Need Help With Kidney Belt Patterns

[AsbjornWorkshop]

Have been searching various sites, including this one, in an attempt to find a pattern or the methods for making a pattern for a kidney belt. As this piece of armor and a cup are the minimum needed to begin SCA heavy combat it surprised me that it was not listed in the types of armor. Can anyone point me in the right direction? Thank you.

[Johann ColdIron]

I do not have a pattern for that. What I have to offer is a warning that minimums are not necessarily the best level of protection to learn this sport.

Some of that is dependent on what kingdom you will be fighting in. Check in with folks at your local fighter practice and you might find someone with loaner gear to use while you are making something. I'd recommend a simple coat of plates like in the pattern archive.

http://www.armourarchive.org/patterns/wisby_cop/

I'd suggest that anywhere your bones are near the surface of your skin needs to be protected in some manner. Until you get some skill that means protective gear. Forearms and collar bones are broken in this sport. Getting hurt is no fun.

[losthelm]

I would look for something cheap the can simulate leather and use that for a mock up.
Your local group may have loaner equipment,
A cup or gender specific groin protection are often the only piece you have trouble barrowing.

[Konstantin the Red]

Have been searching various sites, including this one, in an attempt to find a pattern or the methods for making a pattern for a kidney belt. As this piece of armor and a cup are the minimum needed to begin SCA heavy combat it surprised me that it was not listed in the types of armor. Can anyone point me in the right direction? Thank you.

Welcome and well come, Asbjorn!

Well, SCA kidney belts are... so little patterned as to be hardly patterned at all. There's nothing secret or subtle about the things; if you've seen one at your first fighter practice you can make another. You might even make it better, first try. It is the rock-/chimp-simplest piece of gear. Even a decent wooden shield is a bit more complicated (plywood and sawn out from the flat sheet doesn't qualify as all that decent).

Once you know how much length your belt needs to have to go all the way around you (only some Kingdoms insist on this, check with your local Knight's-Marshal for this standard), which will serve you in any Kingdom you go to, all you need is your materials -- something rigid is best (plastic, aluminum, stainless, galvanized iron, boiled leather/cuir bouilli*), and having the belt's top edge rise up high in your back to actually cover where your kidneys actually live, tucked up just into your back ribs.

This typically means the pieces you make for the back part of the kidney belt look about like grand-piano lids. The plastic plates may be strung together with paracord, or you can join them with a leather strip riveted in as a hinge.

Except for fastening it in the front, everything else is just a refinement or a neat-o detail -- or a reflection of what you're willing to spend on materials, the prices of big pieces of leather being what they are. Steel's cheaper, scrap steel's cheapest.

Enough background, on to the recipe. As you'll see, it's not a pattern:

Assuming you're going with plastic sheet because it's easy to work -- and the same shapes work for doing it in metal -- and assuming you're building to an Armor Standard like that of the Kingdom of Atlantia, whose armor rules call for a kidney belt that is rigid all the way around you -- you will probably want the hard plates of your kidney belt to be four to six in number, all hinged together however you like best.

Measure around your stomach at navel level with a tape measure.

Two plates will hinge at your spine (you could always slip a third, narrow plate in between them, especially if this plate is a little bit curved to sink into the hollow of your spine for close fit and low profile) and these will probably be the largest plates, the ones shaped like grand piano lids. I don't know how tall you are, so I can't really give you a size for how tall these two should be; the bottom edge of the kidney belt is likely to ride about on your hipbones. The plates' top edges curve down from their height to the regular width of the rest of the belt plates, which then hinge together and go around you rather like the plates of a segmented breastplate, just lower down. Some of the grand-piano plates will bend around your sides to meet the other plates of the belt.

Devise a front closure: strap and buckle, or drill thong holes and tie the belt shut. Let the front plates overlap if possible now. You may expand a bit later, you know. Besides the grand piano plates in back you would have two plates per side running forward and around.

