The Armour Archive

I found an interesting thing the other day...
I was making aluminum ellipse shields for a couple guys who wanted them to be as light as possible.
I was using scrap roadsigns I picked up at a scrap yard...
So just prior to removing the gigantic 'YIELD' stickers with my flapsander, I weighed the shields.
I noted the stickers were different thicknesses, and weighed them afterwards.
The stickers weighed .75 and 1.25 lbs each on a 24x32 ellipse.

I guess the moral of the story is, if you want the shields lighter, remove the sticker.

As it is, I spoke to a Judge once (Unofficially of course) and he said typically, if you have a reciept for the roadsign from a scrap yard, tehy STILL assume it's stolen, you only have to pay a fine...not do jail time in addition.

So second moral to the story, always remove the stickers to protect yourself...

Thorfinn

Anyone know if the british ones are aluminium of this type? might make some good shields for larpers.

Aluminum for LARP shields. I don' think so. Most games have mandatory padding, and some even don't allow wooden cores anymore. Most of my customers want either no core or a thin curved HDPE core.

Point
2 would be that you don't need the Aluminum. You don't have the impact that would break the shield as it would in SCA or Stage Steel or Live Steel environments.

An example:

No wooden cores or aluminIum!!! seems silly to me but rules are rules. Might be good for the SCA crowd then. just sent an enquiry to a maker as to the type of material.

Thomas james hayman wrote:No wooden cores or aluminIum!!! seems silly to me but rules are rules. Might be good for the SCA crowd then. just sent an enquiry to a maker as to the type of material.

First off, I use mostly American spelling, so you will have to live with me writing "Aluminum", especially since it seems to be the accepted term used here. If I write German thats another thing. He who sits in the glass house should not cast stones if you know what I mean.

Second, I never said I agreed with the rules. My game allows both wood and aluminum cores IF (big IF) sufficently padded, especially round the edges. If oyu can get the stuff cheap from decommissioned road signs good for you. Just don't expect a lot of business from the English LARP community.

Edited for bad spelling

1: i wasn't having a go i just don't like aluminum it sounds silly, but if thats how you spell it thats up to you.

2: how come you highlighted the EN in English, i don't see a problem with how i spelt it.

Thomas james hayman wrote: i just don't like aluminum it sounds silly.

AL-I-MIN-E-YUM
(I know how you feel)

exactly

Roadsigns make lousy shields. They dent up something horrible!

Thomas james hayman wrote:exactly

Yes silly, should be A-LOOM-I-NUM.
(2 countries seperated by a common language)



My cuisses are road signs.
Thanks for the heads-up on removing the stickers!!!
Especailly for legal reasons.

Girls, Girls, Don't fight, you're both pretty.

James, is it really true that Most English Larps (at least medieval themed ones) don't allow wood cored sheilds? This sounds silly.

Do they really outlaw period materials? I don't know why you would, but do you have any idea of the thinking behind this?

(the above "girls, Girls" part was for fun, not to berate either of you. I am already indebted to both of you.)

f
(and I think that Al-You-Min-Ee-Um sounds pretty silly, but cool in a sort of victorian way. Must be a yank thing)

I know Amtgard still allows wooden cores, but don't expect to ever see one. People normally just use plastic sleds or aircraft aluminum, wood is too heavy. There's not much point in using a wood shield anyway, you have to completly butcher it with all the padding that is required (it's there for a reason, but that doesn't stop it from making the shield look like shit in most cases).

I thought it was alumiNINNYum.

I don't actually larp so i don't know the rules. I know somebody who does though who will know possibly other people who might want shields. I always thought that road signs were strengthened aluminium.

Thorfinn wrote:I was using scrap roadsigns I picked up at a scrap yard...
So just prior to removing the gigantic 'YIELD' stickers with my flapsander, I weighed the shields.
I noted the stickers were different thicknesses, and weighed them afterwards.
The stickers weighed .75 and 1.25 lbs each on a 24x32 ellipse.

You might be removing too much metal with your sander. That'll probably make your shields dent easier and not last as long.

I was given a few road signs to work with, and I used grafitti remover to get the stickers off. Took a couple of applications, but did the trick.

Eh...

What happens if you got your road signs FROM the county road dept?

Would removing the stickers still be necessary? Might be a good idea... as I really would have no proof that that's where I got 'em from except the word of the guy that got 'em for me...

Thomas, you caught me on the wrong foot yesterday. Sorry for my overreaction.

