Need Help: 16th Century Gorget Top Ring

[RWWT]

Brother, it just Struck me... you can't just turn it outwards like that. You have to stretch it with a straight peen. Did u do that? You nick the line where the roll starts, bend out just a few degrees, then you stretch. It'll roll itself out a good bit like that. That's how Dubé does it.

This thread is long and I'm on my phone. Sry if I missed sth.

Ha! I'm glad someone besides me is racking their brain on this!

I considered a cross or straight peen, but opted against it to avoid hammer marks. Per advice I picked up from some of Mac's threads and videos, I went with a round faced hammer. This seems to work nicely and I got one to 90 degrees this way, albeit with substantial flaring out of the curl. I suppose I really could use a cross or straight peen, since the hammer marks are going to all end up on the inside of the roll and it might be faster, but playing around with things, I suspect the over flaring would still be an issue, since I am stretching the (temporarily and to be rolled back the other way) upper most edge out to a larger radius.

Since this area is top most area is destined to roll back on itself, my current thinking is, "Why bother pulling it all the way out to begin with?" I just need to stretch out the middle of the incipient roll, not necessarily the top. I played around with this on some scrap, as detailed above, and the results were encouraging, apart from the mess I made by doing it in a chewed up vise.

I think the trick to this is that there is no trick. I've just been over thinking it. The simpler method, at least in my current theory, is to think about it as mostly a synclastic curve. Initially, I was thinking about it as an anticlastic curve, which is also is; however, as several people have pointed out, once the roll is formed, dealing with the bottom half of the ring is not really a big deal.

I won't be able to get into my friend shop until probably next weekend. In the mean time, I am thinking over the advice given above and trying to figure out the best way to knock volume in the roll with what I have available to work with. Kristoffer's suggestion of a hinge block is very appealing to me. I might give that a shot in the interest of getting past this frustrating stall and feel like I am making some progress in the greater project. On the other hand, I really do need to learn to do this with just a hammer and anvil since I need to do a whole lot more of these types of edges later on. It seems worthwhile to invest some time in scrap and the "Thick Forehead" method Kristoffer mentioned until this is relatively easy, and spare myself this frustration with other parts.

Edit: Hmmm... When I read your suggestion, I was thinking only about a straight peen perpendicular to the edge. I was just considering it more and, perhaps, rounded straight or cross peen parallel to the edge might be helpful.

Ah! The fun of making armor! So many ways to do similar things! The challenge is choosing the best one for what you're working on at the moment.

[Indianer]

There is a dubé Video out there on YT. There is no trick to it. Forehead. Last bit of advice I have is to start there, watch him do it. Maybe you find what's been going wrong. Hope it helps..

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=YDNydQauCgE

[RWWT]

There is a dubé Video out there on YT. There is no trick to it. Forehead. Last bit of advice I have is to start there, watch him do it. Maybe you find what's been going wrong. Hope it helps..

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=YDNydQauCgE

Thanks!

There's a key difference, though. He's doing an outside roll. Mine needs to roll inside.

I suppose I could do the same thing and just bend it the other way (which is where my original thinking was), however, my revised thinking is "Why do I want to bother stretching out the top edge to a wider radius, only to bring it back again and have to compress it all back to where I started from?".

Here's a quick doodle to illustrate, more or less, where I think things need to go if we view a cross section or the end of one of the halves of the ring. The curves are a little off, but I just slapped this together in MS Word:



Where I envision stretching is mostly just along the center, orange arrow line. The top and bottom really don't need to move much, if at all. Where things seemed to go south was as soon as I tried to move anything north of the center arrow outward, which makes sense: 1. I am thinning the metal more. 2. I am stretching out a bigger circle. Alas, the flaring from the original, overall shape. This is necessary for an outside roll. Not so much for an inside one.

A bead roller would do this effortlessly, but where is the fun in that?

[Indianer]

Mmmmh. I see. In that case all I can say is sorry for clogging your thread. Now... why do you need the inside roll again? Where's the advantage? I never noted anything on that...

[Gordon Thompson]

Mmmmh. I see. In that case all I can say is sorry for clogging your thread. Now... why do you need the inside roll again? Where's the advantage? I never noted anything on that...

Hmm...Interesting question. Maybe there is no risk to stuck a point of a weapon into a place where a roll edge is closed, since that place is on the inside?

[wcallen]

Mark II

Brother, it just Struck me... you can't just turn it outwards like that. You have to stretch it with a straight peen. Did u do that? You nick the line where the roll starts, bend out just a few degrees, then you stretch. It'll roll itself out a good bit like that. That's how Dubé does it.

This thread is long and I'm on my phone. Sry if I missed sth.

I often flare things without "stretching with a straight (or cross) peen." For aggressive movement with heat, a rounded hammer works nicely. For less aggressive work without heat, actually the same. When I am going crazy and creating curved shapes from straight pieces and I want to thin the piece, sure I use a very rounded directional peen like the one in my power hammer.

