The Armour Archive

RalphS

Take a look at the top picture (DSC03496.jpg) in the previous post. The other hammer was just one of Patricks regular raising hammers, perhaps a pound heavy. The rough forming of the helmet was definitely some form of "squashing" as Mac so eloquently put it, the rest was more along the lin...

RalphS

http://forums.armourarchive.org/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=33036 I had that one bookmarked OH, so that's what that guy's doing; raising a helm on a anvil? I really couldn't tell what he was doing. No wonder he started out with so thick of steel. Yup. Just testing a theory, it worked pretty well. After ...

RalphS

Gavin, Glassed is polished. There are references to glassing mills. I'm afraid I sometimes use antiquated expressions to amuse myself. I hope others are amused as well. Mac I love to learn these kind of expressions! Not trying to derail the thread too much, but could you tell a little more about gl...

RalphS

He just seemed to glow blue for a moment, I swear, from the inside out... I bet he wasn't cold any more... Some of my personal highlights: While trying to heat a tricky rivet inside a helmet with a propane torch I find out that the torch leaks: a big blue fireball spews out of the helmet and heads ...

RalphS

I notice that a lot of guys like Eric Dube use a cylindrical stake and other "non-ball" stakes for raising. What's needed for raising is support of perhaps a couple of square inches of an approximately right curvature. Preferably you'd want this support to move as little as possible, so e...

RalphS

Hey photo shop guys:
Can you make a...GIFâ€¦ File or something so it rotates?

[img]http://www.astro.lu.se/~ralph/pics/sallet_thomas_2.gif[/img]

Nope, can't be done. Sorry.

(photoshop elements 2.0, save for web option, IIRC)

RalphS

Alcyoneus wrote:
Halberds wrote:Every square inch of this helm will be cold hammered before it is finished.

What about the rounded inches?

That depends totally on whether they are rounded up or rounded down, and if you're using metric or imperial units.

RalphS

Now if you posted a tempting picture of her, more people might consider...

RalphS

Having made iron in both a bloomery and a mediaeval style blast furnace, I very much appreciate the still ridiculously low price of steel. 12% of almost nothing is still very little, considering the alternatives...

Next blast furnace run will be next summer!

RalphS

Ralph; a forge does not need to be coal fueled, I was thinking of a propane forge when I wrote that; but making your own charcoal either from a wood stove/fireplace or from scrap wood works in a solid fuel forge as well. (But you already know all this; when are you coming back out this way?) Thomas...

RalphS

Thomas Powers wrote:A forge is a lot cheaper to heat things for smithing than a torch!

Unless you buy your coal in Sweden

(one of these day's I'm gonna make/buy an induction torch)

RalphS

It's really just a matter of practice, I've been through that stage as well, but think I'll always keep on learning. Eventually you'll develop a feel for the metal and know which kind of blows thin or thicken or move or shear the metal, and you'll have a lot more control over where the metal actuall...

RalphS

Hot raising is fun! A few tips: decide where you want to hit before you (re)heat the piece, heat it exactly in that spot, and while you raise the piece, hit the metal in the places which move the metal in the right direction, don't just hit it in the hottest spot. You can mark with chalk, but try to...

RalphS

Same here: been there, done that, learned the lesson. My first helmet took about, oh, 50+ hours to raise cold with occasional annealing. My second helmet took something like 10-15 hours hot raising, and most of the time difference was because of the hot vs cold work. I'll never cold-raise an entire ...

RalphS

Here is an Italian sallet in the Museo Civico Luigi Marzoli (inventory number 290). It is listed as being Milanese, circa 1450. Hope this helps. Rob Do you happen to have a higher resolution image of this helmet? It has some interesting marks/delaminations/cracks near the face opening, I'd love to ...

RalphS

It's textured like the outside. In fact, with the 1-2 layers I tried in my test pieces, you look right through it. It looks like you could easily put pins in it, but it's too hard to comfortably do this. No sharp fiber thingies sticking out, just a hard plastic shell with holes between the fibers.