Freeman. The English LARP scene (for the msot part) has been drifting towards stricter padding standards and has in general been gravitating towards a more plastic friendly attitude than the continental, especiually the German LARPers. Lots of LARPs in Great Britain allow armour constructed from foam, and helmets form Fiberglass and foam. So in turn lots of marshals have gone to bouncinf rigid shield cores (hell some German marshalks won't pass wooden cores, but thtat's commercial pressures at work, time enough for a long chat). Or so my customers over the canal tell me.

Cheers

Sebastian

PS: This whole policy with the signs, isn't that "guilty until proven innocent?" How does this mesh with due process?

Hello.

As to "outlawing period materials in LARPs"...for quite a while now a trend is emerging here in Germany that the exposed edges on armour (italics edited for clarification) should be rolled (rings a bell? Blankenshield, Blankenshield, Blanken...aw, shut up).
I recently found out why.

1)Most LARP armourers I am aware if are working in 1mm steel only, are
2)unable to deburr an edge properly, are
3)unable to construct plate armour without wide gaps in the articulations, are
4)unable to dish the elbow pieces sufficiently deep,
5)rarely use hammerwork but instead bend and weld their pieces the way that office supply armour is made from cardboard (that´s why they use this thin stuff...try bending 2mm ), and, lastly
6)probably use auto body tools. I just leafed through a few catalogues of tool supplies, and most of the tools like bead rollers available at decent pricing are capable to deform 1 to 1.2mm as an average and 1.5mm as a maximum. Plus,
7)steel sheeting is sold by weight, so the raw material in general is cheaper, but the advertising and pricing of the final products usually is "traditional craftsman" style.

Still, I can´t see any advantage of a rolled haute-pièce versus a properly deburred one when a foam rubber sword hits it dead-on. Conspiracy.

Regards

Ivo

Now that we've hashed out how to spell and pronounce Aluminum, Does anyone have a better way to remove the sign stickers than grinding it off ? Grinding is such a pain.

I cover both sides with canvas.

Ivo wrote:Hello.

As to "outlawing period materials in LARPs"...for quite a while now a trend is emerging here in Germany that the visible edges should be rolled (rings a bell? Blankenshield, Blankenshield, Blanken...aw, shut up).
I recently found out why.

1)Most LARP armourers I am aware if are working in 1mm steel only, are
2)unable to deburr an edge properly, are
3)unable to construct plate armour without wide gaps in the articulations, are
4)unable to dish the elbow pieces sufficiently deep,
5)rarely use hammerwork but instead bend and weld their pieces the way that office supply armour is made from cardboard (that´s why they use this thin stuff...try bending 2mm ), and, lastly
6)use auto body tools. I just leafed through a few catalogues of tool supplies, and most of the tools like bead rollers available at decent pricing are capable to deform 1.5mm as a maximum. Plus,
7)steel sheeting is sold by weight, so the raw material in general is cheaper, but the prricing of the final products usually is "traditional craftsman- like".

Still, I can´t see any advantage of a rolled haute-pièce versus a properly deburred one when a foam rubber sword hits it dead-on. Conspiracy.

Regards

Ivo

Ivo,

agreed. Lots of LARP armour is too thin and some it is badly finished. Then again I have always managed to get my unrolled edges passed, and so have my customers (my LARP customers that is, it's not that much of stink for my others)

One honestly meant piece of advice: No reason to bash though. You know this is what makes most people stop listening, you know. No game is perfect, but there are methods that are more constructive and less degrading. There are a lot of good people in the German medievalist scene who have started as LARPers or still do it. Do not make the mistake of lumping 30000 people or even a majority of them in one large pot. You would not want the reverse to happen to you, like say being lumped together with the average booth-owner/trinket saleman at a typical market?

Cheers

Sebastian

PS:Sent you an email

Trevor wrote:Roadsigns make lousy shields. They dent up something horrible!

My experience is a bit different. I have a larger heater shield that I have used for the last 7 years and I could not find any real dents. I even checked the edges and there are 4 areas that might be considered a dent but 3 are on the 'bends' that were needed to give the shield a curve.

I don't know what type of aluminum it is but I wish i had more of those signs.

Sebastian Kempkens wrote:
Lots of LARP armour is too thin and some it is badly finished.

"Badly finished" can be a bit of an understatement with some LARPs, watching someone duct tape a metal plate to their chest and call it armour is one of the many reasons i'm in the process of putting an SCA kit together.

Alarick wrote:

Sebastian Kempkens wrote:
Lots of LARP armour is too thin and some it is badly finished.

