The Armour Archive

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Damn, that's a good deal.

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Hey Jacob, you've picked a really nice helm. I like your sketch. It looks like you have the fit and form pretty good. The only discrepancies from the original that I can see is that the original is a little bit taller even than your sketch, and the point is a little further back and slightly rounded...

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For most of the forearm I just used ball stakes of a couple sizes, then for the cuff I used a sort of crappy home-made bickern looking thing.

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Wow, that's brutal. I'm cringing extra hard since I sometimes work barefoot. Although I usually make sure to pic up any substantial pieces of sheet metal.

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Hey Jan. Here is my finished forge. I can't take credit for the design. I copied the arm mechanism almost entirely from Jiri Klepac's forge, which he so graciously sent me pictures of. The main design difference is that his is attached to a wall, and mine is not. Instead, mine is designed for easy t...

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Got some work done on these arms. Ended up trimming the cops to more accurate proportions, and started work on the vambraces. Here are some full sized drawings and some pieces cut out. The proportions look a little stouter than the original. I guess I have bigger forearms than the original owner. ht...

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Thanks Mac. I did try something like that, actually, but not too aggressively. I held the visor on loosely with bolts, and held the visor down on only one side with vise grips. Spot heating it in my forge was a little tough. It mostly worked fine, but it wanted to heat through the visor onto the act...

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Thanks for the tips, Andrew. I find it a little tough to check the flame colour, due to the shape/set up of the forge chamber. I messed with it a bit today, and I think it's doing okay. I can get the steel up to yellow, but I haven't really left it in as long as I could. I could probably hit white h...

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Here's where I'm at today. Tomorrow I'll try to get the visor to fit more snugly against the helm, try to square off the ocular ridge thingy then forge the lower half of the visor to shape. Comparing this to pictures of the original, it looks like I didn't leave enough extra material on the edge of ...

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Aussie, Andrew is correct. It's a CO2 deflector. Since the burner is mounted straight down, the hot CO2 rich air coming out of the chamber wants to go straight back into the air intake on the burner, which will lower my flame temperature. Andrew, sounds like you're more familiar with propane forges ...

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Quick video. Forge is up and running. FINALLY getting back to work on this thing.
Pictures to follow.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VTqyIAxBHgk

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Wow, I'm really envious of the fit of that garment. My projects usually end up just a bit too big or just a bit too small in critical areas, much to my endless frustration. Your whole kit seems to be coming together really well.

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Hey Signo, I thought about using the cops for a different project, but I can't think of one they'd be appropriate for. I think all elbow cops need to be narrower than the ones I've made. I think I will just trim them down, even though I think it will make the fan end up looking funny. I think the ar...

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last one for the day. I'm working on a churburg arm harness, and it was going fairly well until I realized that I've messed up some proportions and now that I've seen it, I can't unsee it. I made some adjustments to my pattern to correct this problem on future attempts, but it leaves me with a bit o...

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More things: Kettle hat, made for fun. I got a cheap 120v wire-feed welder on sale, and I've been having fun with it. http://i.imgur.com/U9dJZ3g.jpg http://i.imgur.com/P0N4as4.jpg http://i.imgur.com/G9gUX97.jpg The evolution of a buckle. This is the first time I've taken a serious crack at buckle-ma...

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Next up:

This is a fancy party mask that I made for fun. It's made of aluminum and brass and tooled leather.

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I would apologize for the info dump, but I'm sure you guys don't mind. Here's some stuff I've been working on lately. As always, I welcome questions and criticism. Here is a brigandine I finished recently. The chest plates are 16g mild steel, the rest is 18g. The shell is 3 layers of canvas, and the...

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So, it's been a few months since my last update. I spent most of that time living in a bush-camp working as a tree planter. It's something of a Canadian rite of passage. That's put enough cash in my pocket to spend some time feeding my armouring habit and keep me away from that terrible deli. The la...

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Just a quick update: I finally finished plannishing and cut out the face opening. Took a long friggen time! It certainly went a lot faster once I got Hal to make me a real life ball stake. My only regret is that I didn't order more tools from Hal while I was at it. I have a couple tiny cracks that I...

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Wow! That looks amazing. What gauge did you start with? Do you feel like you lost much material to grinding? How long did it take you to plannish this?

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Wow! That looks amazing. What gauge did you start with? Do you feel like you lost much material to grinding? How long did it take you to plannish this?

EDIT: I read over the thread and answered one of my own questions. Started with 2mm steel.

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Haha! This is looking really good. Everyone works faster than me it seems. I can't see your last few pictures though. Some photobucket issues, it seems.

Can't wait to see more!

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Looking good, man. I dig the integral spaulders.

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Aussie, there are a few reasons I placed the rivets like I did in the sketch. a) It looks like that's where they should sit, based on how I think the helm should sit on the head. This seems to happen with a lot of helmets around this time period. b) I have a barrel helm I use for SCA fighting and it...

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Hmm. I'm working on a brigandine based on an example at the royal amrouries from around 1470, and I''m very intrigued by all these brigandine half sleeves. Do you think these wrap around the entire arm, or basically work like a simple spaulder, articulated on the supporting fabric? I've been looking...

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Looks excellent! I'm really happy to see people trying out the method from that thread.

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Not too much to show for today. Did a couple hours of planishing, but it was slow going. I found the top of the helmet was very tricky to planish, probably because my ball stake is just a ground down trailer hitch and it has a pretty small radius around the sides, which I end up having to use instea...

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Haha, I approve of the lanterns. Definitely should add those to the final product. They're removable anyway.

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Just a little update today. I put in about another 6 hours (I took a long lunch break). The first 3 hours were spent tweaking the shape of the helm. I still feel like I should have made the curve of the neck slightly deeper. Will this feeling ever go away? The rest of the day I spent trimming/grindi...

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I get your concerns guys, but part of my worry with having a separate bevor is that the type of bevor I'm dealing with here does not have a falling lame and seems to want to leave a bit of a gap between bevor and visor. I'm fairly certain this would freak out a lot of martials. But wade, you're righ...

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Aussie, I'd like to make the bevor separate just purely for the sake of investigating historic form and function, but I feel like it would be really finicky to get that to pass in SCA heavy combat. The close helm set up seems like a clean, elegant solution. Probably pretty tricky to get just right, ...

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Alec, I feel you about not wanting to keep track of time. I used to stress about the time I was putting into this stuff when I had some notion that I was going to sell whatever piece I was working on. After my last (relatively unsuccessful) helm, I realized that I'm allowed to screw things up becaus...

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Lately, I've been losing track of how much time has gone into this. I should start keeping track again.

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Okay, long time since an update. The day after my last update I ran out of oxygen, and shortly after that I got an order of steel in, so I worked on a brigandine while waiting on more oxygen, now I have two projects going at once. I will probably post some pictures of the brig when it's done. I don'...

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Tom, this thread is the bomb diggity. I'm thinking of elegant ways of making a sallet I'm building suitable for SCA combat. These pictures are giving me ideas...

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