Here is my big file-of-links. I am very thankful to folks like Mac who take time to go back and boil down their threads / posts.
Mac and Charlotte on avoiding the diaper look
viewtopic.php?f=16&t=164027&start=51 Avoiding the 'Diaper' Look with the phrases "fundamental" and "decent"
Mac and Chris Gilman on how to tailor a camail or aventail
viewtopic.php?f=1&t=80687&hilit=aventail A- D&C "How to deal with maille around face-Aventail"
Overlapping and underlapping faulds
viewtopic.php?f=1&t=177258 A- D&C "Did late 14th century faulds overlap or underlap?"
Mad Matt on the secret of armouring (take a piece of metal. Hit it until it looks like it should look).
viewtopic.php?f=1&t=175798 A- D&C "everything you'll ever need to know about how to shape armor"
Mac on knees and James Aarlen on the ergonomic deficiencies of XV German armour
viewtopic.php?f=1&t=177824 A- D&C "Designing a knee, trying to get it right"
Several people on SCA silhouettes
viewtopic.php?f=1&t=154661 A- D&C "On SCA Silhouettes"
See! This is the sort of thing we are up against. As soon and somebody mentions "squeezing in the waist" somebody else says "corsets" and next thing ya' know, everybody's worried that we want to take out their short ribs and squish 'em til their uteruses prolapse.
Seriously, here is how to find out just how much you can squeeze the waist.....
----Cut out two "L" shaped pieces of plywood and clamp them together to form a sort of caliper. If you have two framing squares, that will work as well.
----adjust the width between the "arms" of your ersatz caliper to be just smaller than your waist (your "skeletal waist" as defined in my post above)
----try it on
----bend from side to side
----take it off and make it tighter
----try it on again
----repeat the process, making it tight and tighter
----when you have it so tight that it hurts to bend, it is too tight
----loosen the caliper until you can bend without pain
The ultimate narrowness of the waist of the armor is limited on the one side by the ribs and pelvis coming together as you bend, and on the other side by the abdominal muscles stretching tightly across corresponding place. As long as it does not actually hurt, you can really wear it that narrow. You will be surprised at how narrow this is.
When you make the armor to that width, you will find it is more comfortable than the caliper because the armor waist will not be as "sharp" as the measuring instrument was.
For really lean guys, the armor will only be about an inch narrower than they are buck naked. For most of us, it will be between 2 and 4 inches narrower than we appear under those circumstances....and that make a really big difference in how an armor will look.
Several people on precision including Mac "This made me smile. It's been over thirty years since I thought hinges "should" have interchangeable parts."
viewtopic.php?f=1&t=178070&p=2716979#p2716979
A- D&C "Precision in craftsmanship"
Mac on beveled edges
viewtopic.php?f=1&t=177831&p=2714390#p2714390 "Real armor almost invariably has its outside arrises beveled to some degree. The better sort of real armor has its inside arrises beveled as well."
Mac on bascinet shapes relative to the skull
viewtopic.php?f=4&t=154000 (Mark G. comments that sport armourers tend to want to place the bascinet to allow more vision) " Armor is always a three way compromise of "Wearability", "Defense", and "Style". So long as the first two principles are not to badly trodden upon, Style will always win out. In the final analysis, I think we have to conclude that they thought it looked cool that way."
