The Armour Archive

hi guys, i really want to make some armour ( 15th century Italian style ) but i can not find any armour plans which will fit my body. the largest plns ive gotten was for someone maximum 1.88mtall and weighing about 115kg, i am 1.95m tall and weigh 92-93kg how can i deit the plans to fit me. I dont have anyone who can show me how to make it first hand, and the only other armorer i know only does wisby coats. please help, thank you

http://nadler.us/armour/body_early_15th ... _15thC.dxf
here are the plans im workin off of

For starter you need to take accurate measurements of your body while wearing the undergarment you will wear under your armour. This mean that if you don't have it already, you need to make it first. After you have those measures, it will be easier to compare it to existing pattern and understand how to modify it, ot how to draw new ones.

good to hear, is it hard to edit plans or draw up new ones ? (in studyin to ne a cad designer, so i know how to draw plans (just not for armour). i already have the undergarments, so that wont be a problem.

I would be more worried about metal shaping skills. A milanese XV cent. harness is deed on his own.

If that would be too hard for a novice (with a lot of patients and time) what would you reccomend that is full plate? I don't really like wisby/Visby because its too much leather and leather is expensive

Will it be acceptable to have a great helm, full plate arms and legs with mittin gauntlets and a wisby/Visby coat ?

You don't have to use leather for a wisby coat. You can use fabric. For fabric a lot of people use a good wool with some kind of other heavy fabric layer for added strength. You can use cotton canvas, heavy linen, wool etc. A lot of people use a leather washer to help keep the rivets from wearing against the fabric for extra longevity.

If you're making a kit for HMB or IMCF you need to pick something to emulate, that way you don't have pieces that you can't use because they can't be documented together.

Mbmul175 wrote:If that would be too hard for a novice (with a lot of patience and time) what would you recommend that is full plate? I don't really like wisby/Visby because its too much leather and leather is expensive

With a 15th or 16th century brigandine body defense like Craig Nadler's design, mostly expect to add in more columns of scales to comport with your greater circumference -- yes, you're a big boy, tall. You're choosing well, making a defense of numerous small pieces instead of a breastplate of a large single piece or two. Sure, those work. They are also not so adjustable as a brig's design. One size does not fit most where breasts and backs are concerned.

{ETA: now that I actually paid attention to what you wrote, well, the subtraction to fit around a tall thin frame is as easy as adding on: either subtract a cm or so off the width of a brig scale or use fewer columns of scales -- and add more scales top and bottom to each column of scales to accommodate your height.}

As they said, measuring over an arming doublet made previously is the most direct, least chancy method. Almost as good but definitely sloppier is adding on 6-8cm of extra circumference to give room for a lightly padded doublet and planning within that new measurement. In a complete brigandine, you manage about that much adjustment just in the buckled fastenings.

It's always easier to make extra for size, and then trim back if needed. Brigs are supposed to overlap at the closures anyway -- no chinks in your armour! More overlap, or less, are both just fine, as long as you don't run out of overlap. There is nothing too esoteric nor subtle about making a brigandine wider, and making it taller too is just as easy as adding more scales into the columns that reach the shoulders. For the columns that rise to the armholes, strictly speaking this is a matter of taste, though you wouldn't want the armhole so big that a dagger or a sword wielded in armor-cracking mode (hand on hilt, off-hand grasping blade, and the whole thing becoming a pickaxe) could easily find its way to your lung or aorta. It pays to stay reasonable about armholes.

With the hard shell of a brigandine around you, your padded doublet need not be thick, at all. A lot of what it would do most of the time is to keep you from getting chafed by your brig's scales. Imagine it working about like a thick t-shirt.

All northern-hemisphere correspondents please note that Mbmul is in South Africa, where it is nice and warm a lot of the time and is presently in early spring.

"There is nothing too esoteric nor subtle about making a brigandine wider"
Sorry, but what does this sentence mean ?

He is saying that sizing it up isn't overly difficult. Such as adding plates for someone who is taller, or making the plates a little wider if you have a wider body type than the pattern is made for.

Patterning these armors isn't incredibly difficult either. You can make a fabric mock up of the shell then use paper or cardboard to pattern the plates so you can see how they will interact with each other.

Thanks for clearibg that up.
One guy said that you work off effigies, are there figies like the picture except with plate arms and legs instead of splints, that you know about ?

