The Armour Archive

Just noticed the little number in the corner... Cool! Go us!

-Gerhard

30,001 now.

P. 858, a many-posted thread on Birka lamellar and its lacing. Back in the year MM.

P. 857, everything old is new again: Bascinet Pattern, and look at the points OP (here, that'd be Ooold Poster) Holger raised.

Camail Construction Advice from Steve S. and Mad Matt. Word!

Mad Matt wrote:Buy your wire by the 1/4 mile at least it's a lot cheaper.

In the Year MM when Internet Explorer ruled the Earth.

Straps and Buckles holding legharness to a plain belt. Or military web belt. Or weight belt.

Okay, enough for now.

We started thinking about quilted camail lining in Spring 2001.

Though the word to Search on may be "aventail" if looking to see if I missed an earlier discussion back in our pp.800's where I found this.

Featuring Tim Finkas (RIP), Ernst, Ideval (probably still had his two little dots then) and Chef.

Some of the Old Guard in a heated discussion of the virtues of period helmet-stuffynge vs. Smurf blubber. December 2001.

We've sure come a long way since that one! I like the fact that the conversation ended abruptly as soon as someone actually came in and spoke up who had experience using a period liner... Ha! And I almost forgot about Rev. George. Where's that guy at?

-Gerhard

Thought he was still around.

Looks like his last post was in March 2013.

viewtopic.php?f=1&t=4035

"Bassin-Eyy." A prize headshaker this one. I'm glad we're done with it.

Hardly. Couters = OF coute = modern Fr. coude (elbow) now pronounced cood, so cooters? vs. ME spelling cowters pronounced as it's spelled? Problem being we really aren't sure how OF or ME was pronounced.

After finding a thread back then on splithead hammers, took a sniff 'round eBay.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Vintage-Raw-Hid ... 4d31ddfd35 $19.50
Garland No.2 $12.45 and no bids.
Garland No.1 $26.00
This one's a fixer-upper: not a split head; looks like you mallet your own rawhide rolls into its receptacles. Garland No.5, $24.80 Valuable detail shots, openings round the collar portions, some corrosion. For the fearless.
And just the head again, install your own G.F. Handel if he's remarkably odd shaped, $8.00 starts you on your way to a soft masher. {ETA}The rawhide'll cost you more.

Boxful of 1 1/4" rawhide faces: http://www.ebay.com/itm/GARLAND-21001-1 ... 3cc933ae81 $25.00

Couple old-school Chicago brand iron & rawhide mallets too. This one looks ready to go. $24.99
This Chicago probably wants fixing. $9.00
And/or $9.95 and get your own handle.

Not neglecting our Antipodean correspondents, a pageful of new Thors. $AUS.

Don't forget that this is not all of them.
About 8 years ago I wrote up a giant post on files, and about an hour after I hit post the site crashed and it was lost forever.
This wasn't the only data loss crash either, IIRC.

Maybe I'll do another file post at some point.

schreiber wrote:Don't forget that this is not all of them.
About 8 years ago I wrote up a giant post on files, and about an hour after I hit post the site crashed and it was lost forever.
This wasn't the only data loss crash either, IIRC.

Maybe I'll do another file post at some point.

Didn't we lose an almost an entire year, 2007 maybe?

Found the details:
JT's Thread - HOLY CRAP! What happened?????
We lost 8 months

Ernst wrote:Hardly. Couters = OF coute = modern Fr. coude (elbow) now pronounced cood, so cooters? vs. ME spelling cowters pronounced as it's spelled? Problem being we really aren't sure how OF or ME was pronounced.

I'm settling for "cow-ters," primarily because the word's timehonored enough to be thoroughly naturalized over the course of some centuries. I've said the same of "sal-ett." English sentence, English rules. French sentence, the somewhat-easier-to-keep-track-of French rules. And while you're at it, a quickie course in French anatomical vocabulary in as a sweetener.

For ME vowels, we do have some pretty solid guesses: not far off. "Must be from somewhere else in England, him."

@Schreiber -- I know the data-crashes happened, leaving some cavities in the post record. Lacunae. We can go so far as to call 'em pits. Complex system, complex problems to match, more complex to prevent. Hrm, ymmv, Humvee... Mmkay, somebody's probably got to ask: files as in mill bastard, or files as in dot-whatsit?

Konstantin the Red wrote:

Ernst wrote:Hardly. Couters = OF coute = modern Fr. coude (elbow) now pronounced cood, so cooters? vs. ME spelling cowters pronounced as it's spelled? Problem being we really aren't sure how OF or ME was pronounced.

I'm settling for "cow-ters," primarily because the word's timehonored enough to be thoroughly naturalized over the course of some centuries. I've said the same of "sal-ett." English sentence, English rules.

Merriam-Webster gives it as "cooter". (American) English sentence, SCA rules?

http://visual.merriam-webster.com/pronu ... tle=couter

And some rather Frenchified armour authorities resort to "coudière," thereby showing us they can. That'd come out "coo-dee-err."

"Voilà, monsieur, if we dip you into this sizzling caudron of fine tallow from the best boeufs, you shall be Frenchified -- "
"That's French Fried, and I'll thank you not to continue in that train of thought... whatever's cooking in there is beginning to smell really good..."

Added: Looks like Bokalo's gotten a lot better than he was. Doubt the links are hot any more, that being the way to bet. Only very occasionally are links still showing hot also good from back then.

I've ticked into the page-690's now, sampling here and there as interest takes... sometimes we gave, uh, advice we wouldn't... er, advice that was, well, bad. A lot of very elementary stuff got asked a lot back then -- frequent threads on shield bending, also frequent threads on getting rivets peined (the askers usually were bending the shanks). Many many many calls for patterns, for about anything you might think of. Especially mail.

I think we've come a ways and so have our newbs. Or the newbs are reading! happy dance

Steve S., what became of this bascinet from October 2002?

And, oo! Oo! A helm-plate bending trick from Halberds that October:

I like to put the steel over a 8" dia. pipe and smack the crap out of it with a heavy rawhide hammer.
Once I had a really stubborn back sugarloaf piece. It would just not bend to match the front. So I wrapped a rope around it and twisted it with a long 1" pipe as a Tee handle. It came together very nice.

So, git a rope!!

When Cap'n Atli was... a LT(JG)? Copied in full from Christmas Eve '02:

Guest
Post subject:
PostPosted: Tue Dec 24, 2002 9:40 pm

Back in '70 or '71 our first big break was discovering a closet full of heavy wire clothes hangers at school. Since they were surplus, and the school had no use for them, the 12 ga. wire rapidly became our first sets of mail. Two pair of plyers, a bolt cutter or heavy wire snip (the latter needing gloves) and a metal rod to wind it around were all that was needed.

It was a start, and we've been at it ever since.

------------------
Full time civil servant, part time blacksmith, and seasonal Viking ship captain.

Visit your National Parks: http://www.nps.gov

Go viking: http://www.wam.umd.edu/~eowyn/Longship/

Hit hot iron: http://www.anvilfire.com

Markland Medieval Mercenary Militia: http://www.markland.org

The early Seventies: the era of coathanger butted (of course) mail, before we encountered galvanizing. Hey, fresh galvy wire you had to buy... wire hangers were free for the taking.

Chef de Chambre giving Matthew Cross a good fisking, his post of May 9, 2003:
viewtopic.php?f=2&t=52805
From there:

Actually, for anybody with an intellect greater than a retarded baboon's, the archive is one of the greatest resources for anyone seeking information about either historical armour, sport armour, or how to make same.

Yeah. We are pretty much beyond the Baboonacy.