"Badly finished" can be a bit of an understatement with some LARPs, watching someone duct tape a metal plate to their chest and call it armour is one of the many reasons i'm in the process of putting an SCA kit together.

Sorry, I misstated. I meant "LARP armour you see in Germany". I was adressing Ivo especially. LARP is a different beast here, ya know. I can't imagine any ALRP where you would get armour points for a duct taped metal plate. The duct tape would dq the armour in any case most places.

BTT: Willing, have you conmsidered heat to get the sticker off?

Hello.

Sebastian Kempkens wrote:Ivo,

agreed. Lots of LARP armour is too thin and some it is badly finished. Then again I have always managed to get my unrolled edges passed, and so have my customers (my LARP customers that is, it's not that much of stink for my others)

One honestly meant piece of advice: No reason to bash though. You know this is what makes most people stop listening, you know. No game is perfect, but there are methods that are more constructive and less degrading. There are a lot of good people in the German medievalist scene who have started as LARPers or still do it. Do not make the mistake of lumping 30000 people or even a majority of them in one large pot. You would not want the reverse to happen to you, like say being lumped together with the average booth-owner/trinket saleman at a typical market?

Sebastian, please note:

I wrote "most LARP armourers I am aware of"...not "all"!

Quite a few people told me that any open edge had to be rolled for safety or foam rubber reasons. An article in the LARPZEIT magazine said the same (which actually was merely an advert from a thin- sheet armourer, disguised as a neutral press article, like so many in publications like the magazine mentioned).
According to this, most armour on sale aimed at the LARP community actually is made of thin metal, with rolled edges and "crafted" like mentioned above, and many a LARP organizer felt urged to put a rolled edge paragraph into his book of rules. I have seen quite a few armour bits of this type, with elbow or knee articulations that did not allow for more bending than, say 45 to 60 degrees. Several I saw had not even hammer marks on the inside of the thin metal, so most obviously have been shaped by bending and welding alone, and have been stabilized by the rolled edges.

The only thing I am bashing is the use of tinfoil for armour and generalizing rules for the period improper manufacture of the same, just because some armourers are not capable of proper craftsmanship or even just deburring an edge- or even only use tools that won´t work with more than 1.2mm thickness.

And no, I am not in the armour business, trying to put the competition down (besides, there are plenty of platforms on German websites to do so more effectively ). I am just about to get started to deform some metal for myself. I just love historic armour and hate this sort of re- invention of things that worked pretty well the way things were done back in history. Plus I don´t like the idea that some thin- sheet tinker´s work should become the benchmark for LARP rules as to how armour should be made "the right way".
I´ve been through quite some discussions with self- appointed armour buffs in the LARP community already, and the opinions held there were horrifying, to say the least. To think of peole like this writing the rules is a nightmare.
I am definitely not Dr Knowitall, and I am learning new things every day, so basically I am quite humble, but what I had to "learn" by several people especially from the LARP community gave me the creeps.

And no, I am not generalizingly bashing the LARP community. I started my medieval carreer with LARP as well and went all the way through "market- medieval" to LH, and am still playing LARPs if time and money allow. Just that I recently am spending my allowance on armouring tools which cleans out my wallet substantially.

Regards

Ivo

Sebastian Kempkens wrote:Sorry, I misstated. I meant "LARP armour you see in Germany". I was adressing Ivo especially. LARP is a different beast here, ya know. I can't imagine any ALRP where you would get armour points for a duct taped metal plate. The duct tape would dq the armour in any case most places.

Ah, actually i had no idea that LARPs where that big overseas, at least not big enough to have publications about them.

But LARPs here in the southern US are a sad sad sight.

Hello.

Alarick, the magazine I mentioned is rather sort of a fanzine on high- gloss paper.
There are a few medieval or historical themed ones as well, but quite a few of their articles are not articles as such but rather adverts, written by traders or manufacturers in order to point out why especially *this trinket* or *that way of manufacture* is the real deal.
And *some* things seem to catch on.

Regards

Ivo

Wow...cool...never thought this would turn into a LARP discussion...
Anyhow,
I have tried chemicals to remove the stickers, and they are so toxic to me and the environment, I will never use them again...I killed a 10 foot area of my lawn when some washed off my driveway I thought was clean...

To answer another question, these shields are more durable than you'd think, or I would not make them. You have to be careful though, some signs are annealed and really soft. Most are T-6, but about 10% I run into are T-100.

For SCA fighting, an edged round like this will last 2+ years of serious abuse. I had a heater that lasted for 3+.

