The Armour Archive

Those of you who remember the angst filled time this spring when I needed to weld material on to the sides of the breast and back will be pleased to hear that all the welds held up to the hardening process. The inevitable difference in carbon content has however shown up dramatically in the color of the oxide layer that formed during the recent re-tempering and straightening operation. These lines will probably polish up a bit differently as well, but should not be very noticeable in the finished armor.




The thing I had not noticed about the cullet is that while it looked OK at first glance, the whole assembly had taken a funny twist on the right side. I did not get a pic of it, because it did not photograph well. Suffice to say, it did not fit on the flange of the backplate without forcing it into place.

While I have the breast and back hanging conveniently, I figured the best plan for getting the cullet to fit was to bolt it into place and play the torch over it in the temper range. While it looks like it fits just fine here, it is really under a bit of strain, and it is only by virtue of all those bolts that it appears to be sitting correctly. The twist is primarily in the upper lames, and by the time we get to the butt tasset, things are pretty much OK. The fauld did not warp at all, and it is serving as another point of attachment for the straightening process. With a bit of clamping it should yield back to the correct shape while it is hot.



By the time it was done, I had added some more clamps in the middle.



I did not get a pic of the result, but it was pretty satisfactory. Right now, I have the cullet in pieces and am moving on to the next stage of grinding. In addition to forwarding that process, it will give me a fresh white surface to work with in case I decide I need to repeat the heat straightening.

Mac

Not much to report today. Grinding and more grinding.

The only thing of note is that my damned, cobbled together machine needed maintenance. The set screw on the step pulley of the countershaft came loose and the key slid out till it was stopped by the bearing. I though at first that I was going to have to stop and machine a new shaft, but it turned out not to have accrued any damage and I have it back up an running again.

Mac

This is like watching consecutive food review videos at 2 in the morning with nothing in the fridge

That is coming along so well. Really wish I could be apprenticed to your shop. Think I am too old though. I had something happen like that recently as well Mac.... but with my car going rather fast on the highway. Luckily got to the shop and the were able to get the old lugs out of and put new ones in.

DAMN Google Photos! Damn it to Hell!

I've just accidentally deleted a whole fucking album by innocently pressing the "done" button.

I have not looked to see how far back the damage goes. I can't bear to.

Mac

Mac, you might ant to call them. They might still be in the system and they ~could~ possibly restore them

Have you checked the trash can? I think everything should be there.

I followed a procedure I found online to check the trash, but it looks like that only applies if I had been using the thing they call "desktop uploader". That seems to be where the back up resides..... Who knew.

I guess my first priority is to figure out what it takes to make sure that the albums are backed up. Once I'm sure that they are secure, I may go back and try to fill in the blanks by uploading photos from my camera card again. That promises to be seriously tedious, and I am loath to consider if a high priority. Perhaps I will view the task in a more kindly light once I have cooled off a bit.

Mac

OK... so... someone who uses Google Photos,

What do I need to do to secure the permanence of existing albums?
What do I need to do the back up new albums?

I don't dare touch anything on that accursed site now until I know.

Mac

From Google:

Your deleted files gets moved to the trash.

Don't see the photo or video?
If something isn't in your trash, it can't be restored. You won't be able to restore a photo if:

You moved it to trash more than 60 days ago
You moved it to trash, then emptied your trash
You permanently deleted it from your trash

Mac, would having someone help you set up something that you are paying for, and won't change its interface unexpectedly or vanish, help? Learning a new system takes time, but sometimes the latest owner of these hosting companies force it on you, and there ought to be people here who would gladly put in the time so you can focus on making things with your eyes and hands.

Wordpress dot com (where they provide the servers and sysadmin) is not perfect, but in the worst case I could move my site onto someone else's server, install a version of Wordpress there, then have plenty of time to think about migrating to some other system.

Mac, page 46 is the last one with pictures.

Tom B has written me to say that the pics themselves are not deleted, but that only the album is dissolved. I have looked, and it is true. The pics are present in chronological order. It means that while I have to go back and re-link the images, I don't have to re-upload them from my camera card. This is something anyway.