Photos of the Statue of St. George in Prague
viewtopic.php?f=1&t=132598
Covered cuirasses and Mac on how to read photos
viewtopic.php?f=1&t=173764
Mac on raising
viewtopic.php?f=1&t=175534&p=2681853#p2681853
Mac on how to be a good client at a fitting
viewtopic.php?f=1&t=176431&p=2693680#p2693680
Various on covered cuirasses with globulose chests
viewtopic.php?f=1&t=176086
Randall and Mac on closed cuisses in XIV
viewtopic.php?f=4&t=177016
Varii on the shape of greaves
viewtopic.php?f=1&t=177194&p=2705955#p2705955
A thread on articulating bracers in the 14th century
viewtopic.php?f=1&t=170292&p=2713442#p2713442
Mac on the Lyle bascinet
viewtopic.php?f=4&t=177632&p=2710535#p2710535
Aventail linings
viewtopic.php?f=4&t=163273&hilit=pisane
Mac suggests that he counts photos which he does not already have as $5 and buys an armour book if it pays for itself in photos
viewtopic.php?f=4&t=166371
Many smart people on authenticity and appropriateness
viewtopic.php?f=4&t=157029
Various on front-opening cuirasses
viewtopic.php?f=4&t=175840&p=2686212&hi ... g#p2686212
Attaching aventails and camails to rounded bascinets/cevelliers
viewtopic.php?f=1&t=173160&p=2645534&hi ... s#p2645534
Rare painting of black helmets next to white helmets, France circa 1370
http://manuscriptminiatures.com/4053/11455/
Debate about whether a video library would be a good idea
viewtopic.php?f=1&t=58034&p=742158&hili ... th#p742158 (criticism of the MET photos of raising a helmet from 1915)
Gaps between the lames as an elbow articulates
viewtopic.php?f=1&t=177905&p=2715193&hi ... w#p2715193
Mac on sketching
viewtopic.php?f=1&t=158178&hilit=beard
Mac on his work circa 1984
viewtopic.php?f=1&t=172120&hilit=purple
Various on the development of SCA armour
viewtopic.php?f=1&t=15890
Reproduction of Wade's 1560s Augsburg gorget
viewtopic.php?f=1&t=157286&hilit=gorget
Mac on the width of a cuirass at different levels
viewtopic.php?f=1&t=178435&p=2722646&hi ... e#p2722646
Mac on Can/house construction of helmets
viewtopic.php?f=1&t=170835&hilit=house&start=35
Wade and others on people's inability to see the difference between an original and a bad reproduction
viewtopic.php?f=1&t=176093&p=2691043
Various on how to avoid joint and tendon damage
viewtopic.php?f=1&t=169453&p=2580131&hi ... n#p2580131
Mac and Wade on curves in three dimentions. Wade mentions that he makes vambraces with compoud curves without a fancy stake
viewtopic.php?f=1&t=160040
Various on keyhole and shallow pointed visors
viewtopic.php?f=4&t=178752&p=2725402
Wade on Tools
viewtopic.php?f=1&t=167031&p=2539737&hi ... t#p2539737
I haven't had the energy to write up some ideas I have had about tools. I happen to have an annoyingly reasonable set to play with, but most of it isn't actually necessary. I did an afternoon recently with a local trying to boil things down to what you really, really need. It is a lot like the list above, but it works from "what you need to do" instead of "what tools I need" because there are lots of ways to do the same thing and a lot of different tools that can do the same thing.
Other than the basics:
Something to use to draw what you want to do
Something to make patterns
Something to cut the metal
Something to curl metal (where necessary)
Something to allow you to do 3D shaping of metal (almost always necessary)
Something to allow you to smooth the metal
Something to allow you to grind out the marks you put in doing the rest of the stages
Something to allow you to put holes in metal
Then things that will allow you to finish like doing leather work, buckles, hinges, and the rest.
Picking a specific first item, drawing it and thinking about how the metal needs to move will lead to what tools you need.
For example - curl metal.
A piece of pipe (with a way to hold it)
A piece of large bar stock (again, with a way to hold it).
A pipe stake (the real tool version of the two above)
A bickhorn (a nice version of the above with a cool taper on the end and a useful flat back end)
A slip roller
A bending fork (two pieces of metal with a slot in between to allow you to slide the metal in and bend)
Something with a groove and something to hit the metal with. The crudest of this can be a dent in the ground, or if you don't care about the finish or road, the curb on a street.
For armour, I find the horn of an anvil to be worse than most of the lower-end things. It is to short, tapers to fast and the body of the anvil gets in the way for most things.
There are lots of possible expensive and cheap ways to do the same thing.
So pick something and start from there.
If you can find someone near you who is making armour, you can get a lot of ideas from talking with them or seeing their tools. But don't let what they have limit you. I find that most armourers do similar things, but many of them to things in slightly different ways with slightly different tools - even when they have previously worked with each other.
Wade on making children's armour in four days:
viewtopic.php?f=1&t=179025&p=2728618
That "armour" was accomplished quickly because it leaves out almost all of the hard parts of making armour. It is really more 14th c. esque than anything else.
...
The breastplate was straight dished. No attempt to maintain metal thickness where it should be.
The arms (except for the elbows) are all flat metal. Cut, fold the edges and roll up to shape.
The pieces (arms, legs, breastplate, spaulders) were taken from patterns I had lying around put into the copier at 50%, so no patterning work (except for the helmet).
