Late 15th century German gauntlet articulation

[Armadillo]

It has been so quiet here lately that I feel I must start a thread to try and foster some discussion. This is the best I could muster:

I was digging through incomplete or discarded old projects and dug up this gauntlet from a few years back. There were a few threads on proper articulation for this type of gauntlet and I realized then that my strategy was all wrong so I put this aside. As you can see from the photos the lames of the back of the hand are all quite flat. They should have a slight downward curve as I've learned here. Still, I was surprised at the amount of articulation I was able to achieve without curving the lames. I accomplished most of that by using inclined slots at the rivets. These created more gap between the plates as the lames were compressed. It requires a little bit of slop in the rivets, but not much. I guess the most grievous error was the ulna plate at the wrist which apparently flares the wrong way entirely. Since I don't play in armour I am probably disadvantaged when it comes to determining what movements are and are not required. My thought at the time was that the backward flexing of the wrist was more critical than forward.

The overall lesson for me in retrospect is that it never looked quite right. It appeared rather static and I can see now that it was due to the very flat lames that didn't 'flow' well. I'm glad now that I set this aside, though I can't claim to have started over and done it correctly....yet.

-Adair

[Zetheros]

Thanks for sharing Armadillo, side to side wrist articulation was one of the aspects I wasn't sure of when building my last suit.

[Mac]

Since I don't play in armour I am probably disadvantaged when it comes to determining what movements are and are not required.

Disadvantaged? No. Not at all, I think. In fact you are arguable in a better position if what you want to do is make armor that looks and works like the real thing.

Most armor being built today is designed around the perceived motion requirements a modern sport, and the results are very unlike medieval armor.

If you faithfully copy the real thing, you will end up with a range of motion that our ancestors considered correct.

Mac

[Armadillo]

Robert,

I appreciate your perspective. I can't say that I've never had the urge to do a historical portrayal, but my main interest is in the form and sculptural aspects of the art.

I don't get much free shop time to mess around with armour these days, but I was inspired recently and I had a go for a couple hours this afternoon. I hope I can continue to find time because I really miss messing around with armour. I posted the following image on the Historical Authenticity page:



I love this fella's gauntlets and had considered making a pair. I thought I would start with something more documentable. I chose the Churburg 51 elbow gauntlet, a longtime favorite of mine:



I have exactly three photos of this gauntlet. None of them reveal much about the side profile (the best shot is in Carlo's book). I don't have any idea how far the cuff wraps around the ventral side of the forearm, but I thought I would have a stab at it anyway.

I used my powerhammer to stretch the back of the cuff and some heat to shrink the front. I just got my powerhammer running after toting it around with me for the last 14 years. It really made short work of the stretching and it left a lovely smooth finish.



I left off after and hour and a half with this:



It seems to suit the profile fairly well. I need to study the location of the longitudinal ridge and figure out what exactly is going on with the original at the end of the cuff. If anyone has better photos of the original I would very much appreciate seeing them. I have "Mit Eiserner Faust" Mann's Churburg Catalog, and Carlo's lovely book. I'm looking forward to more shop time on this. The thing that strikes me most from the original is that the distance from the knuckle to the ulna bump seems very long relative to the overall length. My lames in sketch form appear to be very truncated compared to the original.

-Adair

[Armadillo]

Without another view of the gauntlet all I can assess is the dorsal profile:



My ulna bump is much further out than the original. Short arms and huge farmer hands?

-A.

[Mac]

Armadillo,

What strikes me about that gauntlet from Churburg is not so much that the hand looks long, as that the forearm looks short. Try superimposing a conventional Gothic cuff over the Churburg gauntlet and I think you will see that it is not much longer.

It looks to me like the Churburg gauntlet was meant to be worn with an elbow cop.

Mac

[Armadillo]

Funny how some possibilities so obvious elude me completely. I guess the Churburg composite where this gauntlet is often displayed has influence my perception. I've seen it so often as shown in the attached view where the cuff is very foreshortened, but extends well underneath the cop. A good case of my own conclusion clouding a fair analysis. I think your idea, Mac, to overlay a more conventional gauntlet is a good one. I will try to take that on tonight.



-A.

[Armadillo]

I put the following comparison together quickly. I stole the gauntlet image from Wade Allen. Please let me know, Wade, if that is inappropriate.

