Today I refamiliarized myself with the shoulders.
Let's step back a few years. At the very first fitting session this is what the shoulder and upper arm assemblies looked like.
This is the amount that they would flex. I found it worked OK on me, but that test only works if the armorer and the customer are the same size.
Unfortunately, this was just not going to do it. The upper arms were too tight, and a bit too short as well. The pauldrons themselves were a bit small, but I was prepared to ignore that.
The first thing I did was to decide that the upper arm lames were essentially scrap. This freed them up to be used a templates and models. I then cut the seams apart and spread them till they had a better circumference.....
....and made some notes about how much needed to be added to the width of each lame to make the length of the upper arm come out right.
Then, while my August Patron was being a tourist in the Greater Philly Area, I built a new set of upper arms. This is, by the way, an excellent way to organize a fitting if your client is willing to be in town for a few days. You try everything you have prepared, and if something needs rebuilding, your client gets to see the sights for a day while you work frantically in solitude.
The new upper arms fit
better.... but the range of motion was insufficient. And this is where we ran out of fitting time.
Several years elapse during which time ....I have a rather unsuccessful surgery on my right elbow.... and then my left elbow starts giving me the same sort of trouble....and I take it easy and try not to do anything to hurt myself... and in a couple of years my elbows start to feel a bit better but I am afraid to do anything .... and then my Patron reminds me that we are not getting any younger (which is very true)....and I start the project back up again.
In picking the project back up, we decide that as a fallback position, we would try a more conventional sort of upper arm/pauldron arrangement. You all may remember that I made new upper arms a few months ago. Well... That was a bust too. The new upper arms look nice.
....but their range of motion is even worse than the "MK II tubes within tubes" arms. And, of course, it's not what's on the statue.
Following some of the suggestions of James Arlen G., I began tweaking the articulation of the left MKII "tubes" arm, and found that I could get more out of it than I had.
But, this motion comes at a cost. The inside view shows how much the edges of the lames/tubes intrude on the wearer's space.
About that time, I tried the armor on our local body double, Galleron. The thing I learned from this is that I had the arms set too far forward on the pouldrons and there was not enough space at the front of the shoulders. I was going to need to make new pouldrons, and this would be the opportunity to make them be bigger.
These pics show the difference between the old and new pauldrons.
The plan is to make yet another set of "tubes within tubes" upper arms see if I can get them to work this time. The hope is that the additional room I am building into the fronts of the new pouldrons will give enough clearance for the whole thing to flex sufficiently.
I will begin templating them this evening and hope to be shaping steel tomorrow.
Mac
