The Armour Archive

Sasha

You have tons of choices depending on cost and weight and the time you want to spend. You can do hi-reliefe work by either using traditional gesso and leather and gold leaf...or you can cheat a bit by carving your device elements with a jigsaw out of plastic or thinnish plywood. The contact adhesive...

Sasha

A variation on a hold-down. Basically it plugs onto your anvil or your free-arm and presses stuff down to the face of the anvil while you use both hands on holding, say, a hammer and a cold chisel. The vice-grip variation on what is traditionally a piece of spring steel welded to a bit of stock the ...

Sasha

For most (like 98%) of applications that is the right way to do it.

sasha

Sasha

You don't need to reverse them. You need to move them further up the line towards the bottles. The hoses have male connections at one end and female at the other. So do the FA's. You have them pointing the same way, you just move them to the regulators (there should be a direction of flow arrow indi...

Sasha

Unless you have a torch the likes of which I have never heard of, you do not need to buy different FA's. unscrew the hoses form the ones you have. Then unscrew the FA's from the torch. Unscrew the hoses from the regulators and screw on the FA's (make sure that the oxy FA goes on the Oxy line and the...

Sasha

The foormer Baron of Ynys Fawr (Master Hrolf) Used four layers of dead ugg-boot uppers (sheepskin) as his helm padding. As a marshal this gave me the screaming willies! I know the rules state closed cell foam or equivalent but how the hell is a marshal doing inspectiions on the field (far away from ...

Sasha

Are the rivets round head or flat head? If they are round (or dome) headed then you can benfit from making a rivet set. This basically a little stake (I use a bolt from the hardware store) with a depression in the top that matches the rivet head. (Somewhere on this site lurks a fairly coherent artic...

Sasha

Bad Harold. No biscuit! Harold is being ...errr...Harold. The suit is time consuming, but not overly difficult to rep[roduce (if you are up to doing full milanese harness anyway then this one will not present too much extra difficulty is what I meant. If you have posted a "how do I make a coat of pl...

Sasha

DLI is the Department of Labour and Industry. They issue the certifiicate for top level applications in welding and boilermaking. In boilermaking it involves being authorised to work on pressure vessels in excess of some astronomical stresses and tempreture fluctuations. In weldding it is for the co...

Sasha

You may have gone back and edited...but I know you recommended using live gerbils as flashback arrestors! I have rejoindered your rejoinder. So there! And I will now use Valetii's defence against you. (I will tuck my sword under my left arm and make a big rasberry noise at you while making elephant-...

Sasha

My sincere appologies oh burrowing marsupial of the archive. When you said flow check valves I assumed you were saying flashback arrestors wrong. Part of the reaon for this may be that no one here has used the damned silly things for about 10 years (since the commet2 torch become industry standard)....

Sasha

Hi folks. I just read a scary thread that has been around for a while (just haven't looked). I posted some stuff regarding the safety of gas welding and flashback arrestors and such at the end oof that thread. If you have a gas welding system and the flashback arrestors are either not fitted or fitt...

Sasha

If I may offer a bit of advise as a traiined weldder with DLI qualificatiions. ] Wombat. I am about to be nasty to you. You know I respect you so just put up with it for a minute. wombat is basically being proof that a little knowledge can be a dangerouse thing. Some of what he has said has been dea...

Sasha

brass, copper, bronze, silver, platinum and Stainless Steel are all hot annealed. This means that you take it up to a low glow heat and then count to three/turn off the torch sing the entire "best of Aqua" collection...whatever takes about 3-5 seconds and then quench in water. You harden it by heati...

Sasha

Dish the codpiece deeper. Make a statement!

And post a detailed picture of the gauntlet cuff.

Sasha

Sasha

Make one out of card. If it is too small then you will know to tinker with the pattern. You could even waste a vast amount of steel and just make a "trial" version of the pattern. you will then also have a piec to try and make all your mistakes on...that way the two elbows you end up with will have ...

Sasha

The greave and vambrace shapes I am refering to are the fully formed variety (as in the shape of the body and not just a tapered cone), so that you get the nice counter flare on the vambrace and the bulge for muscles as you go back towards the lames. The greave form I mean is the calf muscle definit...

Sasha

Apparently they can.

Can't get into the chat...and the screen is purple!

maybe I am just not wanted anymore (sniff).

