The Armour Archive

With my studies of Border Reivers I know that they really liked to use a jack of plates. I was wondering if any has attempted to make this or know how to. I would spend hours trying to look for the original message if someone has already asked this question but with school in session my hours go else where. send my to the message or websites to help me out thanks

There is a Compleat Anachronist on the subject. #126, Winter 2005.
https://stockclerk.sca.org/scan/MM=5bcb817b32824464dd6ee10e3056e314:120:129:10.html?mv_more_ip=1&mv_nextpage=ca&mv_arg=

Albrecht

Welcome and well come, MartynBaxter. I found a couple of my old posts searching on "pennyplate," as in pennyplate jack -- from one of them:

A 16th-c. economy edition of the brigandine was the stuffed jack, or pennyplate jack. Hundreds of small plates, round or clip-cornered squares, pierced with a hole in the center of each, were stitched into place with stout twine, making an allover geodesic pattern of threads on the outside of the doublet-like jack. This one requires 16th-century everything else in the kit to pass with the Authenticity Police. You know, the ones who have to be reminded that saying something isn't period... isn't period. Using the plastic from too-thin buckets like the 6-gallon agricultural bucket or the buckets pickles and potato salad come to restaurants in, makes a hella-excellent light-fighter torso defense.

Pockets work for hidden reinforces. It's a great technique for concealed kidney plate reinforcement of a brig. It'd be a terrible PITA for installing every last plate in the brig, though; use this for the extras.

http://www.eskimo.com/~cwn/brig_craig1.html

The method for a jack of plates is a variation on the method for making up a brigandine. In the main, it replaces the arrays of rivets with a pattern of heavy twine run through the central holes with an upholstery or sailmakers' needle, such as can be gotten in the needle set from Tandy-LF. Substitutes needle and thread for rivets, but otherwise there is a general similarity. My quote says 16th-century, but I'd modify that with "late." Every penny-plate gets up to three threads passing through its central hole unless I am totally off base.

The cut and style of the jack would be any late-sixteenth doublet that you like. You've seen the pictures; this is just a hard doublet. As with a brigandine, lay out and cut out a doublet to fit you first, then make up the needed plates to fill in for armor. They didn't put slashes into these, though some nice piping or cord ornament wouldn't go amiss; I recommend a bit of effort at making the piece a bit decorative so it is pleasing to wear it in the field. If you're working on torso armor for SCA heavy, incorporate some reinforcing in the form of larger plates for your kidney region, per Society and your Kingdom's Armor Standards, q.v. They may be completely buried within your pennyplate jack and invisible behind more pennyplate scales.

The second page of this thread gets into jacks. Jacks stuffed with plates just adds in a hard layer to the rest of it.

What scale material do you like?

Look for: the journal of The Arms & Armour Society Volume XII, Number 2 September, 1989

It has a discussion of Remains of a Jack of Plate excavated from Beeston Castle. Excellent background article on jacks and brigs

I'd say 18 gauge plates.
Each about...hmm....2 inches across?
They need not all be the same size for every part of the jack,though.
Smaller plates for tighter areas like armpits, or neck ring maybe.

The plates assembled in this manner will all overlap about 50%, so you can use thinner than what you'd want in say, a coat of plates.

I'd add a little extra to the edges of the cloth when you pattern the jack shell.
Just enough to account for the extra layer or plates, and maybe padding if you stuff padding into it instead of using a separate padded layer under.
You can always trim the edges down later when you finish the garment.. But, say, an extra half inch gives a little more forgiveness for the plate layer and the expansion it creates.

The pics I have seen of original jacks look like they have a half inch or so of stuffed padding under the plate layer.. I could be misreading the images, but I don't think so.
The edges where I can see them are quite thick, and a padding layer would account for that.

From what I have read, plates were made from just about any old iron scraps or old plate armor, cut into squares, painted and punched with a hole of around a quarter inch through the middle.
(For the cording to have enough clearance to pass through three times, the hole has to be reasonably generous- 3/16 to 1/4 inch seems about right to me.)

For the record, a jack of plate has been on my to-do list for a couple of years....
So I have devoted some time to thinking about the details.

It also occurs to me, that the thin version of 2 inch fender washers could be used to make a jack, if round plates are in consideration. (Around here, 2 inch, 18 or 20 gauge fender washers are carried by Lowes.)
They would be galvanized and with a convenient hole in place already....And easily obtained in numbers.

If they would lay better curved- they could just be dished lightly with a wooden block and a hammer or leather mallet.

Just my two cents worth.

-Badger-

Round, or snipped out octagonal. A bit of deburring & Bob's your ungulate.

It's a passable way to recycle smashed and ruined 100-mil HDPE paint buckets also. These would have a single curvature to the pieces already.

Somewhere in Ursus' Pennsic pics there is one photo of a guy in what appears to be a really nice jack. I saw it in last year's and this year's sets. I briefly looked for this years and couldn't find it. I saw that you had limited time so I'm not sure that this is an option but if you did find it you could post the pic and ask if anybody knows him and then contact him that way and ask how he made his. Not much help but it's what I have.....


Morgan