The Armour Archive

As I said earlier, the grinding and polishing is proceeding. The cuirasse is now at the stage we might call "rough polish". This is grey emery compound on a sisal buff. It's shiny, but there is a distinct "grain" to it. Later, everything will get a finer polish with cotton buffs, and perhaps a finer compound as well. It's always hard to know when to quit.

The blue tape is there to keep the parts from scratching one another while I mess with them.



Next, I will turn my attention to heat treating another batch of parts. This will also give my hands and elbows a bit of a break. Holding things up to the buffing wheel is strenuous work for an old guy. When you are young, arthritis is just a word.

I think the next group to go into the kiln will include the bevor and the four remaining tassets.



That seems a bit "light", and I will include something else to make it worth heating up the kiln. Right now, I am thinking it will probably be the gauntlets. They will need a bit more prep work than the other items. The fingers of the left hand will have to be disassembled and all of the finger parts parts from both gauntlets strung up on wires. That zippy bag in the foreground contains all the parts of the right fingers as well as their templates. All of these parts will need to be given identification marks so I won't have any occasion to try something stupid when it comes time to assemble them in a couple months. I will also need to make holes for the cuff strap and buckle as well an any holes that will be needed for the lining gloves.



Mac

Meanwhile.... the postman has delivered some buffing an polishing wheels. I ordered these the other day when I noticed that my sisal wheels were getting small, and my cotton wheels have disappeared.



These new wheels have 3/4" holes, and my machine has a 1/2" arbor. I will be turning up some sort of adapters on the lathe, but I'm not sure what form they will take yet.



These wheels come from PJ Tool & Supply's Ebay store (pjtoolbox). The prices were good. I'll report on how well they work in the fullness of time.

Mac

Great update, Mac!

I think that I used a short piece of 1/2" hose as my mandrel adapter.

- Scott

Hose! There's an interesting idea. Is it accurate enough?

I have rethought the idea of making any sort of adapter bushings, though, and have a couple of plastic ones coming in the mail. They cost more than they have a right to, but they are still cheaper than making something on the lathe if my time is worth anything.

Mac

Today is a heat treating day. The items are all wired up and ready to go.

The gauntlets are suspended by a wire attached to loops on the wrist pivots so that they hang at a good angle to enter the quench.



The tassets are wired through their buckle mounting holes.



I had some trouble deciding how I would wire up the finger parts, but in the end, this is what I did.



Each of these bundles contains the parts for one type of finger, ie. both thumbs, or both first fingers etc. The parts are all marked inside with punches to let me identify them later.



The bevor will be presented upside down. This should reduce the chances that the bib plate will bend in the kiln. It looks a bit like there is a danger of air cetting caught in the chin when the piece is quenched, so I did some "wet runs" of this suspension into the slack tub to see it it's a problem. The bevor sinks nicely, and without any hesitation, so I satisfied that it will not be a problem. Note that I have used two thicknesses of (16ga) wire. The bevor is heavy enough that I don't think it wise to trust a single thickness. It looks like three thicknesses, but that's just how I dealt with the loose ends.



The quench is almost up to temp (100°f) and the kiln is heating. The kiln, the quench heater, the tempering range, and the shop heaters all work on electricity. I'm not really sure what I can get away with in terms of having all these things on at once, so I start the process with the quench heater and only one of the room heaters. When the quench is nearly up to temp. I shut off the room heat and turn on the kiln. When the kiln is up to temp, I will preheat the range.

Mac

Good luck! Don't forget to pour cold water over your head to please the gods!

Thanks! I've considered the bucket of cold water, but rejected it. I hope I'm making a good decision.

The kiln is up to about 1650°f., so it turned it back to medium on all three switches and turned the range to 450°f. When the range is hot, I'll see where the kiln has fallen to and adjust the switches appropriately.

Mac

Earlier today, while waiting for things to heat up, I made a new hook to get the work in and out of the kiln.



It's a one-hander, for light work. I'm not really satisfied with it, but it worked well enough.



Mac

So far as I can tell, the hardening went OK. All of the parts were heated to 1450°f. and quenched at about 100°f in the usual aqueous polymer. They then spent about ten or fifteen minutes in the range at 450° or 500°. realistically, they probably only got up to about 350°, but that will do for now.



I'm going back out to finish the tempering at 750° now.

Mac

All of today's parts have been tempered at about 750°f. As you can see from the clamps, I did a bit of correction to the gauntlet cuff extension plates already. There is more correction to do on some of the other parts as well. The tassets have flattened a bit, and I am working on an idea to deal with that.



Mac

Now that the AA is back online, (yea ) I will file my Tuesday report.

There's always something that needs fixing after the hardening. We see here that the right front tasset still fits OK, but the left one has flattened a bit and that will need attention.



