-made), under your layer of leather but above the wood, since y'all are almost exclusively playing with blunt objects...

Russ Mitchell

<font face="Verdana, Arial" size="2">Russ, in the first place, some of the references that were first suggested didm in fact, include books about soldiers in Italy; go back and read the earliest posts.</font> What, two titles by Nicolle, and a picture-reference book by Wagner et al, which is almost...

Russ Mitchell

Um, guys.... gotta play Devil's advocate here... I'm looking over your regs and stuff... and for a routier company in Italy... I'm not seeing a single reference that deals with Italy! May I recommend to you, either as a resource, or to raid its bibliography, The Condottieri: Soldiers of Fortune. Geo...

Russ Mitchell

I know of God's Playground... but does it go a good job with the earlier timeframe? I was always under the impression that it really glossed Polish history prior to the conflict with the Teutonic Order..

Russ Mitchell

"Experimental Archaeology" has been around for quite some time. I think you're right, in that it comes out of England, but I've seen it used in articles from way back in teh early seventies when they were really starting to get serious about the bronze-age field systems and settlements. If any lurke...

Russ Mitchell

Bascot, this looks really, really good. Have you considered blousing that mail shirt, though... unless you've got a powerlifter's torso, that's going to ride a lot better if you let the belt transfer some of the weight of that shirt to your hips... If you come up with solutions on the chausses, plea...

Russ Mitchell

Engel, Pal. The Realm of Saint Stephen: A History of Medieval Hungary, 895-1526. If anyone would like to know what happens on the other side of the Alps, this is a must-buy (though not cheap at 50-odd bucks)... it is the only survey work I know of for Hungarian history to appear in English, and help...

Russ Mitchell

A small aside, if you'll permit me... [QUOTE]How can I fit into this? I live in central Texas. My SCA portrayl is late 14th century french.[QUOTE] You come hang out at my place, we both go off against Bayezid in order to fight off the heathen Ottomans, and then we're both killed because your buddies...

Russ Mitchell

He's not all that great on the Asian stuff, either...

Russ Mitchell

The leather armour you describe in said Persian miniatures was one way of interpreting this -- we know the Mongols/Kipchaks used it, which suggests that the Cumans ought to have... but every period image of Cumans we have shows them wearing normal-looking, albeit sometimes pretty thick, short-sleeve...

Russ Mitchell

Actually, Rhys, I do very little with wasters -- not a reconstructionist. But more on target, it wasn't the wrap I meant: by the time the guy's into wrap range on the legs, smacking his arm is obviously not a trivial exercise. But shots to the top of a guy's helm, and flat shots to the upper left? T...

Russ Mitchell

As usual, it portrays pre-Norman England as a bunch of unwashed barbarians. How anybody with the BBC doing history managed never to hear of Bede I'll never understand...

Russ Mitchell

May I put in a secondary/followup question to this? I've only been to a couple of SCA fighters' practices, and was actually quite impressed with the level of fighting mechanics understood in the group. But there are other things, that primarily being a blade man, I don't get. One of which is... why ...

Russ Mitchell

This whole thread mirrors stuff I've done as well. I can hand sew, it's easy enough, but am hip deep in about four academic projects while being a student in a closed-door martial arts school (slacking off is not an option)... so I'm always interested in providing materials to folks who've the time ...

Russ Mitchell

Thank you very, very much. This definitely seems like it'll be worthwhile to make one of these up... though what they did so that it would be waterproof I don't know. That I'll have to play with.

Thanks again.

Russ Mitchell

Mix it in with Verbruggen, and ignore the section on the Hussites. Otherwise, you can get a whole lot out of Delbruck. The 19th-century guys were really good at laying out the "what happened." Our interpretations of said have obviously come a long way since then. But again, if you can afford it, you...

Russ Mitchell

Thanks for all the responses.

They're... a little further over the map than I expected, but definitely close enough to what I thought that I can move to prototyping stage...

Have a good weekend.

Russ Mitchell

And don't forget St. Augustine, folks... the A-#1 earthshatteringly famous monk of the late antique/early medieval world, was as black African as it got... What actual ethnicity is he? American black, or more obviously regionally African? If he can pass for Ethiopian, then he's totally set, as he ca...

Russ Mitchell

There are times when I've seen folks justify it (hidden legs, etcetera, though for folks like Egforth and I, none of this is an issue in the first place)... but the A-number one argument I haven't heard you guys raise in the Plastic Wars (tm) is safety. Metal doesn't shatter in cold weather. Leather...

Russ Mitchell

gluing several layers together into a leather armour of sorts... and the part that gets me, putting on more glue and another layer of leather whenever the outside layer gets damaged. Which tells me: 1. Thin pieces of leather. 2. Not boiled. 3. The armour is expected to be damaged, but not compromise...

Russ Mitchell

Thanks, mi amigo.. I'll wait on the report.

Russ Mitchell

Problem is, the chronicle I'm playing with describes the guys in question smearing some kind of glue onto leather... trying tofigure out what such a period glue would be...

thanks, tho. That's at least one possibility out of the way.

Russ Mitchell

Any carpenters or early-mod. musicians here? I may have solved an old problem in hungarian archaeology, and need to know the answer to the following question: if I have two pieces of relatively thin-moderate leather (NOT 12-16 oz armour scrap), and I glue them together with hide glue, will the resul...

Russ Mitchell

I need an answer to the following:

if I glue two pieces of thin-to-moderate-thickness leather (NOT 12 OZ.) together with hide glue, will that glue dry as a rigid shell, or will it dry in such a way that a degree of the flexibility of the leather is preserved?

Thanks...

Russ Mitchell

Actually, no, they had it right. The word in question is not "pied," but " pie' " (e-accent-aigue). Of course, that's the objective singular, rather than the nominative, but given its place in the phrase, I think that's appropriate. Now, of course, if there were two of them, you could call them "pie...

Russ Mitchell

block o' iron set in a stump is also how the 9-12th century magyars did things, and there was a LOT of interaction (mostly friendly) between the two cultures...

Russ Mitchell

I would also be interested in an explication...

Russ Mitchell

The routiers idea works very well, and due to the circumstances involved, allows for a number of personae well within reason. After this summer I hope to be in much better shape to pull off my Cuman persona, though there'll be some experimental archaeology involved, for which I need a yard and house...

Russ Mitchell

My copy of Talhoffer is sitting in Hungary at the moment, but a place to look might be the plate where T. shows attacks at the lower openings. I have a vague memory that one of those was performed with the false edge... otherwise I'd have to defer to more knowledgeable brains than mine.

Russ Mitchell

Chef's idea was very good. As an addition, if one of you has some skill at a period craft, you can be the representatives *of that guild* to the town militia. At least in E.C. Europe, specific guilds often had specific parts of the town wall to guard, and set duties -- this is NOT my specialty, so I...

Russ Mitchell

Well, heck, if they wanted to tongue-tie the heralds, they should have been Hungarian... anybody want to go storm Szekesfehervar?

Russ Mitchell

On the other hand: lest Evil Bob come smack me upside the head for missing something obvious, it is quite clear from Fiore's text, and the others I'm not clear on, that some of these guards at least are meant to be "dynamic rest" positions that you can hang out in between the more frenetic moments a...

Russ Mitchell

Yes. There's a gentleman named Steve Hick who posted this in a bunch of places last year under the title "steal this idea." Taking it one step further, if you want to actually begin to move in, as opposed to merely through, the guards, think about moulinets (moving the weapon in a circular or ellipt...

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x-post from Armour: Anybody here worked with hide glue?

Anybody here ever worked with hide glue?