You can do a simple bending of plastic sheet heating the flat pieces with a heat gun and bending the plastic. It will mostly stay. That's about all you need to bend plastic into kidney plate pieces. Even better results if you can boil the pieces in a pot before you heat-gun them so they're already up to a couple hundred degrees to start. For REAL plastic forming, with homebuilt simple molds and stuff, you want to get the HDPE up to about 300-325 degrees: see the "Easybake Armor" thread for all the details -- it is all about making cheap, easily worked plate pieces on a fighting-churchmouse budget, so long as you can use an oven and an oven thermometer.

You have many choices for how you hinge all the six plates together. The simplest one is to drill some holes and string the plates one to another with paracord. Leather hinges I've mentioned -- drill holes, punch leather strip, rivet. Putting all the plates on leather strips or strips of nylon webbing, riveted inside or outside of the plates, is another favorite. The expensive way with leather is to make something of leather that looks like a WWE wrestling belt and put the plates in that for the rigid reinforcements. This can be very artistic with tooling and dyeing, but it may not fit in your hobby budget yet. Handsome if you can pull it off and not have to starve for a month to pay for it because you used all your lunch money!

(A plaque belt, though most knightly, is not a kidney belt. Though we've never had anyone confuse the two.)

Manila tagboard (or old file folders), scissors, and tape are great for making yourself a pattern to use if you want to do your cut and try in cheap easy stuff first -- a good idea.

The fastest way to get a kidney belt cranked out is to get with someone else in your Barony, Shire, College or Canton who has built one and copy his. Local assistance is a lot more material than reading us gabbing to you about all the kidney belts we've ever seen from bedrock rock basic up to "damn, that's ingenious." Just now you need basic, and it needs to be big enough and comfortable.

A martial-arts cup you buy; it's personal. A kidney belt and a safety gorget are among the two most useful and simplest pieces of rigid armor a new guy can make and make work. A pair of spaudlers for your shoulders is a simple, small, and pretty swift first project in forming metal, very suitable for the new guy with crafting ambitions. Helms and helmets of the simple kinds are not hard exactly, but involve more for tools, equipment, shop, and being able shove heavier metal about. You don't need to get an anvil, but if you do you'll find some uses for one. Some of us would rather use a short length of scrap railroad track; it's massy and fits into tighter spots than some parts of an anvil, if necessary (often, it is not).

Find and download Paul Blackwell's How To Make Armour PDF. Full of simple easy stuff to do that will get you fielded.

A Wisby Coat of Plates, or CoP on-site, takes care of kidneys and most of the rest of your torso exclusive of the cup zone. And often enough can at least shelter that from blows raining down from above somewhat too. A comfort, that is.

Possibly useful.

Kidney Belt & Thigh Guard pattern -- YouTube. Thigh guards are called "cuisses." Which I think is Medieval French for "thigh."

This is enough to show you the sort of thing I'm talking about:
This one is commercially made (not cheap, but Windrose itself is a good maker and shipper) and has the leather belt all the way around holding interior plates riveted in, rather than making the plates the entirety of the belt itself as in the above. The rise to cover those kidneys in the back is shown.

*Cuir bouilli, modern style: you can find everything we wrote on the topic by Search-buttoning "water hardening" and "water hardened" leather. Requires vege-tanned leather, no lighter than 9-10oz, or belt weight, for best results and quite heavy saddle leather is fine (half again as thick), and the results are highly authentic and pretty reliable without too much experience or skill to start with. Fairly light weight too. Lighter to wear than impregnating with wax or acrylic floor finish to stiffen.

[Konstantin the Red]

It might help if I mentioned those "grand piano plates" meet up tall side to tall side at your spine, sort of like two capital D's back to back, and then the bit of the piano plate that comes around your side being rather like D= altogether. So, the left half of the kidney belt's pieces all march along kind of like D=,=,= to get round to your front closure. Right half, mirror image of the left.

Let's see, do we know where you are and what your local SCA group is? We might have a correspondent near there who could be of immediate help.

[Konstantin the Red]

Any word, a week along?