RalphS

Has anybody tried the fiberglass that is now being used for casting broekn limbs? As I understand it, the original body cast can't be fiberglass due to the heat given off by the curing process. (anybody know what the temp range acually is?) but I would assume that the stuff being used by Drs must s...

RalphS

Aw man! Such a beautiful suit and such a horrible looking piece of rattan...

RalphS

Black heat is typically something around 500 C, it's just below the temperature where something starts to glow a deep dull red. At black heat, and normal mild steel, the stress in the steel will disappear very quickly and the steel will remain soft no matter how much you work it. When working the st...

RalphS

For annealing the propane should be fine, you only need a barely visible red to anneal mild steel, and black heat also works. For hot raising it's possible if you have a *big* burner, like a weed burner. Things work even better if you put the piece on a bed of charcoal, which helps with insulation a...

RalphS

Welcome to the armourarchive!

This happens to be a topic which has been covered many times over. Have a look at the wonderful search function, you can access it from the link in the top right hand side of the forum pages.

Any pictures of the armour by the way? We *love* pictures over here!

RalphS

ETC wrote:Don't Underestimate Steel

Shouldn't that be: Don't Underestimate the Power of the Forge?

RalphS

at this time im cutting 18 guage steel sheets with the classic hammer and chisel, works quite nice and very accurate... but it takes FOREVER! Just curious: what kind of technique do you use? Some time ago I wrote a tutorial on how I cut with hammer and chisel. The secret lies in a *sharp* chisel, a...

RalphS

I know nothing about them, except the extant ones I've seen in museums were 'rough from the hammer' and the paint job was to hide that. A matter of opinion, but I see the rough from the hammer more as a case of: "why bother grinding it off when you're going to paint it anyway, and the paint wo...

RalphS

That's close! I'm 30 km north of Ystad, just north of SjÃ¶bo. Did you end up somewhere in SÃ¶vestad? I'll definitely drop by some time, I'll be in touch!

RalphS

Welcome (back) to the armourarchive! The basics of heat treating: It won't work with just any steel, you need special steel which can be heat treated, commonly known as carbon steel or spring steel, but also by a large selection of more specialised names and/or numbers. The heat treating process is ...

RalphS

You moved to Sweden?! Anywhere in the neighbourhood of SkÃ¥ne perhaps? (not that it matters very much with me spending most of my time in the Netherlands nowadays).

I'd love to get together and play some time!

RalphS

Beautiful setup! One warning: from personal experience I found out that plastic can melt from the piece one is quenching in the bucket. Over the years I've melted holes in the bottom of several buckets. Now I use a metal bucket in a bigger plastic bucket. The metal bucket is all abused, rusty, crack...

RalphS

Ralph, the solid fuels definitelly work fine, but I think that smoke of the fire is a problem (at least for me). Stock forging or small plates are just fine, but when trying to heat large piece in the middle for raising more then half of the smoke goes around and stays in shop. "The Old" ...

RalphS

Solid 80 mm round stock.

RalphS

Am I the only one around here who has used solid fuel for raising? Coal, coke, and charcoal work great. Not as fast as oxy-acetylene though, but versatile in a completely different way.

RalphS

Not disagreeing, but a note with regard to using cyanoacrylate for this purpose - it is notorious for causing significant scarring. OK, I didn't know that. So far I've not noticed any unusual scarring. Plenty of scars though, but most from the time before I started using superglue. Anyway, I'll kee...

RalphS

Gloves will give you about 0.2 seconds of extra time (which you may not notice) before the grinder happily digs into your flesh (which you'll probably notice). Still, for those "oopses" which only take a blink of an eye that may be just enough. Something I've found as almost essential arou...

RalphS

Not sure about kilns over on your side of the pond, but over here they're just resistive wire. As long as the temperature of the filaments doesn't exceed the maximum they're rated for, the voltage doesn't matter that much. AC, DC, doesn't matter. What *does* matter is the power you can get out of th...

RalphS

Ambrogio wrote:RalphS, you are weird!

Yeah! Why tin when you can TiN?

Re: fiberglass casts?

Re: Cutting Steel

Re: Painted helms?