And when you are planning a quick piece with a PB-80 (scratch) finish, you can get away with pretty minimal finishing work on most of the pieces.
Add to that the fact that I used commercial buckles and mounted the buckles wrong - using loops of leather, not the right metal mounting plates. Since there were no inner plates on the vambraces and no back plates on the cuisses, the armour needed no hinges.
The number of straps was minimized. I didn't put any in the elbow or knee (there should be straps there).
Suspension tabs on the arms, spaulders and cuisses were omitted. I just put holes through which I passed thongs for suspension.
The helmet lining was just some open-cell foam strips glued into the skull. I didn't make a tow-stuffed lining, and I didn't sew it to the skull.
On the other hand the armour is made of steel. It is formed by hand with no power tools other than the grinder/polisher. To most people (other than those here) it appears to actually be an armour.
So, when you start with patterns, only have to do about 1/4 of the work, keep the finish rough, and don't have to make or correctly mount buckles or hinges, you eliminate a lot of the work that actually goes into making a correct armour.
That armour is a pretty good example of how something that can look like armour, but really not require all of the actual work of making armour that is really correct. It should be relatively simple for many people to build armour for children or even armour for the SCA to this relatively low level of construction or authenticity.
wade and schreiber on raising with and without heat
viewtopic.php?f=1&t=179131
Two quick points.
1. I can hot raise without mouse ears on. I don't do it as a rule but I can. I cannot dish without them.
2. If you haven't made a riveted helm, make one. Tools required are not as specialized, they're really quite fun... and despite what you're probably thinking, you really don't know how to do it until you've done it. It is very much worth it and the sense of accomplishment is no smaller. It takes craftsmanship just like raised helms.
...
I think that maybe something should be clarified. When people say "it is a lot faster to raise hot" they really mean it. A lot really doesn't tell you what they really mean. A lot means A LOT. I haven't raised cold in so long I can't provide a valid time difference, but for something like a helmet I expect we are probably talking about .... 1/10 the time? Something like that.
And the noise difference isn't close either. Hot raising is civilized. You can talk about it if you have anyone who cares to listen while you are doing it. Cold raising steel is loud like cold dishing.
Toby on his career where he says that the Mac Black harness was his only harness at the time, and that his only income was from museum curating and jousting (!)
viewtopic.php?f=1&t=46753&start=35
When it was sold at auction in 2006 auction 51 lot number 2155 the starting price was 30,000 Euros but it did not sell
http://www.hermann-historica.de/registe ... p?id=27746 http://www.hermann-historica-archiv.de/ ... _kat_p.txt
Wade and Mac on integral buckles in the 14th century
viewtopic.php?f=1&t=126677&hilit=Chartres&start=35 Mentions effigy of Sir John de St. Quintin (1397) by name and what we now call Met Museum accession number 29.150.19 (not by name) as well as the armour in Chartres Cathedral.
100% Textiles List from 2008
viewtopic.php?f=4&t=89965
Modern equivalents of 14th century silks
viewtopic.php?f=4&t=65272
Greaves with staples for a strap at the back: Doug Strong has #1668 which was found with other objects in the style of the late 14th century
http://talbotsfineaccessories.com/cgi-b ... 68&cartID= and
viewtopic.php?f=4&t=150994&p=2283917&hi ... e#p2283917 Pins and staples on greaves
Greave fitting: mcallen "Much better (as Mac said) to have the greave support its own weight. You really shouldn't be trying to hang the greave from the cuisse, the other way around works better (supporting the cuisse a little from the bottom)." Thread contains theorized and schynbald
Konstantin the Red "The best suspension points [for cuisses] are port and starboard at your jeans outseam, perhaps supplemented by two more a bit forward of that, like just behind where your jeans pockets curve up to meet your waistband. Farther forward on your hips than that becomes too changeable in length and your cops don't stay on your knees." in '"Hanging your legs" question'
viewtopic.php?f=1&t=164811&p=2502218&hi ... e#p2502218
Wade Allen on planning a 16th century armour:
viewtopic.php?f=3&t=182895&p=2776669&hi ... n#p2776669
Personally, I would look for someone who has done things in the past that look like what you want.
Then I would see how they want to work with you. A lot of this will depend on what you really want. 16th c. esque SCA armour, or 16th c. armour. Also, what part of the 16th c. There are common techniques used in a 1510 Italian armour and a 1590 Augsburg one, but the actual armour is pretty much different in every way.
