The Armour Archive

I've come to the conclusion that I'm going to have to put my "dream" kit off for a long while till I can afford to build/buy it, which may be several years off. However I don't want to wait that long to get back into armor and back on the field. What I'm looking for is ideas on a relatively inexpensive kit, pieces that wouldn't be too hard for me to do myself, but not looking like a football player equipped from the junk yard.

What I'm thinking is the usual bascinet w/grill (shudder) with a COP, splinted arms/legs, and a brigandine gorget. The body and gorget I could do easily enough, the arms and legs I could buy the elbow/knee cops and do the splinted part myself.

Any ideas would be greatly appreciated, I'm getting restless to get back fighting.

~Folcric

Leather bracers/Greaves/Kidney Belt/Gorget. Either water harden them all or attach splints like you want. Then you can rivet metal cops to knee/elbow pads.

Add helm, a cup and your weapons and you're good to go.

I've been building all my stuff and its cost me about...190ish? to make it all. The helm however was a gift so that will cost the most.

Cost Breakdown:

Metal Elbows/Knees/Gorget from Bokalo's armory: 75ish dollars.
Leather was from Tandy and cost me about 100. Plus I bought tools but if you can borrow some you're golden.

Your idea sounds good and won't be too expensive. You could even go a slight bit earlier and get rid of the studded cuisse and go with gamboised cuisse (with something underneath if you dont want the bruising) and a greathelm (that way you won't have a bargrille). You could make everything you are talking about or buy the elbows and knees for cheap.

I have worked armoring 8 college students (including myself) over the last 3 years and have learned:

A good gambeson is important. Make sure your padding is also washable, not important from a protective or looks perspective, but very important from a other people wanting to be in your car with it standpoint.

Get the right helmet. A helmet can really make you look silly. Or a helmet can make you look really great. I have found that for simple easy armor, the helmet more than anything sets the look.

Don’t forget you can cover things. Knees and elbows especially can be worn under sleeves or pant legs, and may acutely look better than a “nicerâ€

You may be able to dispense with the CoP even, if you go with a standalone gambeson, "Equipping the SCA Man-At-Arms" style (Best of The Hammer, Vol. 3, p. 111 et seq.).

Exclusive of the bascinet, this armament features a safety gorget of the typical collarband + superhumeral/cowl plates sort of construction, a longsleeved gambeson originally going to the kneecaps, but which for 14th century may hang to a little lower than mid thigh and showing more leg; gamboised cuisses suspending hard knees; lower leg protection to taste. The original model had it in heavy leather -- easily worked if not exactly cheap.

Sleeves were gamboised like the rest of the gambeson, with elbow cops pointed on and probably closed in with an elbow strap too once the gambeson was put on. It didn't discuss gaunts, but an entry level fighter would likely be doing half gaunts and baskethilts with his sword & board anyway.

Reinforcement of the gambeson, particularly about the kidney zone in accordance with your Kingdom's Armour Standards, is the next consideration. Concealed HDPE plastic beneath the gambeson and secured in padded pockets should pass the Marshal. Other strategically located reinforces pocketed within the gamby may be located all up the spine in horizontal scales, overlapping to flex, and at the points of the shoulders. An array of splints in the outside half of each gamboised cuisse may recommend itself to you also, though what with the gambeson skirt, you're twice as padded there to begin with.

So, you're laying out money to purchase an entry-level bascinet, two elbow cops, two knee cops, one pair gauntlets of 14th-c. style. That's for the steel. A good cup hardly needs mentioning, save that the martial-arts type is superior to the old fashioned ballplayers' variety, and the Nutty Buddy (tm) comes with excellent report.

The other outlay is for the fabric to build your gambeson in quarters, cotehardie-like, in the general manner of 14th- and 15th-century outerwear. Front and back are both made of left and right torso from neck to waistline, and there are left and right skirts from waistline to hem. This is very easily cut to give the medieval gents' waspwaisting in whatever degree rides well upon your personal corpus. If you don't have a particularly distinguishable waistline and your six-pack is really more of a keg, well, just broaden the shoulders and upper torso and go for plenty breadth in the skirting -- enlarge things to give the figure an enhancement. This is a considerably elaborated variant on the shapeless gamby of the original article in The Hammer. Any gamby is a laborious project compared to most equivalent garb -- you're sewing everywhere, and then you sew the seams! -- so budget a lot of man hours for this part.