I decided that the best way to deal was to make up a fixture that would simulate the curve of the fauld and clamp the tasset to that for another tempering. That fixture took the form of a length of 1"x1/8" angle iron, bent to fit the fauld. I shaped it up using a torch and a leg vise. The only hard part was not getting too much curve: it's easy to make it more curved, but a bugger to make it less curved.

Nota bene, blue painter's tape does fine form keeping the work from getting scratched, but it will burn if the hot angle iron touches it. When that happens, it leaves a stain that needs to be polished out with the black emery and sisal wheel. The tenacity of the stain was a bit of a surprise. I guess that the water and other combustion products actually etched the surface



I cut a slot in the corner or the angle iron for the point of the tasset to sit in.



With the tasset clamped to the fixture, I figured I could just slap it into the range at 500° and forget about it for an hour or so.



That turned out not to be the case. I don't know if 500 is just not hot enough, if the work never got that hot, or if an hour at that temp is insufficient. Whatever the truth of it is, the tasset did not take the hint.

So... I reinstalled a wire to get in in and out of the kiln, and let it soak at 750° for 15 minutes.



That worked just fine.



One of the side tassets needed a bit of reeducating as well. I found that I could get away with using the same fixture as long as I did not clamp it down all the way.



Mac

No pics from Wednesday.... just grinding and polishing the tassets. I hope to have that under control by this evening.

Mac

Neat work with the angle iron. Curving that evenly is impressive!

So Mac I have been wondering about your unloading & quenching procedues.
For the one item loads it seems pretty straightforward but this looks to be 12 seperate things. Can you explain your procedure and how you arrived at it?

Mac wrote:So far as I can tell, the hardening went OK. All of the parts were heated to 1450°f. and quenched at about 100°f in the usual aqueous polymer. They then spent about ten or fifteen minutes in the range at 450° or 500°. realistically, they probably only got up to about 350°, but that will do for now.



I'm going back out to finish the tempering at 750° now.

Mac

Tom B. wrote:......but this looks to be 12 seperate things. Can you explain your procedure and how you arrived at it?

It is 12 separate loads. That's why is took much of the day to do.

Each of these items gets the following treatment.....
--The kiln is allowed to get to a temperature above the target temp. That will be about 50° to 100° for small items and 150° or more for big ones.
--The lid is lifted with the foot pedal and the item swung into the kiln with the hook.
--The lid is closed carefully so as not to let is slam.
-- (during that time, the temp will have fallen significantly)
--I watch the temperature climb back up until it reaches the target (1450° in this case)
--If, when "crack" the lid with the foot pedal, the steel is not the same color as the kiln walls, I close the kiln and wait for the temp to come up again. Sometimes this needs to be repeated more than once.
--If the steel looks hot enough and the heat is even, I remove the work with the hook
--I swing the work into the quench as rapidly as I can, and pump it up and down to speed the heat transfer
--At the same time I let the lid or the kiln close with careful pressure on the foot pedal. (this really cries out for a mechanical damper, perhaps the sort that goes on hatchbacks, but I haven't installed one)
--When the steel is no longer steaming and sizzling, I swing the work into the slack tub, making sure to quench the end of the hook as well.
--The polymer film that got "dragged out" of the quench is scrubbed off in the slack tub with a brush.
--The item is then put into the range at 450° or 500° for 10 or 15 minutes.
--While that's happening, I put the next item into the kiln.
--Meanwhile, I try to take meaningful notes on the session.

If I did this sort of thing often enough, I would build some sort of fixture to hang all of the finger lame bundles so that I could treat them as one item. Next time, perhaps.

Mac

Johann ColdIron wrote:Neat work with the angle iron. Curving that evenly is impressive!

Thanks! It wasn't really difficult, just tedious.

Mac

I got to where I had hoped to get this evening. The front tassets and the side tassets are all up to the same polish as the rest of the armor.



I have begun stamping my mark on any part that can be separated from the armor.



Mac

12 seperate loads was the only thing that made sense to me but it was not 100% clear, I though that I might be missing something.

Thanks for the detailed explanation

Mac, Why did you choose to stamp your Maker's Mark there instead of somewhere more innocuous like a corner?

I try to mark armor in the places where I have seen real ones marked. Here are some examples where you can see the maker's mark on a tasset.





All these are Italian work, and I more or less adopted that custom years ago. I'm really not sure where (or if) the Germans marked their tassets.

Mac

None of those images work. Just x's on the screen for me. But that answer does make sense.

Mac wrote: I'm really not sure where (or if) the Germans marked their tassets.

Oh god.
No-one do the research that shows they're in the wrong place, or these ones will end up on the Reject Pile too...

Ckanite wrote:None of those images work. Just x's on the screen for me.

Working fine for me here.

Ckanite wrote:None of those images work. Just x's on the screen for me. But that answer does make sense.

I may have pulled all of those images from pinterest boards. Is it that folks who are not using pinterest can't see them? It so, I will try to go back and replace them with the same images from other sources.