In the first image, I lined up the knuckles and the ulna bump. To me this does not represent a good comparison because Wade's gauntlet is clearly at a larger scale than the Churburg Gauntlet.



When I size the gauntlets based on overall proportions the ulna bumps are in very different locations relative to the back of the hand. Could the Ulna bump on the Churburg gauntlet be stylized and have nothing to do with the anatomy? I've wondered in the past if this might not be the case with some gauntlets of this style.



-Adair

[wcallen]

I think you are working with this gauntlet:

http://www.allenantiques.com/A-213.html

Please do. Comparing different pieces is a good thing. I don't know whether the gauntlet was fully extended or not in those images. It doesn't look like it is all the way out, maybe it is part way.

From memory (I haven't checked in a while) the bump lines up somewhat reasonably with my anatomy on my gauntlet, but that is definitely not always the case with gauntlets in my collection. The placement does appear to be somewhat arbitrary generally.

These two gauntlets do appear to have very different proportions. The Churburg one is overall narrower in feel. Maybe since it wouldn't have been worn over a vambrace, they could fit it more closely to the arm?

Wade

[Mac]

This is more complex than I thought is was.

Armadillo,

You are right. The hand of the gauntlet is longer and narrower than one would expect. I had heretofore presumed that the ulna bump on Gothic gauntlets was an anatomical landmark. Latter armorers seem to have put the bump wherever it looked nice; but I had thought that since Gothic gauntlets had narrow wrists, the bump was there to accommodate the anatomy. This gauntlet shows that that is not always the case. This, of course, begs the question of whether the bump can ever be used as landmark.

The size and prominence of the anatomical ulna bump varies quite a bit from person to person. Mine barely protrude at all, and I could wear a Gothic gauntlet with no bump at all and not have any trouble. On the other hand, some folks have honkin' big ulna bumps and might truly benefit from having bosses in the wrist plates to accommodate them. Perhaps that's over thinking it, though. Getting the bump in in exactly the right place is not easy, and the flexion and extension of the wrist tends to move it out of place anyway. Perhaps the historical answer has always been to "put it where it looks good and not worry about it".

Wade's idea that the cuff/cannon of this gauntlet is narrow because it does not have to fit over a vambrace is a good one.

Mac

[Scott Martin]

Hi Mac

The Churburg gauntlet looks like it is slotted, and fully extended in the slots. Wade's gauntlet is slotted, and this image is at almost full compression. Each slot can provide up to ~1/4" of compression / expansion room, so this could amount to ~1" of extra length in the Churburg Gauntlet, which is enough to distort proportions significantly.

I cut down the length of my gauntlet patterns since the distance from the knuckle plate to the ulnar bump was about 3/4" too large, and this reduction in length (and the proper curved plate shape - thanks for pointing that out BTW) vastly improved both the look and the function of my gauntlets. Prior to this change they looked much like the "extended" version of the Churburg gauntlet, so I'm a bit hyper-sensitive to this overly "gracile" proportion. Wade's gothic gauntlet still looks much "beefier" than the Churburg one but they will be much closer with this compression: Can someone with better image editing skills than me compress the middle laminations of the Churburg gauntlet by 25% and scale the gauntlet up so that the main metacarpal plate is the same size as Wade's?

Scott

[Armadillo]

Scott,

Here is the image with the compression adjusted as you described. It does bring things into a different perspective.



The compression shown is complete speculation. I would need to see a side view of the gauntlet in order to determine how much compression there may be. However, this does appear like a reasonable amount based on examples that I have seen. Thanks for posting that observation, Scott.

The gauntlet in the MMA collection would be a good comparison. The one displayed with the Innsbruck composite. I think I have a nice photo of it in "The Art of Chivalry".

-Adair

[schreiber]

I don't think sliding rivets are even necessary to get that much of a difference. The Churbug also looks to me like it's in complete extension (all plates articulated downward) whereas Wade's looks like it's in the middle of its up/down movement range.

Regarding ulnar bumps.... these are my favorites from Wade's collection, and whereas they're much later, you can see that the ulnar bump is clearly vestigial here.

[wcallen]

If I can remember, maybe I can shoot a picture of the gauntlet fully extended and fully compressed next to a ruler. I don't think I can get it to be "pretty" that way, but it should serve its purpose. I wonder if I will remember tonight?

Wade

[Mac]

Splendid idea, Wade. It would be good to see the two extremes of length.