Your fabric itself may vary with both your purse and your patience. Online sources like fabrics.com offer discounted 100% linen regularly. Warm&Natural 100% Cotton quilters' batting comes in 90" widths off the roll for eight dollars a yard, but what a yard! Surplus military wool blanket may be scored somewhere also and is surprisingly springy and cooler than you'd think, quilted in firmly. Linen, cotton, wool, no scrap of poly except maybe in the sewing thread.

Spray-of-fluting stitch lines in the quilting further enhance the style of the thing, and I wouldn't hesitate to use them, or your device at your breast but clear of your camail.

I agree, leather is the way to go. If you have some basic tool skills, then try Halbard for one of his $80 helm kits. Good steel and good price, and the get to have the fun of making it yourself. That will save you some $$$

Stonekeep-- PRicebeater cops $40 give or take
Padded cuisses from Stephen.. $40
Rough from the hammer breastplate $50
Kettlehelm from Hjalmr $100

Apply leather where needed and you're set to go..

Find someone with sewing skills and you can save money on the gamboised cuisse, as well as being able to go with a simpler uglier body armour that can be covered by a purdy Jupon or tunic, or worn under a gambeson giving you a great infantryman look.

I've often said that the most useful tool for a beginner armorer is the sewing machine.

Look at flea markets and thrift stores for the old metal-cased battle-axes in art deco colors. It'll cost you $25 or so to get it, $40 or so to tune it, and then you'll have a machine that will sew a marquis tent from scratch if you need it to. So you can guess how it'll do when you want to sew a canvas CoP shell...

...BTW you don't want to do that with your girlfriend's/ wife's/ mother's sewing machine. That one is a plastic geared pile of wussy meant for drapes and prom dresses. The old ones are designed to sew babies together and are much friendlier to men who refuse to go slower than the machine's capacity.

schreiber wrote:I've often said that the most useful tool for a beginner armorer is the sewing machine.

Look at flea markets and thrift stores for the old metal-cased battle-axes in art deco colors. It'll cost you $25 or so to get it, $40 or so to tune it, and then you'll have a machine that will sew a marquis tent from scratch if you need it to. So you can guess how it'll do when you want to sew a canvas CoP shell...

...BTW you don't want to do that with your girlfriend's/ wife's/ mother's sewing machine. That one is a plastic geared pile of wussy meant for drapes and prom dresses. The old ones are designed to sew babies together and are much friendlier to men who refuse to go slower than the machine's capacity.

Don't know what kind of girlfriend you have mines starts drooling whenever she comes across one of those old machines.

Don't be afraid to by used.

There are a lot of people out there that will buy something, wear/use it for a season, decide they don't like it, don't like the period, don't like the style, decide they need to sell it for some reason or another. Then they practially give it away (sometimes) so they can buy something else.

Sometimes you can find it here, sometimes you can find it on ebay (if you know what to look for) sometimes you can find it through a friend, or at fighter practice.

I have bought (and sold) more great items that were "used" than I can count. I might as well open my own armor depot...

Keep your eyes, out... buy cheap... resell for close to what you bought it for... and save up.

I put together a pretty nice 15th century kit on a college students budget.


Good luck.. and don't be afraid to ask people for help in finding things.


MJ

That sounds like a great 14th century rig. You can buy the splint material pretty much anywhere.

You can cut your coat of plates plates with tin snips use 18ga galvanized. Or buy a kit.

Bascinet is great but you've got several other options. You can do a cerveliere, kettle, sugarloaf or there's a pile of different greathelm types.

If you're getting the knees elbows and shoulders from Cet you can get a welded top from him too. Add a slat back and a grill which is possible to make with rivets just fine. Nothing complicated just takes some time. Now you've got a cerveliere.