After reading about different types of gambesons, I discovered that the woman who made mine ( apparantly the best in the business) messed up royally and made me the wrong gambeson, too thick for full plate, so I have to go for a wisby/Visby coat

Amanda M wrote:He is saying that sizing it up isn't overly difficult. Such as adding plates for someone who is taller, or making the plates a little wider if you have a wider body type than the pattern is made for.

No fancy math or calculations needed -- just arbitrarily add 1cm or 5mm to the width of the scales if you'd like wider scale-columns, or alternatively put another column or two of scales into your brigandine shell. Craig Nadler suggests making the canvas shell first and then fitting the brig's scales to that next, doesn't he? We find that works for making brigandines. I like making an odd number of scale-columns, so I can have one column right on my spine, then the same number of columns of scales on both right and left sides, plus the added column of scales attached for the closure overlap, in front like a jacket.

Amanda M wrote:Patterning these armors isn't incredibly difficult either. You can make a fabric mock up of the shell then use paper or cardboard to pattern the plates so you can see how they will interact with each other.

Which is the usual way we do it if we have to resolve any questions. Cereal box cardboard is our great friend.

http://www.greece-in-photos.com/photo/1 ... -65103.htm
is this an acceptable suit of armour ? im confident that ill be able to make that without too much trouble, and not need a new gambeson, its the best of both worlds for me. would it be considdered wrong if i swapped out the chainmaille armound the neck for a goret? cause im not that fond of making chainmaille and swap out the auntlets for mittin gauntlets?

That's the famous "frankenarmour". beware of it.. at least if you go deep in the details, but if you just look at the general outlook, then it's ok.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E2oTy6dYPPE

How did you find the desired, or indicated, picture Signo? I clicked the link and got a bunch of nonsense about other pages to click on.

Is it the famous armor at the Metropolitan Museum with the red coat-of-plates?

@Mbmul -- for the armor builder, this mis-constructed late fourteenth century has both very bad points, and very good ones. Its best point is that it is very handsome to look at, and its next-best point is that yes, late-fourteenth plate armor is simpler to hammer out than the fancier, more complicated shapes of the middle fifteenth century -- your instinct is correct there.

The very bad points are in the details of the harness -- and we've compared other harness (mainly in artwork) for those details, and the mistakes can be remedied to produce a harness that you can move in even better than the Metropolitan suit.

• The mistakes in Mr. Bashford Dean's restoration/reconstruction of this armour:
  The skull of the helmet is not a 14th-c. bascinet skull, but a 15th-c. (ca. 1430-1450) great bascinet skull, with the plate covering the back of the neck being in one piece with the skull; 14th-c. camailed bascinets didn't have this extended and integral part. A 14th-c. hounskull visor has been improperly put on it. This is only really visible in a side view of this armour.
  
  A late 14th-c. bascinet would have a camail fitted to outside the bottom edge of the bascinet -- not the helmet put on over a mail hood as this restoration has it. It was as if Dean were improvising; there's a better way, as I'll list below.
  
  The plates covering the point of each shoulder seem to have been an invention of Mr. Dean himself. There are no comparable examples in artwork nor metal anywhere else. While the metal may really have been old 14th-century steel, the metal may also have been, er, reshaped. That kind of thing happened in Mr. Dean's time, when the market in antiquities was getting hot.
  
  The skirt of the red coat-of-plates (a rather distant ancestor of the genuine 15th-c. brigandine), or cuirass, is of vertical steel panels, and not what they really used, which was long, fairly narrow horizontal steel lames; vertical hard panels get in your way, horizontal lames allow you to bend over. They don't seem to have figured that out in Dean's time, in spite of having pictures and effigies to look at.

The arms and the legs seem to have been pretty good. The hourglass gauntlets probably once had scales armoring the fingers and the thumb, but these are attached by leather strips made into a finger-four shape. Leather rots, and when the leather perishes, the finger scales are lost. Down at the feet, there's probably room to debate back and forth about if they'd really be accurate to just before 1400 AD or not. I'm not good enough at that to say for sure.

