Feedback wanted...

[UdoM]

Hi, i'm new here, though been a lurker for a while. Great site. Very skilled people here.

I started building my armor site. I really don't want anyone else to see it yet because it's lacking all content (with a few limited exceptions). What I would like is some feedback from you guys before i go any further:

1) Is the site's layout acceptable? I don't want any flashiness - just simple and functional. (It should work on a phone browser too.)

2) The real question: when you review this page, does the info seem good, ie does it meet your quality standards? Do you see any errors i am making?

3) It's a WordPress site with comments disabled. I like the image slider there, but does it load okay for you?

I intend to instruct people at my home. The site should provide some Online How-To as well, so this all needs to be accurate. I might do things differently than you, but do you see any problems with the way i started this armor project to make fluted pauldrons?

[Cheezweasel]

Perhaps since the pattern portion of the archive isnt ever updated, you could do that on your site. I just read through the thread on who is maintaining it. Seems like a lot of people are willing to contribute if there was a p!ace to host it.

[UdoM]

I noticed that too - seems to be a lack of patterns. Why do you think that is though? Is it mainly because people feel a bit protective with patterns, especially when developing them can take so much time? I did not yet add a pattern area to my site. I guess i could but it would be limited. Breastplates for example, are usually per customer. I hold up a sheet of oversized graph paper to a guy and have him hold his arms out, marking the paper. Then i fold it in half vertically and cut it out. Hold it up to him again and trim off excesses. Make adjustments and ka-bam: one breastplate pattern, but it's only going to fit that one guy best.

Now that i type that out, i want to do it, and take pics along the way to document the process - add that to the site. So if not a pattern, the reader at least sees how to make one.

Anyway, your suggestion is flattering to me since nobody here even knows me yet. I could do it, but is that what people here want? This site, thearmourarchive, is truly awesome - it feels like where a pattern archive should be.

[Scott Martin]

A big part of the pattern issue is that the pattern is affected by how you build armour. My greave pattern has a fair amount of shape to it, based on measurements from the person who will be wearing it. Wade's greave "pattern" is a rectangle of "the right size". I'd say that Wade is far and away the better craftsman, but that particular pattern won't be very useful in a pattern archive.

Most patterns really need to be associated with a build tutorial so that you can understand how the pattern is supposed to be used. This is less of an issue for 3-piece welded helmets, but (IMO) these don't generally tend to look like medieval helmets. Raised helmets tend to start as one variation or another of a disc with bits added - an armet pattern looks like a lollipop, while a sallet pattern looks like a triangle overlapped on a circle. Craig has a number of patterns on his site (incuding CAD patterns) here: http://nadler.us/armour.html

I could go on, but in my opinion the more experienced armourers who build pieces close to replica quality tend to have very crude patterns that get trimmed, while "production" armourers who put out a million "good enough" pieces tend to have very exacting patterns tuned for production. Production patterns tend to use modern tools (hydraulic presses, english wheels etc) and don't tend to incorporate a lot of raising (compression) since that is time consuming and difficult to do.

Wade Allen has let folks copy his patterns from the dawn of time, so if you really want to compile an archive, you may want to start by asking him via PM. If so, I would STRONGLY suggest that you try and arrange a visit, since you will learn a lot from him in person. IIRC Jonathan Coldiron lives down the road as well, and he also makes pretty pieces.

Scott Martin
(I'm not dead, I've just been overly busy)

PS you may want to check out http://www.borealissteel.ca - I went to Wordpress since it's easier to assemble articles than with HTML, but it is still massively time consuming - and some of my articles are still in the "old" format. Feel free to borrow pictures as long as you attribute them, and there are a few sites linked there that you may find helpful.

[UdoM]

Scott, i just spent an hour carefully reviewing your instructional on Spring Pin Construction. It's one of the things i really needed to see. Thank you!

The first two images on that page are technical drawings - side views showing us how it works. Do you mind if i use those two pics on my site? If not, i can re-draw them myself but i think mine will look suspiciously similar to yours lol.