In the mean time, see if you can pick up a URL by right clicking on where the image should be and pasting it into a Google image search. Does that work?

Mac

Suzerain wrote:

Mac wrote: I'm really not sure where (or if) the Germans marked their tassets.

Oh god.
No-one do the research that shows they're in the wrong place, or these ones will end up on the Reject Pile too...

Touché!

Mac

they work for me

I'll try checking on my phone when I get home from the office. Might fix it. and yeah... I would hate to see those go into the waste pile. What do you think was the logic behind placing them like that? Whenever I put my mark on something, I try and put it on the piece as inconspicuously as possible as to not interrupt the presentation that I spent so long working to perfection... but that could just be me...

Mark location seems to be something that differs between our sensibilities and theirs. They seemed to just whack them in there where they would show. The location wanders a bit over time, but the idea is pretty similar.

Right at the top of the breastplate. Wham!

It does seem that the Germans didn't get into the idea as much as the Italians in the 15th c. The Italians really loved to mark things.

Things seem to change in the 16th c. That is what I see the most of.

Wade

p.s. I don't do Pinterest, but I can see the images posted.

Hmm. I see them on my phone. Wade, do you know if there was any attempt ever to standardize where the marks would go? Or did is vary from shop to shop or person to person or did no one else even think of it?

Of course you want your mark to show! It is your logo, you want people to see it so they will remember it when it is time for a new armour.

Ckanite wrote: Whenever I put my mark on something, I try and put it on the piece as inconspicuously as possible as to not interrupt the presentation that I spent so long working to perfection... but that could just be me...

The answer is almost never "that's just me". We are all products of our culture, and I think that most modern First World artisans sign their work over in a corner somewhere.

The big difference between us and historical armorers is whether we think of our work as "Art" or "manufacture goods". Antonio Missaglia didn't think he was making art any more then Henry Ford did, so they both just signed their products front and center.

Now... if you really want to see the other end of the spectrum, check out how the German guilds marked work that met with their approval. Sometimes the guild stamps even distort or crush the decoration. (I'm not finding any good images online right now... perhaps Wade has something in his collection)

Mac

Mac wrote:Now... if you really want to see the other end of the spectrum, check out how the German guilds marked work that met with their approval. Sometimes the guild stamps even distort or crush the decoration. (I'm not finding any good images online right now... perhaps Wade has something in his collection)

Mac

One that I have been talking with Piotr Feret about about is Wade's A-19 http://www.allenantiques.com/images/A-19-marks.jpg

Lots of people today put the Adidas swoosh or Apple apple front and centre, right? If the 'brand' is a mark of quality in a mass-produced good, you flaunt it. Its only 'bespoke' items like a tailored suit or a painting where we are more subtle.

I started grinding the bevor last night, and am continuing it today. It turns out that I've dealt myself a difficult hand with that border on the bib plate. I can't get in there with any of my usual methods, and it looks like it's all going to have to happen with a Dremel tool.



When we apply the maxim "if you cant get a grinding wheel in there then you shouldn't have made it that way", it looks like I should have had a different idea months ago. Oh well. I still think it accords nicely with the border on the lower breast, and it will look very unified when I am through with this tedious process.

Mac

Mac wrote:

Ckanite wrote: Whenever I put my mark on something, I try and put it on the piece as inconspicuously as possible as to not interrupt the presentation that I spent so long working to perfection... but that could just be me...

The answer is almost never "that's just me". We are all products of our culture, and I think that most modern First World artisans sign their work over in a corner somewhere.

The big difference between us and historical armorers is whether we think of our work as "Art" or "manufacture goods". Antonio Missaglia didn't think he was making art any more then Henry Ford did, so they both just signed their products front and center.

Now... if you really want to see the other end of the spectrum, check out how the German guilds marked work that met with their approval. Sometimes the guild stamps even distort or crush the decoration. (I'm not finding any good images online right now... perhaps Wade has something in his collection)

Mac

http://www.allenantiques.com/A-212.html
specifically:
http://www.allenantiques.com/images/A-212-marks.jpg

The marks are pretty deep, but the holes bellow the neck line are really painful to see.

As to standardization... well, in the 16th c. it appears that generally our guild buddies liked the cop center of the breastplate and back plate, or the comb of the burgonet. Gauntlet cuffs near the end seem popular... I have seen a burg/close thing that is stamped on the chin.

I expect that it went in phases, and we can't be certain how many marks were done a little later, or a lot later. I have a nice deep James II mark on a lobster tailed pot that Richardson indicates were whacked in with great abandon on everything (or at least many things) lying in the arsenal at the time. No matter when they were made. It is DEEP.

Wade

Lorenz and Kolman Helmschmid were remarkably bad about marking their work, which has led to some attribution problems. It was long believed that the 'Sigismund gothic' harness (A 62 KMW) was the work of Hans Gruenwalt. Funny thing; Gruenwalt has to be the most famous platner who has left almost nothing we can attribute to him for certain.