At some point you will have to decide on an order of things. (almost) no one is willing to wait for a whole armour to be completed, and almost no armourer can afford to wait that long for money. If you are being mean, you could tell them what you want and ask them to start with the pauldrons. If they say yes, go somewhere else.
In your friend's case Morion with breast/back and tassets, I expect that whether they know it or not they are looking for 1580-1600. Italian and German based styles aren't that different, but they are different.
I could skew a morion back to at least the 1560's, but the shape probably isn't quite what the customer is expecting.
Details will also matter a lot. Black/rough from the hammer? Black and white? Polished? Plain or roped borders? recessed borders? sliding gussets, fixed gussets, or integral rolls on the breast? Etc. Etc.
Finding someone who does all of the details the way you like and with whom you can agree will govern how satisfied you are with the result.
Oh, and mild? Stainless? Spring? Tempered? Those will affect who you should work with too.
I also expect any good piece is going to involve some waiting.
And a really correct shape and fit will involve some in-person time between the customer and the armourer.
Oh, and while I am at it. You skipped the gorget. Either you need integral collar with the cuirass, or you will want a gorget. And it has to be done first. If the person offers to do it later if you want it, also a good sign that you should go somewhere else.
I could probably ramble on....
Wade
Using the Icefalcon Riveted Mail Tool (A- D&C)
viewtopic.php?f=1&t=152341
Making needles for sewing leather
viewtopic.php?f=1&t=173435&hilit=pliers
1st post and maille question
viewtopic.php?f=1&t=168190
A-D&C Raising Armour like Chocolate Pudding
viewtopic.php?f=1&t=184915&p=2803489&hi ... t#p2803489
mac: Like the guys are saying, raising from sheet is probably a modern technique. It dates back to the availability of rolled sheet.
The basic problem is that we all learned to make armor from reading modern books on silver and copper smithing. Those books all date from well after the time when sheet metal was readily available.
In all likelihood, the helmet makers of old worked up a heavy plate from the inside until it was deep enough and then raised in the sides. If the initial work is done with brutal efficiency, the resulting helmet blank will have a rather uneven wall thickness. At that point the armorer's job is to make the outside look good without regard to what the inside looks like. The result is that the irregularities of thickness are all pushed to the inside of the helmet (or breastplate for that matter) where they are left to amaze and astound us modern folks.
It's a bit disheartening to learn that everything we "know" about helmet making is probably wrong, but It time we just suck that up and move on. On the plus side, you can tell your customers that raising vessels from sheet is only about 150 years older than oxyacetylene welding, so you're not going to bust your arse and ruin your elbows doing it that way anymore.
I'm working up a Youtube playlist which includes material on traditional (pre-sheet metal) production of volumetric shapes.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=P ... hedoxU4W1A
Mac
A-D&C Dishing Steel- On a Flat Anvil?
http://forums.armourarchive.org/phpBB2/ ... &p=1051740
A- D&C Some questions about the munich covered breastplate
The neck of the breastplate should be as high as it can be while not resting on the place where your sternomastoid muscles attach to your sternum. To find out where that is, pull your head forcibly forward and feel where the muscles are.
Are your torso tracings verified with caliper measurements? If so, then you have drawn the armor too wide. The widest part under the arms should be the width of your chest when you take a deep breath. If you make it too wide there it will interfere with putting your arms at your sides more than it must.
Pursuant to the above; the waist should be as narrow as it can be. Get a scrap of plywood or MDF and cut a waist sized "notch" in it. Shove this onto your waist and see if it fits. If you can't fit it on at all, it's too narrow and you need to cut it a bit wider. Open it up bit by bit till you can "wear" it. If it fits OK, but hurts when you bend from side to side, it's probably still a bit narrow. If it's perfectly comfortable, it's too wide.
Put your arms out in front of your and lay your hands on opposite elbows. The distance between your arms, right where your pectorals insert to your humeri is the width to make the upper breast. Most people make this too narrow.... beware.
The width of the back at the top can be significantly wider than the corresponding with of the breast. Hold your arms out at your sides and than try bringing them back as far as they go. This should convince you that the back can be pretty wide. Most people make this too narrow as well... beware again.