Anyway, great job on that! I'm also looking carefully at your page showing how you made a special stake for greaves. The one image i wish you could add to that page, would be holding a greave up to it, which would show readers how the stake is used. (Greaves are one project i have never done, and for which i lack such a tool, so i've been planning to do it cold, and improvise.)

[Scott Martin]

Feel free to use the pictures as long as you provide a link to the whole article and note where you got it from. If you want an email (so you have a paper trail providing authorization) please drop me a PM and I can get that for you.

You may also want to look at these pages:
http://borealissteel.com/Articles/Hamme ... ammer.html
http://borealissteel.com/Articles/Hinge ... ction.html
http://borealissteel.com/Articles/Hinge ... ation.html

I think that the First is still hosted on Arador, and dates back to the early '90s - you may find that this type of broad hammer actually works better than a soft-faced hammer for sinking.

I'm working on finishing off my "greaves" article, and while I did most of the work cold (to prove that it could be done) you really want to blend the edges hot (which takes ~5 minutes) instead of trying to match them cold. I'll try to get this up over Christmas, I think I have a friend helping me with the final blending next week, after which I can emboss the ankles, trim and fold the edges and do the final polish.

There are some things that just aren't practical to do cold, since working hot means that the hot pieces move like putty, and match perfectly against the "cold" pieces which remain rigid (or don't distort the shape of the rest of the piece which is still cold). This is one of the reasons that SCA armour often has weird gappiness, while the period pieces are almost perfectly blended together. A "weed burner" is often enough heat to do this, so you don't need an oxy-acetylene torch ($30 and a barbeque tank vs $200+ plus the cost for tanks of oxygen and acetylene)

Scott

[UdoM]

Thanks, Scott! Here is my page now.

Reading that you did work cold "to prove it could be done" made me smile since that's how i tend to think. Okay so i'm back to making armor - building an armor web site should not take as much time as actually making the armor.

[Konstantin the Red]

Okay so i'm back to making armor - building an armor web site should not take as much time as actually making the armor.

Uh, I ain't so sure, because this is a technical sort of field. Whether it should or not may matter less compared with how it nearly does, man-hour for man-hour.

[wcallen]

Since Scott kindly mentioned me...

Yes, we shared every pattern we had (Aaron and I).
I will still share anything I have.

Partially this is because I am not doing this for a living, and partially it is because I have a lot of experience with sharing patterns. They aren't the "magic bullet" that people seem to think. In fact, often you can give someone a pattern, a piece of steel and even access to tools and in the end they will get so frustrated that they will just come back and buy the thing from you (or someone else who can make the thing).

I don't do nearly everything from a rectangle... Yes, the last greave probably was close to one just for fun, but I am willing to be more detailed than that when it makes sense. The last little thing I did (a cheek plate for a burgonet) wasn't taken from a rectangle at all. The pattern even sort of looked like what people would think it should look like. But they don't get that much metal movement.

I looked at the pauldron how to.

Doing how-to's is a lot of work, and I can never manage it. Doing what Mac is doing and documenting "finishing" a suit is a huge amount of work, and he should be applauded for it.

I would say that any "how to" should start with how armour will need to be built. First, what are you trying to make? Show pictures of the original or originals (I often blend them together) that you are using as inspiration. Without this you and your end user are working in a vacuum. We don't know whether what you got is what you intended, and we don't know whether it matches an original.

Next look carefully at the original. Make sure that what you are making actually reflects it. Since the pauldron was there, and it happens to illustrate a pet peeve of mine (sorry, you fell right into it), they aren't symmetrical front to back. Even if they almost appear to be like on some 17th c. ones, they aren't. The front has to interact with the breastplate and allow you to move forward. The back has to interact with the backplate and doesn't need to allow you to move back in the same way. This is a GROSS over-simplification, but in general the back is dished (pretty much like you did) and the front is curled - not dished. It curves to match the form of the breastplate and allow the piece to change from the size of the shoulder/chest to the size of the arm.