Another question, and thing to be careful of is the grinding...I have ground off too much in the past...it is not pretty, I usually leave the nasty gum layer of the sticker on, and only have scratches thru it from the grinder, and use a putty knife to scrape the gum off...it works pretty well.

The only real reason to do this is for people who have weight concerns on their shields. This is a way to make LIGHT aluminum more durable and get more folks on the field...

Thanks for the interest all!

Thorfinn

Get a metal scraper. Build a fire in a BBQ and set part of the shield over the fire for a bit, with the sticker side up. The sticker adhesive gets really soupy and the sticker scrapes right off. I've been able to get some really clean this way. A rag wet with paint thinner or quivalent will get the residue off after it cools.


P.S. A cheapo heat gun with the scraper attachement should work also.

wont that bugger up the temper?

-+G

yup...heat will mess up the temper in a BIG way.
Once I tried melting/burning off the sticker, and melted right thru the aluminum. You can't see the color change in the metal that shows it's getting hot...(yet another way to mess things up)

Thorfinn

Removing decals;
One way it is done comercially is with a rubber disc which is available from autobody supply stores. I have not used this method myself, the discs are apparently a bit pricey, and are consumed by the process. some people swear by them. I suspect they wouldn't work too well for road signs, since most of them are covered with reflective vinyl, which is a notoriuous pain in the butt to remove (compared to other vinyl decals) It has minute pieces of glass in it, and the adhesive is more obstinate.

Krag's burning method is easiest, but of course messes with any temper.
His suggestion of a heat gun is a good one.

What I usually do is warm it in the hot sun, a hair dryer, a heat gun, or a blow-torch (with a light touch!) and scrape it off with a razor-blade scraper, or even my fingernails. It can be tedious, but it works (I'm used to doing this on vehicles where a customer would not apprediate us taking a grinder to their paint!) For a shield, I'd probably go with Thorfinn's idea: using a flapper wheel & stop at the glue layer (the odd scrach won't usually be a big deal on a shield)

Paint thinner, a couple of rags, time, and elbow grease handle most adhesive residue. A product called "goof-off" (seriously) works on others. (Don't breath the stuff!)

I've written too much - but I hope this helps!
Cheers
Brad (designing, making & removing decals for a living in between armour projects!)

Good decal tips...thanks!

One thing I have found...
the side I sand still has scratches and glue gunk on it...if you scrap it smooth with a putty knife, wash it with dawn soap and lots of water, you can directly apply paint.
Normally aluminum shields have a problem wiht the paint not sticking well, but between the glue residue and the roughing up scratches, it sticks as well as on wood IMHO.

So I would not bother removing the glue...just paint over it.
I have also had people spray glue fabric to this...with very good success...

Thorfinn

Thorfinn wrote "To answer another question, these shields are more durable than you'd think, or I would not make them. You have to be careful though, some signs are annealed and really soft. Most are T-6, but about 10% I run into are T-100. "

I am sorry Thorfinn but I would really like to see some documentation that street signs are T-6 or T-100.

The Federally mandated materials for street signs are 3105 H-18 and 5052 H-32. Sign manufacturers in the Midwest produce these in .080" and .100" thicknesses. Some manufacturers may go to H-36 or 38 (which have physical properties in the same range as 6061 T-6) but they are not using, to my knowledge, any alloy that is artificially aged as is required for a T rating. For making signs it is a worthless extra step. Plenty of strength is produced by physical reduction of the material with huge rollers at the plant.

Basicly there is no reason for the municipalities to pay for the higher priced alloys like 6061. The ones that are mandated do the job of being a sign just fine.

Captain Jamie

Thorfinn wrote "To answer another question, these shields are more durable than you'd think, or I would not make them. You have to be careful though, some signs are annealed and really soft. Most are T-6, but about 10% I run into are T-100. "

I am sorry Thorfinn but I would really like to see some documentation that street signs are T-6 or T-100.

The Federally mandated materials for street signs are 3105 H-18 and 5052 H-32. Sign manufacturers in the Midwest produce these in .080" and .100" thicknesses. Some manufacturers may go to H-36 or 38 (which have physical properties in the same range as 6061 T-6) but they are not using, to my knowledge, any alloy that is artificially aged as is required for a T rating. For making signs it is a worthless extra step. Plenty of strength is produced by physical reduction of the material with huge rollers at the plant.

Basicly there is no reason for the municipalities to pay for the higher priced alloys like 6061. The ones that are mandated do the job of being a sign just fine.

Captain Jamie