Sasha

Sasha

The ffoundery charges you for the time and materials of a pour. If you want a two hundred pound block of steel with one shallow depression....it will cost not much different to a very versatile and complex swage for. Basically, you hand them the wooden form and they press it into the sand and pour t...

Sasha

I am laugthing way to much to be the remotest bit of help to answering any of these questions right now. thanks "Abu"

"Abu? What's abu?"

"I don't know, what's abu with you?"

I will try and answer a couple of these...later

Sasha

Sasha

Hi Loren. I mihgt be arriving late to this conversation but I will throw in my ten cents worth (only 5.3cents U.S) I think just having round dishing forms in a cast steel swage block is a huge waste of swage block! If I was going for an armouring specific swage it would have a wedge shaped dish, a c...

Sasha

Try wax instead of oil. Gun wax or a good polymer car wax (Nu-finish) tend to do the job well. There is also a rust proofing polishing compound that is equivalent to white buffing compound, but it aslo seals in a layer of really effective wax type stuff. Things I have polished with this stuff 8 mont...

Sasha

Okay. A very breif rundown of the three main varieties of tanning and their uses (off the top of my head, so I may miss some stuff) Veg tanned : This covers primarily oak bark tanned hides but also includes silver willow tanned, mulberry tanned and hundreds of lesser known tannin infusion methods (d...

Sasha

Different aplications , different uses. What specific thing did you want to do with the leather. There are things that veg tanned is better for and there are uses for which chrome tan is superior. Only Veg tanned and Alum tanned leathers are accurate for the medieval period. All a matter of what you...

Sasha

Why not just spend $10 on a strap cutter and and buy a piece of leather (iin the correct colour if you cannot be bothered dying it yourself)? That way you can always generate starps in whatever width you need, in the most efficient lengths, for the least amount of money....and if you break a strap t...

Sasha

Having only recently started to offer stainless myself, I upped my rates by 50%. In retrospect (and I will probably act on this in future) it should have been closer to 75-80%. Gundo is right. Though for me the standout extra cost was running the oxy torch about 20times more then for a normal helm (...

Sasha

Brittle. Very brittle. Crunch. shatter. tinkle tinkle.

Even very soft plannishing work will eventually fracture it (sooner then later)

Sasha

Sasha

Ivar. If you can come up with a decent B2 at a good price in about 8 weeks...and are willing to go to a lot of bother to organise shipping it to Australia (after making it look dirty and worthless and sticking a 'happy birthday' card onto it so that I do not need to pay sales tax and a dozen other c...

Sasha

I do a lot of rivet work with a cross-peen (thus making me extra-deluded as well as a curmudgeon). I make a grooove in the rivet with the first impact and then make another at 90 degrees. Then I use the flat to shape it out and facet it into a dome. This is what I learned in my apprentiship and it h...

Sasha

I built a jig for making shieldbosses. I use a raw-hide faced 10kg Sledge hammer. The disk is set into the jig and then I do the "dance of the hammer" (circling a step to the left for every blow so that strikes come from 360degrees). Because the jig is a bottomless dish, the metal stretches at a uni...

Sasha

I agree. I start at the edges and work inwards. keeps the metal form thinning out too much, keeps the edges for too much deformation, gets as much of the steel as possible into contact with the smooth inside surface of the dishing bowl as quickly as possible. Having said that, there are exceptions t...

Sasha

I would second the 1 1/2 hp minimum for a buffer. add to the list the fact that you are going to need AT LEAST 4 wheels to do a good job of buffing (each buffing compound gets its own wheel. start with sissal and go to stitched denim, down to stitched calico and eventually loose leaf calico). The th...

Sasha

Hi there. Hugs issued as requested. I will scribble down the start circuit pattern when I can find where you put the little cover it was on. I handed it to you to take inside and copy..... Haven't fouund it yet. I will send the pics you requested me to scan as a CD along with your zip disk (which is...

Sasha

Bush is not the right word....but damned if I can think of the right term at the moment. (A bush refers to a usually bronze tube that fulfills the job of a bearing...but at less cost to manufacture. Thus power tools with bushes are usually inferior to those with bearings) I tend to make all of my ad...

Sasha

First off, Are you using keroscene on your buffing compound? If you want to cut down on a lot of the buffing compound dust that gets thrown around uselessly and also get better efficiency out of each stick of compound... Get a small conatiner of kerosene, lightly dip the stick of buffing compound be...

Regarding gas welding