The Armour Archive

Hey everyone, I need some help. I need to make a pair of 15th century floating greaves. I need a pattern, I looked on the pattern archive and found only one and it required a welder which I do not have access to. Does anyone have a pattern that does not require a welder?

Uhm...if you don't have access to a welder, do you have access to a heat source? You can make cased greaves without welding or heat, but its difficult. As far as a pattern, the easiest is to make your own off of the legs they're intended for. Greaves need to be well-fitted, especially floating ones that don't have cuisses or sabatons to interface with.

Not really, I intend to make them out of 18 gauge mild and if there is a basic patten I can just edit to my size that would be great

Got bad news for ya. With cased greaves "basic pattern I could just edit + that'd be great" doesn't happen; the steel has to fit your lower legs like a pair of stockings. Your lower legs, and nobody else's. Helmets are easier to pattern. Not sure how I should take that winkie you appended.

Take some measurements, make craft foam mockups from these, then cut out blanks and expect to spend a lot of labor tweaking them -- and since you're doing coldwork, a good deal of skilful stake work will be involved. The tricky part of doing this kind of thing well, with centerline creasing, is the centerline crease should follow the line of your shinbone. That's a curve. That's immediately where it gets... interesting. Contouring to the calf muscles (both of them, two per leg) is easy by comparison to getting that shin line conforming.

That's why there are welded-halves patterns out there. That's the (comparatively) easy way to get the crease-line to follow the shinbones. Even then it's not exactly a newbie friendly project. You're jumping into the deep end here. How much experience have you building legharness? The more the better.

You can see pictures of my flat pattern here: http://burgundianhours.blogspot.com/201 ... orial.html

Front-only gutter-greaves are less demanding, and effective also in the stick game. We try and promote ambitious undertakings around here, to be sure, but making a set of contoured, curved-for-your-shinbone gutters for the experience before launching into going all the way round in cased-greaves for the next greave project is a likely road to likely success.

Depending, JGarrett, on the decade your armor is in, if your harness is roughly 1350-1380AD, wetted, formed, and hardened leather, one piece all the way around and lacing shut, might be a greave option. It's not something often done these days, but examples of cuirbouilli greaves to harness mostly of plate turn out to be rather numerous, and attested to by funerary effigies.

This one has the properties of being somewhat expensive in material, no welding, noob-friendly and easy enough to form wet, of 12oz leather as recommended thickness, 9oz being the barest minimum for best cuirbouilli results. It also offers an easy path to a little tasteful embellishment with tooled borders at the edges or possibly a stripe down the center, either outside or shin. I know of no proof against this in the cuirbouilli evidence we've got.

A greave really is not a "first project" kind of piece. It ends up being a combination of needing to learn anatomy, actual armour styles and some serious metal forming. A greave is just like a lower leg, except where it isn't. It has to fit very closely, but it also needs to allow you to move and to have the little extra details like the real ones. The most obvious of these is the crease up the front, and often a crease up the back too.

The goal is to get it to hang from the calf, it can't be set up to sit on the top of the foot, or it won't be comfortable.

When you get the idea of the shape down, then you have to move metal in some interestingly subtle ways. I have done them with and without heat. Most people use heat, because it probably really is easier and you can sort of watch it coming into shape more easily.

If you want to work without heat, you will likely need to be able to stretch the metal more than we often do when we raise it with heat.

I have attempted them by flairing the whole bottom third to get the nice shape. That usually doesn't work, it gets too thin. A more interesting way to do it is to stretch the sides about 1/3 of the way up. This causes the center to get a sweep and leaves you more thickness where you will likely want it down at the bottom to get the final shape. I have done this one a full pair and on a test one recently. It can actually go pretty quickly, but it is more of an act of faith because you have to do the stretching and then curl it up to see what you got. It is easy to not stretch it quite enough and then have to work a lot. Finding someone semi-local you can talk to would probably help a lot. Most of us have several unfinished greaves lying around that reflect what happens from a particular shape and manufacturing method.

Wade

Thanks guys, I get what you are all saying and appreciate the advice. But I have to try anyway. Pretty much because I need greaves and have no money to buy a pair.

JGarrett wrote:Thanks guys, I get what you are all saying and appreciate the advice. But I have to try anyway. Pretty much because I need greaves and have no money to buy a pair.

Go for it. Feel free to give it a go. Assuming you think about the right shape and are willing to hit the metal a lot, it is possible to get a reasonable enough result. Just remember, "cut it out, curl it up, you are even close to done" isn't the way to approach the project.

Expect to spend many hours on the rough shape, esp. without heat. Show us how it goes.

It is nice to hear that someone needs greaves. They can really make the look.

Wade

Will do, thanks for the encouragement!