There is a range of fauld lengths for this sort of armor. If they fall to the level of the hip joints, they can be made very close fitting, but you may want to extend the front with one of those triangular appendages that vulgar modern armorers call a DPU. If you want it to cover all the way down to the glutial fold in back, the fauld will have to be a bit wider to allow you to spread your legs a bit before the fauld has to collapse.
A- D&C -> 16th C Cuirasses, and gaps at waist
viewtopic.php?f=1&t=99122&p=1390604
Those gaps are pretty common on armors from the first half of the 16th c. I've always worried about them, myself. Here are my thoughts on them...
-As Alcyoneous says, they make the waist look really slim.
-They are easier to get into, because you don't have as much trouble squeezing your waist into the backplate.
-They are less inclined to pinch ones clothing and flesh at the waist when the breastplate is cinched uptight to the back.
-They are easier to make, because the most difficult anticlastic curvature of the waist lame is simply not there.
-It is my impression that this construction is more prevalent on cheaper armors, but this is by no means universal." - mac
"When you buy a shirt, just think of it as a shirt kit. That is what it is, and you shouldn't think anything else." - wcallen
Re-tailoring a shirt takes a certain amount or resolve. I usually begin by establishing where the waist is going to be and then simply cutting it apart at that line. I modify the skirt and bodice separately and put them back together as a final step.
Here is what I do to the bodice....
---mark the locations of the tops of the shoulder blades on the back
---make a vertical cut from those points up over the shoulders and down to the waist in front
---remove one column of rings every 4 rows from begining of the cut to a point just over the tops of the shoulders. You will be removing about 5 or 6 columns on each side.
---close the cuts back up all the way down to the waist in front. The upper back is now broader than the chest.
---mark the locations of the bottoms of the shoulder blades.
---make a cut from here to the waist in back.
---Figure out how many columns you can loose and still be able to your shoulders through the waist.
---Remove half that number from the edge of each back cut at a rate of one column per four rows.
---Close up the back cuts and try it on to make sure you can easily get your shoulders through the waist.
If you are reconfiguring the armpits, do that next. I am not going to try to describe the armpit. Burgess' articles show it clearly enough. The important thing is that there will be a "cross grain" joint about a hand's breadth wide at the bottom.
If you have full length sleeves, make them taper evenly from the armpit "gusset" to the wrist. You will be dropping two rows at a time here. Make sure you can get your hands through the wrists.
Find the "point" of the elbow and make a cut through about half of the circumference of the arm. I have always made this in the "back" of the arm, but surviving mail sleeves all seem to have on the bottom. You will need to add columns of mail to this cut to give you the extra material you need to bend the elbow properly. You can either add a series of expansions right down the center of the cut as you close it back up, or put in a sort of "lens" of mail.
Close up the neck hole as much as you can and still get you head through it. Some shirts with square neck holes have a band of cross grain mail over each shoulder. This lets you make the hole even smaller, because the cross grain stuff will sag out of the way when you but your head through. It also gives you a consistent edge to decorate with brass rings.
Modifying the skirts will require more work than brains. There are ways to do it that will allow you to reuse big patches of fabric, but they are harder to describe. Here is the "brute force" method. If you can see a cleverer way that yields the same result, so much the better.
---start by counting the number of rings you ended up with at eh waist of the bodice. This will be the number you must end up with at the top of the skirt when you go to reattach it.
---Cut the skirt into four panels.
---make the top of each panel have 1/4 the number of rings as the waist, minus one.
---put the panels back together at the waist
---start closing the cuts, adding one extra column every four rows.
You may now reattach the skirt.
I would not consider doing this to a shirt for less than $1200. That's just how long it takes. When everything is said and done, there are probably no more than 200 "funny rings" in the whole shirt. If the mail maker had put them in in the first place it would have only increased the production time by an couple of hours....." - mac
Evan M., How do I start making armor?
viewtopic.php?f=1&t=186949&p=2833778&hi ... l#p2833778
In my experience, most authentic armor finish can be described in the following grades.
1 From the hammer. This is a black oxide (fire scale) surface with good smooth hammer work. There may or may not be some file or coarse grind marks under the oxide.
2 "Shine over scratches". This is a surface which has been coarsely ground and then finished and then polished. It is shiny, but the coarse scratches are very evident.
3"Fine finish" This is basically the same thing as the above, but more effort has gone into removing the scratches.
4"Mirror finish". Here, more time has been spent on removing the scratches, and the surface is more or less secular." (specular?)
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