The Armour Archive

Im making a small piece of decorational armour for my yr 10 metal work project (Breastplate and helm)

..iv had exeriance in armour forging in the past (making my own chainmail and steel gauntlets)

MY question is can anyone give me directions to a good desing i can get ideas from?.. Iv seen many desings of plate and Im not particularly fond of any of them... manily because i dont like the look of the large round (deflecting) belly shape.. it doesnt look righton someone of my build.. (and size )

so anyway.. any help would be greatly appreciated ^_^.. thankyou in advance

I would highly suggest checking out the many good patterns that live right here on the archive.

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

Best of luck!

Thank yo for your generous help ^^ the main problem is i need pictures... though i guess i can mabye manipulate some of these templates and designs for my own benefit.... thankyou again ^_^

Yes, they should be useful. Cut them out of manila folder or posterboard or cereal-box cardboard, assemble the bits, and try them on you. Protrusive breastplates were there to provide a spaced-armor effect over the vitals inside the ribcage. They'd get the stylish (and useful for holding swordbelts up) wasp waist treatment, lending even those optimists who are "getting back into shape" a waistline. The spaced-armor idea worked pretty well; incoming first had to cut its way through the plate armor and then cross a few inches of air and punch through an arming-doublet before arriving at anything that bled.

The breastplate profiles pretty much followed male fashion, with mods for actual protection or lance-rests. Note the peascod breastplates of the later sixteenth century and their sundry variations -- fashion, man. That's what it mainly was. Could you be a little more specific as to the, er, figure flaws you're working around? You mentioned this as a serious concern, so we should really try and help. I'm guessing you're lanky and a bit potbellied, but that is just a SWAG, y'know? Measurements, jacket size -- chest and belly measurement at the navel would all help. You'd have to be a lot more pearshaped than most folks for some kind of globose breast not to work.

Sinric has quite decent patterns.

I enjoyed making his italian legs and breastplate some years ago.

You find his site at:
http://www.eskimo.com/~cwn/

Helmschmiedt's sitye is also usefull, but it's a russian site in Cyrillic.
Anyway you can reach those very, very, very slow-loading pages at
http://helmschmiedt.narod.ru/technology.htm

I found his patterns very usefull, but sometimes a bit oversized and over-scaled.

So when making his " Schaller" helmet It came out way to big, so first make some paper dummies and look at pictures of the original ones in order to make some modifications to the pattern.

By the way, you can translate the cyrillic pages by the use af Altavista's Babelfish free online (URL based) translation tool.
(At http://babelfish.altavista.com/ )

Only the page are so, soooooo slow that you cannot translate them from the original location so what I did was to download all of his pages, copy them to my own website space and translated them there.

Some quite clear English came out of Babelfish, with some funny bits in it.

In reply to the comment on my build... You guessed right ^_^

Im not really potbellied, in very tall for my age (16 and 6' 4" )... and really thin.. despite my muscle. (no matter how much i work out i can never seem to build up much)

SO yes... iv had a look at the templtaes and they do help sort of, i looking to design something thats not immensly rounded, but not compeltly flat either.

so yes.. Thank you for your help everyone ^_^

If you wanted just the cuirasse for a project, (as opposed to an entire kit) one of the Lorica Segmentata patterns might fit nicely.
Something like this:
[img]http://www.englisharmourie.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/Gallery/Amour/LoricaSegmentata.jpg[/img]
This site - http://www.legio-ix-hispana.org/8_1.html - talks about how to make adjustments to the patterns for different sizes and body types.
Nice progress pics here: http://www.legio-ix-hispana.org/segmentata.html
Some construction/care and feeding experiences here: http://www.legio-ix-hispana.org/loricaassesment.html

suggested layout/cutting patterns from Arador: http://www.arador.com/construction/lorica1.html

Being very thin but not exceptionally tall I can relate. I am a few inches shorter than you and had never could build up any real mass working out and I have been for 4 years or so now. I have heard protein suppl.... never mind something on to something I have actually done made breastplates. If you really want to avoid a globose something that would work with the globos pattern on the AA is to start gently curving the belly of the breatsplate from the arm openeings down so you have a very light curve. If it looks like it is getting too rounded then go and curve the sides on the anvil and from the outside you can hammer and flatten it out fairly easily. Looking straight on at the breastplate the sides will look not exactly straight, but almost diagnal, wider at the top and thinner at the waist. Last go and work the top a little so that it looks even and you do not just have this huge place that looks totally different from the bottom, it looks to unfinished Do not work this too much it can cause problems though.
Good luck
RPM

Hi Julious,

You might find some of the cuirass designs I have been doing useful. This is a pic of the most recent.



I'm hoping to include the patterns on the site eventually.

Mike
www.armourdesign.co.uk