Take a look at a few real ones, this may become more obvious. If you don't have good images of good ones from various angles, maybe the ones on my site will at least offer insight into not so nice ones.

http://www.allenantiques.com/Armour-Arm ... ction.html

This one is my newest acquisition:

http://www.allenantiques.com/A-283.html

It is missing its top plate. but in some ways that allows you to see what is going on with the next plate better.

This one:
http://www.allenantiques.com/A-132.html

Has some good angles as well.

I would also tend to start with a note - A pauldron has to interact with the cuirass with which it is worn, so making the cuirass first is the only path to success.

I have rambled on a bit. I tend to do that. In short:

Start with real pieces.
Understand them.
Work from them to create your new piece.

And yes, I am still willing to share. I had a get-together at my house (again) this year, and I attended Gruber's get-together and brought along real pieces for people to play with. I also rambled on accidentally a little bit about gorgets and backplates one morning. That happened because Gruber was starting to make one for a client... and I have played with and made a few, so I could offer some perspective.

Wade

[Scott Martin]

Hi Wade - nice to see you're still active. I'll point out that I didn't say that you made everything from a rectangle, just that your greave pattern was one since that was the last time we discussed patterns, and you were working on your new greaves

That's the first time I've seen a peg like in 283 - interesting. That's a really nice piece: I particularly like the cut lines parallel to the flutes. Could you provide the weight and dimensions on the website please?

Back to the (other) topic at hand, making decent instructional material is HARD because you need to put in enough information so that folks can follow what you are doing, but keep it short enough that they don't get bored and wander off. I tend toward longer, in part in reaction to the "style" that was popular in the '90s of having very terse instructional material (take a look at Talbot's PDF's as an example). They are excellent material if you have a grounding already, but can be incredibly frustrating if you don't have enough of the "language" to understand how the metal will move, or visualize the in-between steps.

On the web you don't have to worry about how many pages can be shipped for a stamp of a given denomination.

In general, my expectation is that I will spend approximately as much time writing a tutorial (including all of the delays in my process as I stop and take a picture) as it took me to make the piece - although the greaves will probably come out under that because:

• I screwed up my pattern and needed to rebuild the fronts
• holy crap greaves take a lot of shaping
• If you are doing a lot of shaping, you need to do a lot of planishing to get the craters out where you should have stopped due to fatigue...

For context, the buckle articles each took the better part of a week (probably 6-8 hours of dedicated time, with a bunch of thinking in between - and requests to folks for photos) and I have a few incomplete articles each of which have over 16 hours each already put in. The "Tools for the starting armourer" article was pretty quick, but I could crib from a bunch of material I had already generated, having given a course on the subject formally and informally about a gajillion times.

I'll stick with Mac - if we all share how we do things, then other people will learn, and we will ALL get better. There was a step improvement in my work following the hammer-in, largely thanks to all of the folks with different techniques who shared not just what they did, but WHY they used those techniques. There were some pretty spectacular teachers including Patrick, Ugo Wade and Mac - I'm just not convinced that they should be left in a room together with alcohol... I'm also drawing a blank for the names of the engraver (specializing in tack) and the damascus diety, and that blacksmith who made a (hardened and tempered) knife out of a railway spike in less than 10 minutes!

Good times, we should do that again.

And invite Jeff Wasson - he's a darn good teacher too!

Scott

[wcallen]

Hi Wade - nice to see you're still active. I'll point out that I didn't say that you made everything from a rectangle, just that your greave pattern was one since that was the last time we discussed patterns, and you were working on your new greaves
....
And invite Jeff Wasson - he's a darn good teacher too!

Scott

No worries. I have made things out of rectangles, and similar shapes.
I also tend to use things like this as ways to pull people into new ways of thinking. The rectangle (or similar) may not be the right shape for many things. But thinking about metal movement differently - drawing out material to thin in places that aren't squashed, then squashing to get 3-d shape can be very useful.

I would love to play with Jeff someday. He does good work, and I have seen videos of him demonstrating.

Wade