The only suggestion I really have is to actually look at some effigies. So many people do splinted that's not really based on anything other then the fact that there's splints.

It's pretty much all stuff you can do in your living room. Trust me that's where I made my first suit.

Its my opinion that steel armour is the best way to go.

Even simple steel plates.

Steel has the highest resale value vs. leather which can get old, scraped up, permeated by years of sweat etc.

Matt sells some nice steel kits that are a good value. And if you decided to sell them later, even though some devaluation is always going to happen, youd probably a good chunk of return investment vs. leather or cloth armours.

So I just saw this on wild armory.

http://wildarmoury.com/product_info.php?cPath=31&products_id=89

The description says it's 14g hot rolled. For 130 euro (217ish) I'd have to see if it would fit my noggin, but from what you all see and know would this pass SCA specs? And if so what could go with it? Chainmail obviously but for budget's sake could I get away with mostly hidden stuff under a tabard/tunic?

Something akin to pic #3 from http://forums.armourarchive.org/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=73637

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Hello
from what it looks it would make a good SCA helmet You just would have to make them build it big enough to add at least 1 inch padding (a little more would be good though )
and another point would be to ask if they make the eyeslot also 1 inch wide or smaller. If those are the case you sure can go with that helm, though remember shipping is from Ukraine, I don´t know how expensive that would get for you (nothing against wildarmoury, just a question of his budget ).

Edit: Just looked up a link for you
http://www.flickr.com/photos/21215018@N07/
If you want something inexpensive go for hjalmr´s stuff, his prices are unbelievable, and from what people wrote reviews his quality must be outstanding for the price. If one of those helmets is listed as sold, then you should pm him, cause I think he makes them for the same price on order as in stock And he is a really nice guy

Hope that helped
For the other forum members: Please don´t hesitate to correct me or add something

Greetings Vigmund [/code]

Well, the enlargement doesn't enlarge, but those sights don't look to be more than 2cm wide anyway, and likely are less, circa 1.5cm. It looks like it's sufficiently deep not to expose too much of the neck, let alone the angle of jaw/mastoid/base of skull worries one sometimes has with early-type Topfhelms. BTW, I don't think this one is a Topfhelm, being not buckety enough. More like a handsome execution of a spuntop that doesn't have the fatheaded look too many spuntops do through being perfectly circular rather than oval. It reaches toward a sugarloaf in general description.

Soooo -- assuming sugarloaf/round top helm = latest 13th through first third 14th, the rest of the armor look is mail + reinforces (roundels, soupcans, schynbald greaves, getting on towards platey gauntlets, some with surprisingly long cuffs, a cuirie for torso hardening or the good ol' CoP, whichever you'd rather) and the shorter, or cyclas, forms of surcoat still much in evidence, getting visible fastenings at the sides sometimes and prominently cut away in front but left long behind, to the backs of the knees. Covers a multitude of sins.

A great many adult heads are right around the same size -- hat size 7 to 7 1/2 -- metric hat size around 60 or a touch smaller.

You'd need to suffer from a remarkably big head or an unusually small one to really have trouble. Erring a little on the side of generosity won't give you trouble. Erring too tight -- there's where trouble lies.

I always go for a biggish helm because I'm a glasses wearer. I've fought in contacts and I like that just fine too. (Visored bascinets are my friends -- lots of nose room.)

Vigmund means 1 inch in diameter, call it 3 1/4" extra circumference above your head measurement... 8 to 9 centimeters additional, call it. 1cm extra circumference isn't very much at all.

ooooooooh early 14th century kit!!! gamboised cuisse for your theighs, soupcan knees attached to them (lots available and not expensive) a long surcoat, a gambeson, a pair of simple elbows and possible simple vambraces (steel, splint, or leather) and a sugarloaf! Matt sells sugarloafs.

So after a conversation with my uncle, he's convinced me not to go over to the "dark side" and will be sticking with a late 10th century Russian kit, most of which will probably be hidden for the time being. Thanks for all the tips and suggestions, I do have a little brother that would like to go for this sort of look when he's able to fight, so I'll definitely be taking notes from this for his kit. Thanks again all.