Mac

[Armadillo]

I added the MMA elbow gauntlet and read of another comparison that I don't have photos of. There is a pair of elbow gauntlets from this period in the Scott Collection. Does anyone have have a nice orthographic view of those?

I continue to size these based on my own understanding of their proportions. Since absolute dimensions won't generate a fair comparison given that these were made for different people, I am scaling them based on an overlay of my own arm.



-Adair

[Mac]

There's also these gauntlets in Philly.



They are currently displayed in a way that would make it easy to get the required pic. If nobody has a pic from the right angle, I could get one next time I'm at the Museum. That may be several weeks from now.

Mac

[wcallen]

Laying these things out to get a clean shot is more trouble than you would expect. Perspective makes a lot of difference, even how you flex the knuckle rider makes a big difference. I can at least get a reasonable measurement.

From the center of the ulna to the center of the closest knuckle (on the pinky side) on my fingered gauntlet when everything is collapsed and the knuckle is in a pretty flat position gets me 3 1/4". Extending the gauntlet and allowing the knuckle to move to a neutral position (it really wants to do that...) gets me 4". I can allow the plates to sit up a little bit and shorten things a little more, and I can allow things to really rotate down and get a little more. Since these things aren't really flat, there isn't really a nice "all the way in" vs. "all the way out" that I can't cheat a little one way or the other.

Every time I try to measure a piece of armour I am reminded how little I should trust the measurements in catalogues or articles. There are almost always several valid ways to measure the length or height or width of a piece.

Wade

[Scott Martin]

Laying these things out to get a clean shot is more trouble than you would expect. Perspective makes a lot of difference, even how you flex the knuckle rider makes a big difference. I can at least get a reasonable measurement.

<SNIP>

Every time I try to measure a piece of armour I am reminded how little I should trust the measurements in catalogues or articles. There are almost always several valid ways to measure the length or height or width of a piece.

Wade

For Gauntlets I have extracted the measurement across the knuckle plate from the text description and then used this to scale proportions in a photo - at least then as I am building the piece, I can check whether the pieces I have assembled look similar to the picture, instead of being a slave to dimensions.

I seem to recall asking you to measure depths of plates on your gauntlets, and I used the (nice high res) photos of your gauntlet inside photos and the rivet head sizes (which were ~1/8" rivets - bacause I had handled that pair) to determine the "appropriate" lenghts for slots.

For anyone interested, they were 1/4" to 3/8" depending how you measured them, which is why the 1/4" per rivet wasn't completely pulled out of my nether regions

Scott Martin

[James Arlen Gillaspie]

The gauntlets of the famous 'Sigismund gothic' harness in Vienna (A 62) are so tight that the lower cannons are over an inch shorter than what would be usual for lower cannons, and the ulna spike has a very broad, stepped base compared to what one would see in the vestigial examples. It is not, of course, glued to the wearer's ulna bump, but it doesn't need to be. It only has to be there when the hand is in certain positions where the bump would contact the gauntlet, making a strike on that spot likely to conduct impact energy directly to the bump (excluding whatever dispersing effect the glove would have). The spike would also have the effect of directing a bladed weapon's impact away from the bump.

[Christian Wiedner]

Hi James, do you have any measurements of this gauntlet? This would be more than great

[James Arlen Gillaspie]

The lengths of the gauntlets are (rt) 303 mm and 295 mm. Width at the knuckles, 102 mm both sides. Width at the wrists, rt. 71 mm, left 72 mm. Width at the widest point of the cuffs, 104 mm right, 98 mm left. The gauntlets were pulled out so that the rivets were at the ends of the slots, but all the rivets were actually brass capped screws with thread-on washers, which interfered with its movement. In my experience, original rivets are a bit loose in their holes, and the articulation takes that into account.

[Christian Wiedner]

Thank you very much. This is really a great help. It seems I am pretty close with mine...
At what point in the front have you measured the length, metacarpal plate/knuckle plate?
You don't have measured the circumferences by accident?

[Armadillo]

Thanks to Mathius Goll's thesis I finally have the side views of this gauntlet (among many other views). I've attached a critical few here.











Many thanks to Tom B. for compiling all the images from Mathius Goll's thesis document. I would not have found these so quickly otherwise.

-Adair

[Konstantin the Red]

Am I perceiving correctly that the main metacarpal plate, that's right above the knucklerider, is the only one with obvious dishing?