Playing around with the way metal moves with and without heat and with different hammers can be fun and enlightening.

Wade

[RWWT]

Mmmmh. I see. In that case all I can say is sorry for clogging your thread. Now... why do you need the inside roll again? Where's the advantage? I never noted anything on that...

No apology needed and nothing is clogged! We're all learning here. Much to the frustration of anyone who's tired to teach me anything, I am one of those annoying people who learn better by trying to wrap my arms around everything, all at once, then look what whatever I want in context. Yup, I was that annoying kid who kept asking, "But why?" about everything until his parents locked him in a basement and disowned him. Things have not improved much with age, though I have much more sympathy for those who've had the patience to try to teach me stuff. In short, your comments are most welcome because the more info, the better, for me!

Why inside? It fits the period and it's how things were done on all the contemporary examples I've looked at. I may be getting things a little wrong and defer to those more knowledgeable than me, but my understanding is that around the early 16th century, edges went from "outies" to "innies". I suspect, based on my own observations, what I've heard and read from others, and what I'm learning from this and prior messing around with things is that "outies" are a pain- due to the flaring and waviness you need to deal with while compressing the lower edge back inward. They served their purpose, making a nice edge where armor meets flesh, for a couple centuries. Later on, things got more decorative and you see more hollow shapes with all manner of chasing and repousse' type stuff. Going in, rather than out, seems to me a step forward to address both of this needs. For the most part, at least from what I've looked at,once you get solidly into the 16th century, you pretty much only see "innies".

For my purposes, as I mentioned, the pieces I'm trying to represent are all "innies" and all have roped edges formed over hollow volume (though several seem to have wire shoved in afterwards. Others have "jelly rolls", but those seem to come in a little later than I'm shooting for).

[Indianer]

I mean there remains the option burn out the copper wire...

Thank you kindly for the elaboration. I recall some of it, didn't have to really come to terms with it before. I can only hope and wait that you get the process down. You will, and when you do - hopefully you'll find the time to make it graspable for us here. I do not recall a video out there doing a large innie roll. Out, yes, not innies.

I often flare things without "stretching with a straight (or cross) peen." For aggressive movement with heat, a rounded hammer works nicely. For less aggressive work without heat, actually the same. When I am going crazy and creating curved shapes from straight pieces and I want to thin the piece, sure I use a very rounded directional peen like the one in my power hammer.

Which brings me back to You Wade - thanks for chiming in! Wish I had your experience. I did refer to a method that I know is working for what I had mistaken the OPs process for. Sure...my ideas are based on snapshots of processes. I believe I have developed a sufficiently precise feeling for what would work when, at least when I do utter my opinion. I could not have developed a feeling for what else would work though. What I know is not conclusive, might never be. I can only ever hope it helps someone when it fits. Cheers!

EDIT: Which is another way of saying: Please don't be mad, I mean well and don't take myself for the ultimate prophet either. But when the oracles keep silent, I may whisper

[RWWT]

I give a big "Thank you!!!!" to everyone for the continued comments, advice, and differing thoughts of how to go about this. It's a huge help!

I'm aware that I am overthinking things, particularly in context of making this part of a gorget. Some of this is deliberate, since I'm going to need to do quite a bit more of the same thing when I get around to making the helmet. It's got these types of hems around the eye slot of the falling buffe and helmet itself and all over the place. It's frustrating to toss gorget rings into the scrap heap, but it will be a heck of a lot more annoying to toss the much more complicated pieces just because I screwed up the hem.

I need to get a handle on forming these hems without overly deforming a shaped piece. Forming the hem first and straight patterns are really tempting and seem easier, but I don't think I will learn as much as I need to by doing it the easier way. With that in mind, I think I'm going to revert back to my Mark I approach, albeit with suggestions several folks made about "keep the template simple, stupid!". My current plan is stick with a curved templat and incorporate Mac's Red Lines (already did that, for some of my play around pieces).

The good news is, after rolling all your suggestions around in my head and pondering my screw up pieces, I don't think I was that far off with Mk I and II, at least as a starting point. If I skip trying to bring the full edge to 90 degrees and focus more on pushing out and stretching just what I need to, it feels like it should get me where I want to be.

Maybe.


I won't be able to play around in my friends shop until next weekend, so I will continue pondering in the mean time. Any other suggestions are more than welcome! I'll post updates after I bang on metal some more.

[Indianer]

Your plan is to start rolling an innie right here?

Maybe a small dedicated stake would be useful, like a small- diameter 45° pipe elbow. Walls prolly too thin, I'd just grind one from bar stock and weld onto a sq bar handle. I was thinking about your plan to use dishing for it - stake might give you a better handle to apply force where needed.