I don't yet know if I can link to them where they are, or if I have to group them back into an album. I'll make a little trial and see....

Mac

I just tried linking to a photo that was not in an album, and it did not work. The board was unable to determine the dimensions of the image. I'm don't know why that it, since the dimensions were part of the URL.... but I don't even pretend to understand these things.

It looks like I need to put those pics in an album before I can re-link to them.

Mac

I'd also put them on Flickr or Photobucket. Google Photos sucks for hyperlinking. I've seen this happen multiple times on different boards.

Mac wrote:I just tried linking to a photo that was not in an album, and it did not work. The board was unable to determine the dimensions of the image. I'm don't know why that it, since the dimensions were part of the URL.... but I don't even pretend to understand these things.

It looks like I need to put those pics in an album before I can re-link to them.

Mac

Mac,
If you can, try right clicking on the image in your browser and open it in a new tab. Then link that to the AA. This is what I have used when "The board was unable to determine the dimensions of the image"

I've got the images back into an album (thank you, Tom!) and have started refilling the lacunae in the posts. This will take a couple more sessions to complete. People who "quoted" any of the old images will need to edit their posts to get them looking nice again.

Meanwhile, I have been bringing the skirts up to near the final finish. I will investigate other image hosting options before I post more pics though. I'm sort of pissed at Google Photos.

Mac

I fixed a few more images this morning.

Today, I have a date with Dirk Breiding at the Philly Mus. Art. I will be delivering Will McLean's armor and probably shooting the breeze for a couple of hours.

I'll get back to this task sometime this afternoon.

Mac

Mac, take as much time as you need to relax. I know when I have computer problems like yours, I go caveman for a while. Besides, with all the gold that you post here, you deserve it.

I'm back from the museum. Dirk B and I spent much of the morning getting enough of Will's armor onto a (rather inadequate) manikin so that he could show it to his overlords at a meeting tomorrow. The plan is that it will get a proper manikin in the fullness of time, and be part of Arms and Armor's education material.

After dinner, I got back to the image redux thing, and I think I am all caught up now.

Mac

We love you for doing this Mac. You're awesome.

Thank you Mac for your work, both with the chronicle and reworking the pictures after the loss

I have not yet decided what to do about future images, but for now I am just traveling along the path of least resistance and hoping I don't do anything stupid again.

When last I showed what was going on, I said I was furthering the finish procedure on the fauld.



I also said that my welds were all holding. Well, that's almost true. I had one small crack appear on the third fauld lame. This is a part I welded before I settled on the procedure involving a curved weld.

Like the other crack, I have headed it off with a 1/8" drill and plugged the hole with a bit of rivet wire. I just used a larger drill to countersink the edges of the hole, but that's not really the best procedure. I have a 60° carbide countersink that I should have used. The steeper angles of that tool make it easier to get a close fit that blends well.



This is what that plug looks like now that the plate is nearly up to it's final polish.



While I was fussing over the image deletion issue, I got the cullet lames up to the same stage. I wanted to be sure that I was truly done with any sort of curvature correction before I moved on to heat treating the tassets. That way I could do any adjustment that were necessary while they were soft. I may still have to correct for some distortion later, but I want to have them fitting as well as I can before that.



Mac

Mac wrote:I've got the images back into an album (thank you, Tom!) and have started refilling the lacunae in the posts. This will take a couple more sessions to complete. People who "quoted" any of the old images will need to edit their posts to get them looking nice again.
Mac

Glad to see you have things under control.
I am happy to have provided you with some help, I wish that my more elegant solution had worked.

I didn't get a lot done today, but I started back in on the finish work of the breastplate.

This little bracket showed up in an earlier pic where I was giving the whole cuirass another soak at tempering temperature to make the parts lie down well after the initial grinding. The finial was one of those places that had defied my efforts, but it's OK now.



I took the breast and back apart and tossed all the angle iron into the "land of lost braces". That's right between Job's dung heap and the medieval piss-pot. Some of these braces will get turned into something else one day, but most of it will end up in the trash once I am sure I have no more use for it.



The finial had been left with no sharp internal corners to minimize the chance of cracks during the hardening. It took an hour or so to reduce it to it's it final shape.



