The Armour Archive

RalphS

That would be pretty cool, coating your armour with TiN!

RalphS

Here are some of the fakes which are on display in the Royal Armouries in Leeds. Kind of obviously "wrong" shapes if you have even a moderately trained eye for the Real Stuff.

RalphS

The breastplate could be something in the following style (but note that the arrangement of all the individual pieces may be different than shown in the picture): http://www.hermann-historica.de/auktion ... at52_A.txt

RalphS

Oh boy! That skull part turned out pretty beefy around the edge, lots of grinding margin

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Beautiful pieces of steel so far!

RalphS

With a hammer face more curved in one direction than the other you can force the metal rather specifically in one direction, if you choose to do so. With identical curvature in all directions that's much harder to do.

RalphS

Aussie Yeoman wrote:that looks like a Jim Henson creation. Where'd that come from?

Many generations of selective inbreeding by a lunatic, no doubt.

RalphS

This is one of Ugo's side distraction... erm.... projects. It's an aluminum corset...Here is a friend of mine in it last time he was up for a visit (An Tir 12th night) What's that?! Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No! It's the trauma heli coming to fly you off to the ER after a self-inflicted neck inj...

RalphS

The best (and unintentional) results I've gotten with hot-dishing. I was working on a ladle in an improvised workshop and needed something with a gentle depression, the oak stump was an obvious candidate. The combination of hot steel and water to keep the charring down eventually gave a wonderful an...

RalphS

I think that Ugo is like Blonkensh*ld: if you mention his name three times, he shows up!

(and he rolls his edges too...)

RalphS

Sounds like an interesting trial run. How thick did you start out with? We took some quarter inch stuff and tried raising and dishing a cauldron from it. I ran out of time leaving it rather shallow and never finished. RPM It all started out with the experiment described here: m using 1/4 inch sprin...

RalphS

I have seen sheet armour plates arriving in England for a wide variety of parts of armour so it quite easily could have started out for the armourer as a semi flat piece and worked into armour. It does seem from the memoranda book examples that they may in fact already be cut. If you check out the ...

RalphS

This is what happens late at night in Patrick's shop when there's too much armour lay'n around: m The cool thing is, the visors actually fit like they were made for the barbute even though they were made for an armet. This m combination does have a special kind of appeal. I'm sure some SCA people w...

RalphS

Cet wrote:
The billet was the way it was done historically

Cite?

Absence of rolling mills for steel, I'm sure someone can dig up a reference of the first rolling mills, some time in the 1700's?

RalphS

Just curious: what will you do with the bottom? Seamless too?

RalphS

Thats going to be a great helm when finished! Can you explain more on how you intend to change the tilt of the visor? Right now the visor rides on the bolts with wingnut, and pinches on the brow when pressed down. This is because there are some bumps and dents in the roughly finished visor, especia...

RalphS

Nice. It's interesting to see the contrast between the finished piece and newly made face plate. What gauge steel do you use and after you've finished grinding and polishing, what gauge do you think it would then be? It started out 2.5 mm thick, way too heavy really, but the idea was back then to u...

RalphS

Zombie time! Just picking things up where I left them. I've rolled the hinges, and attached the visor to the helmet. There's still quite a bit of trimming left to do, and some shaping of the top of the visor to help it to fit snugly against the brow of the helmet and have it tilt down some more. As ...

RalphS

I once took my helmet with a mail coif and some other small stuff as carry-on luggage. Coming out of the other side of the security check I was prepared to answer all kinds of tricky questions. The question I got was totally unexpected though: "Did Ã…lstene make that helmet?". And yes inde...

RalphS

The problem I have with MSDS's is that basically everything is mortally dangerous, and it's nearly impossible to distinguish the really dangerous stuff. One of my favourites is the msds for sand, http://www.jtbaker.com/msds/englishhtml/s0722.htm

I wonder how I survived all those trips to the beach without the proper protection...

RalphS

Just an idea (which didn't work out in the end): the waybackmachine, m m We're sorry, access to m has been blocked by the site owner via robots.txt. Read more about robots.txt See the site's robots.txt file. Try another request or click here to search for all pages on forums.armourarchive.org/phpBB2...

RalphS

Personally I think that the right curvature and angles are what give a piece its spirit. Symmetry is nice, finish is nice, but if a helmet is made up of perfect cylinder, cone and sphere segments it just screams plain "wrong!" at me. Attempting to use original production methods really hel...

RalphS

Look at it from the bright side: Lots of free diskspace again!

RalphS

What Hal said.

And, you can scribe a line in the depressions to get definition there, or two parallel lines along each side of the flutes crest. Or you can grind. It's all been done in the original pieces, just take another close look at those many good pictures of original pieces of armour.

RalphS

Yup, it's plain old energy dissipation. If you bounce a hammer off your piece of work on the anvil, just letting it drop by its own weight, it will not bounce up to the exact height you dropped it from. This loss of height is loss of energy of the hammer, which is converted to heat (due to inelastic...

RalphS

Pyro wrote:And hey...not everyone has a beer belly. Nor are we all old farts! I happen to be still on the younger side of the spectrum, thank you!

That just leaves the macho part then (for now). I'm sure time will work on the other two.

RalphS

RalphS

You guys do realize I was joking, right? I'm just checking because I don't want anyone to take offense. Cat Aww! And here I thought you were this really cool girl who's going to show us macho beer-bellied old farts off by standing up for your rights to beat heavy metal no matter what your gender is...

RalphS

My significant other would most definitely have bought me those hammers even before I'd found them myself!

Years ago, she continued bidding on a forge at an auction when I'd bailed out. And another time she'd found me this wonderful T-stake at a flea market. I like her!

RalphS

I'm in on whatever is going to be organised! Only problem is that my workshop is in Sweden, so I guess it's kind of out of the way to suggest a hammer in at my place

But I'll gladly join in on anything in the Netherlands and surroundings!

RalphS

I thought the main cause of global warming was ozone-depleting hairspray. Off topic... but here we go: Ozone is actually a greenhouse gas, and a pretty efficient one. So using more of the ozone-depleting hairsprays would counteract global warming. So would cutting down all the forests, BTW. Persona...

RalphS

Ok, I gotta ask...do you REALLY need that many hammers? If so, I'm in a lot 'o trouble. Well, there's need and need ... I do 90% of my work with about 3 hammers, but one never finds just the right hammer to do that last 0.5% of the work, so the collection is ever growing. And it's easy to find/make...

RalphS

That's a fine selection of hammers!! No pictures of my hammer rack. It's a simple construction of two boards with appropriate spacing for a hammer handle, narrow on one side, broader on the other, with a couple of legs and support beams for the legs, so I can drag the thing around without the legs b...

RalphS

for stakes well that really depends what you are comfortable with. I've heard of someone (trying to remember the name) who raised a helmet using just the horn of his anvil for a stake. That could be me, but it's a truncated and rounded horn. The 300 pouns of anvil and the angle of the horn make it ...

RalphS

I followed the two seasons of armouring courses he gave a couple years ago. I think the best things I learned there was how to feel the shape of the piece you're working on, and even more patience. He has an amazing eye for detail, and will not finish any piece if it's not perfect by his standards.

RalphS

RenJunkie wrote:Don't suppose you have any pics of you gorming that bulge?

Check out the pictures and links over here:
http://forums.armourarchive.org/phpBB2/ ... hp?t=58875

It's actually pretty straightforward with that stake.

Raised pigface visor