[RWWT]

Your plan is to start rolling an innie right here?

Pretty much. I think I need to there area right above the crease out and down a bit more and give that area more volume. Otherwise, let above area start to roll in on itself, more or less by accident as a consequence of raising.

Maybe a small dedicated stake would be useful, like a small- diameter 45° pipe elbow. Walls prolly too thin, I'd just grind one from bar stock and weld onto a sq bar handle. I was thinking about your plan to use dishing for it - stake might give you a better handle to apply force where needed.

I had been thinking the same thing. Swage blocks, hinge blocks,.... At the end of the day, the movement I need is going to come primarily from hammer blows in the right place and moving the right bits of metal where they need to be. I hate making tools. There is also the "a poor craftsman blames his tools" issue. I am a poor craftsman (or at least very out of practice). I need to regain some of the intuitive sense of seeing the shape form, knowing where and how to push the metal, and how far I can push it. If I keep going down the dark, special tool path, forever will it control my destiny. As I mentioned earlier, I need to do a bunch of these on various shaped pieces. A form of some sort will probably help, but I can't rely on it as much when I get to trying to wrap these things around eye slots.

As Wade nicely put it, playing around with metal, heat, and hammers can be fun and enlightening. Hashing through this with everyone here and taking a critical eye to my failures and experiments, I'm dealing more with a "me" problem than tool problems. I don't feel bad about that. Fixing me is cheaper than tools and works on a lot more things. And, again, better to screw up a small bit of metal and super easy basic forms for a gorget ring than shape up a helmet, falling buffe, etc. and toss them in the heap because I can't do hems right. The overall project won't go any faster if I cheat my way through this relatively simple piece.

Edit: For clarity, I do intend to start fresh and cut out new pieces of steel. Cutting out the complicated template was a poor choice and contributed to my cracking problems. I knew better but did it anyway. Stupid me. So, next round, I am going with Mac's red lines.

[wcallen]

I have resisted mentioning this because the goal here is for a hollow roll. Hollow rolls I have tended to work in ways that simulate what you are doing.
But I often don't do hollow rolls. Many of my rolls have been smaller. They were either for other parts of armor, or they were for my boy, so they were just smaller.
When you are making a smaller roll, or when you are willing to make a larger one that is not hollow, it is trivial to just roll the thing up and then push it out. I have done it many, many times using wire of various sizes as filler. I have done it for small rolls using nothing as filler, but you end up with either a very small or pretty flat roll. Others have followed the example from one of my original gorgets and done a "jelly roll" - you roll the material on itself a couple of times to achieve a larger roll. Once you have that, then you can just curl it up without collapsing the roll just like you can if it is small or filled with wire. If you want to stare at the original jelly roll, you can see it here:
https://www.european-armour.com/A-201.html

Wade

[RWWT]

Thanks, Wade.

Your timing in bringing this up is helpful. I think a common thread I'm seeing between different methods serves to highlight a couple of my errors.

The overly simpified version seems to be that I have not been stretching things enough where they need to be stretched, in part, because I was perceiving things incorrectly.

As I was working on the prior iterations, I'd get to the point where things start flaring out and my brain kept saying, "I need to push the sides back in". Really, I needed to be more focused on pushing the center out and letting the sides take care of themselves, more or less. Trying to bring the sides in resulted in overworking and thinning the metal on the ends, alas, my cracking issues.

If I had wire in there and bent the curl around, the wire would push the center out while I am pushing the ends in. Absent wire, as you noted, things would flatten out, starting from the middle. The root seems to be the same. The middle has to move. I can do it with filler of some form or another or I can do it with a hammer.

It's probably more accurate to say that, once things started flaring, I lost focus on uniformly stretching the metal. I focused almost entirely on the sides and forgot to move the middle. This looked like the right thing to do, since if I held it up to my template, the curve in the middle looked good and it appeared it was the sides that were misbehaving. My brain forgot to see that if I moved the middle down, the sides would move in.

[RWWT]

I got to spend a little bit of time in my friends shop today. Several unrelated things prevented me from getting as far as I'd planned, but I promised and update, so here we go:

As I mentioned, I went with the curved template, albeit according to Mac's red lines and other suggestions, ditching the cut outs. I also stuck with a round faced hammer (one face a bit shallow, the other more round), a flat surface and the edge. In this case, it was the flat part and edge of my friend's bicorn, since it's the old clean flat in his shop at present.No real problems, though I've been to this stage before without any real problems.

Focusing more on gradually stretching out what I need in the hem area uniformly seems to be making things easier, though it still seems a lot more time consuming than it should be. I have several ways that could speed things up in mind, however, I still think I need to work through this slowly and deliberately the hard way so that I learn what I need to for later parts.