The fixes for the above list are now well understood:

• Replace the great-bascinet skull with a proper bascinet of c. 1370-1399, with a camail attached. Just as handsome, more historically accurate appearance, and better protection of the neck and throat than a mail hood would give (fits too close). Extend the padded cloth lining inside the bascinet out into the shoulder parts of a hood, to line the mail camail. This gives the camail the exact appearance it has in art and statues, like the Black Prince's tomb effigy. This is a conical shape rather than a neck-to-shoulders angled silhouette: not this _| |_ but this / \.
  
  The funny shoulder plates are right out. What's very common among the historically correct designs for shoulder armor is a spaudler-like multipiece articulation at the top of the rerebrace, or upper arm armor, in the same place the true, independent spaudler was in the next century -- covering the deltoid muscle and the point of the shoulder, and not shaped like the Dean plates either. Just a neat, tidy extension of the upper arm armor. In later decades, they took this permanent articulation and made a separate, and longer, piece to armor the shoulder and overlap the rerebrace; you could turn your arm easier, more freely, this way.
  
  The skirts of the cuirass can have the same shape as the Met's armour, but just need to be constructed as a series of horizontal lames, such as may be seen in many famous artworks, like the Pistoia Silver Altarpiece, with all the armoured knights standing around in it, and waist and thigh armor made of lames very evident. Skirt, same shape; metal inside arranged differently and better.

copy pasted the "link" to google, and found a flick'r album with that photo.
A bit of Google-Fu

Thanks for the frankenarmour video, I'll make sure to make it right

Pistoia Altarpiece:

The man on the left, looking at the man with the upraised hand, is probably wearing cuirbouilli on his torso rather than metal. Such leather-based armor has a certain look and certain shapes distinguishable from equivalent harness of steel.

Here's a breastplate and fauld of the gesturing knight's type. You wouldn't need the triangular extension, though. (see also "nad tasset" by Search, here)

How much torso retailoring you'd actually do depends on your individual proportions -- whether your 7cm of greater height over 188cm is mostly in your body or mostly in your legs. And on your chest and waistline measurements -- these taken together will give how tall and how wide your brig's canvas shell will have to be, to be both long enough for you and wide enough to get around you, plus the overlap I mentioned at the front or side closure.

You then fill in the brigandine shell with the scales. It's all rather elementary, not a matter of elaborate, technical engineering. It's cut and try. Look for it to fit on you smoothly and close, not with too much space inside for you to fill it up.

Shaping armor isn't as hard as it might seem. Make your original pattern out of poster board, then make a rough draft out of scrap metal: Without an experienced armorer's help, this first attempt often won't come out quite right. After you've screwed up one or two pieces, you'll start to understand how the metal prefers to move.
I'd start by making spaulders: They're one of the more forgiving pieces of armor when you're learning and don't take much metal.

When studying the armor you want to replicate, remember that the pieces generally slide over one another. They may hinge on rivets (look online to see how best to rivet an articulated joint), may have hidden leather strips holding them in place, or both. Rivets on the exterior will often show where hidden leather was attached.

Do you need advice about what tools would be best?

Thanks for allghe advice, I think I'll stick with the corrected frankenarmour style suit. It just looks more badass that a full suit of shiny plates.
Is 1.5mm 304stainless steel thick enough for a bascinet with a pigface visor ?

Also, I'd be more okay with dings on a 14th century suit than on full plate

For thickness it will depend on what you are going to do with it. If you plan on participating in HMB or IMCF there are rules for minimum thickness depending on material so you need to hit up the rules before you commit to anything.

Mbmul175 wrote:Thanks for all the advice . . . Is 1.5mm 304stainless steel thick enough for a bascinet with a pigface visor ?

It helps that it's stainless, yes.

We'd recommend 2mm for the helmet skull. If you can get 1,75mm or so for the visor and the rest, use that for durability and safety on your helmet, but you can get along with 1,5 stainless on a visor for a while at least. If the entire helmet is of 2mm it will last a long time and will be very very strong; being a bit heavy is no bad thing in a helmet to help preserve your brains from concussion.

1,5mm is very good for vulnerable or deep-formed pieces (e. g., gauntlet knuckles, with the rest of the gaunt in 1mm) on body and limbs; try 1mm for less exposed spots; it's okay for breast and back, and a very good choice for vambraces on your arms and greaves on your legs; too much weight out on the ends of your limbs makes running difficult and your sword slow, so look to take weight away from out there with thinner metal.