That's it for about a week. I am traveling to visit my folks tomorrow.

Mac

Just fantastic Mac!

Seeing how close everything is getting, this week wait is killing me!

I'll be returning home tomorrow, and should be back in the shop on Friday.

Mac

Good news! How was the trip at any rate?

Okey doke. I'm back. The trip went well. My folks set me to work on a few projects around the house, and I found a couple of my own as well. I disassembled and cleaned the old binoculars and was rewarded by a spectacular view of the Andromeda galaxy about a half an hour before moon-rise on Wednesday. Central Florida has some very nice night skys.

I expect to get back to grinding the breast and back this afternoon.

Mac

The grinding on the breast is going OK. Slow, but OK.

This brings me to an issue that developed earlier, and how I decided to fix it. Back in the rough grinding a few weeks ago (before the corrective temper procedures) I had reaped the harvest of what I had sown months earlier. I had been a bit heavy handed in working up the decorative border on the lower breastplate, and had a place where the tool had indented sharply into the back of the work. Had I been on top of things I would have made sure that the resulting "bump" on the outside of the work was hammered back to make a smooth surface. I did that in most places, but not in this one. To make a long story short, in a moment's inattention, I ground through that bump with the grinding disc.



This was very irritating. Welding it up was out of the question. I might have braised in a patch, but that would have ruined the heat treating in a broad area. I considered soft soldering in a patch, but feared how it might interact with the subsequent blacking and gilding. That left only one option and that's a rivet. Having settled on a "cold" repair, I figured there was no harm in furthering the finish while I considered things. So I went on grinding and sanding as if there were no problem while I considered the repair.

Today, I decided it was time to fix it. The first step was to regularize and chamfer the hole with a 60° countersink. I did not chamfer the inside since it would not be seen; and that gave me liberty to leave extra material there.



I was able to get the hole round at something like 3/32", and that seemed pretty encouraging. I prepared the plug by starting with a 1# tinner's rivet. The shank was a bit over 3/32", at about .112"



I've got this modified pair of vise-grips I made for filing shoulders on rivets, and I used that to hold the work while filing the end to fit the hole with a barrette file.



This left a nice shoulder that would keep the plug in place while I peened it up on the inside.



When it was sufficiently firm, I cut the waste off with a dremmel tool.



Supporting the work on the corner of the anvil, I peened it up tight from the outside.



I used a file to bring things level again. There is no longer any margin for error here, so power tools seemed inadvisable.



Here's what it looks like now that I have brought it up the the same finish as the rest of the piece. You can see it if you look for it, but for all intents and purposes, it's gone.



This fix took about 45 minutes, but it seemed longer. I'd been brooding about this for a few weeks now, and it's good to get it done.

Mac

I find repair work like that fascinating, and extraordinarily stressful! For me, I often spend more time thinking about the work, then I do actually doing the repair, at least for the more dramatic ones. It seems to work out though.

I did a major repair on a Prussian Garde du Corps helmet eagle which had been dropped. It was a hollow eagle, made up of 11 pieces of copper brazed together. I spent about 4 or five hours staring at it, planning the attack, before I resigned myself to partially cutting off the wings and working out the inside with a snarling iron. Then I spent 2 hours working up the courage to cut into a 19th century masterwork.

Once I cut into it, it was maybe 45 minutes of work to do the repairs, and another 15 of soldering up the cuts and cleaning them. At the end, I resurrected a piece that was destined for the trash bin, and the client was happy with the results! If anyone is interested, I can post before and after photos.

I also find that a good repair, even if it has minor imperfections, very satisfying, and it adds to the character of the piece. It gives it a sense of care and workmanship, and signs of a craftsman who truly cares about what he is doing.

That sounds like an interesting project, Roland. Please post (or link to) some pics so we can check it out.

Mac

Wow!! love the filework!

Zetheros wrote:Wow!! love the filework!

Thank you! It's mostly hammerwork, and the cleanup was done on the wheel. If I had relied more on the file, it would be neater, and I probably would not have ground through anywhere. Of course, I might still be filing....

Mac