Sorry I didn't get pictures in the shop and in progress. I was pressed on time and, considering I didn't get very far today, I doubt progress pictures would help anyone much. It's pretty self explanatory whacking from the inside with a round hammer. Here's a couple pictures of today's results, though.





Things aren't terribly neat or uniform and the curl got a flat on the ends, but I was short on time. On the optimistic side, what's not right is all easily manageable.

I'm becoming increasingly convinced that the downsides of the curved template are less significant than I was thinking. Sure, if I do this again, I will probably use a straight template for the convenience of saving a couple of degrees of pushing things outward and giving myself more room to work. Though, in balance, I supposed what I save in stretching out the top, I will later invest in stretching out the bottom. The addition space inside the curve to work from the start would be nice, though. The benefits of the curved template for me, for now, seem to be:
1) it's easier to see where the stuff I am moving is at relative to the stuff that is, more or less, already where I want it to be. I'm probably making too much of this, but it seems helpful to me for now.
2) Shaping up the lower part gives the basic shape a little more rigidity than if it were straight and flat. Considering there's so little metal there to hold the curl, any little bit seems to help quite a bit. This probably doesn't matter much if I were content to let things flare out and just bang it all back in later, but for the reasons I stated earlier, I'm trying to avoid that as much as I can.

Next chance I get in the shop, I intend to heat up the top and push out the area between the crease and roughly the middle of the hem allowance; focusing just on the area and letting the upper part just fold back in, more or less, rather than trying to push the whole allowance down to 90 degrees.

I hope my rambling around on this is helpful for someone. Thanks again, everyone, for the advice and support!

[RWWT]

For anyone interested, Progress!

First, another thing I was doing wrong. When forming up the roll, I was thinking too much about the two dimensional line (the cotter pin-ish shape) rather than the 3 dimensional necessity of stretching out the volume I need. Once I started focusing more on just creating volume, rather than bending things, stuff went a lot better all around. The simple things one forgets when one only gets to bang on metal sporadically. Sigh...

Anyhow, I used this stake and hammer to beat in some volume between the crease and the middle of the roll from the inside:




Any good edge would have worked, I suppose, but this stake gave me a more convenient angle and room to work. I pretty much ignored everything from the middle line to the top and just let that do whatever it wanted, more or less.

That got things to here:


Some refining from the outside with a flat hammer over the same stake got me to here:


Things are still a little beefy and bloated for my taste, so I am going to tighten things up and even it all out some more the next time I can get in the shop. After that, onward to forming the roped edge. I haven't done that before, so it has me a bit panicked. I plan on whacking some scrap around a bit beforehand.

Thanks again, everyone for the comments and helping to talk me through this!

[Indianer]

Sooo...instead of a dishing form you supported the "fold" between body and roll and hit on air? Wasn't that wobbly af?

And thank You for the pics and keeping us in the loop!

[RWWT]

Sooo...instead of a dishing form you supported the "fold" between body and roll and hit on air? Wasn't that wobbly af?

Not any more so than raising anything else.

I am glad you asked. It's forced me to consider where I was seeing problems earlier a bit more clearly, I think. In large part for all the iterations, I have been looking at this like raising a crease, just somewhat backward from the way we usually think about such things. I *think* this is important to maintaining the curl of the crease line while forming up the roll. The anvil supports a small part of the crease that I don't want to move and the hammer pushes in a small part of what I do want to move, then rotate it a bit and repeat. In the raising sense, I just ignored the wave that pops up behind the hammer blows, since, in this case, I want it to be there.

On the earlier iterations, I was trying to counteract the flaring by stretching the crease up/ in more. This caused excessive stress and thinning on that line until it cracked. This was dumb and should have been obvious. In the later iterations, I focused more on stretching the metal above it to progressively wider circles, which has the effect of keeping the crease line where it is.

So, I guess it's sort of like a combination of raising and dishing over air.

I did do a bit of planishing from the inside over a flat surface with a round hammer. I suppose I could have done the same into a dished form, but it comes to be the same thing, I think. I don't have a dishing form that is deep enough and an appropriate shape to work it into. A swage channel, hinge block, or similar would also work, as others mentioned earlier, but it more or less amounts to the same things.

I suppose I could have spend things up a bit by doing a bit more inside planishing with a small, round hammer to pinch the metal between hammer and anvil to stretch it, rather than just pushing it out over air. I will have to keep that in mind for later.

[RWWT]

I stumbled on this helpful closeup of A 127 from Wade's collection somewhere (Wade, this one isn't on your webpage) that illustrates some things well, I think.



If you look at the edge, you can see where the armorer stretched things out along the bottom of the roll, while the parts above and below remain thicker. I suppose it could be argued that this is from compression, and it probably is, but the point still remains- the work is in the area between the crease the area just above it, before the middle line of the roll. Also of note is the thickening of the crease line.

Mine isn't as nice, but I think I managed to get closer to the right idea.