The Armour Archive

Guantlets are the very first piece of armor that I'm after, since in all of my battles with friends we get cut short from hand injuries. Right now I found a decently handsom pair of mitten guantlets from the King's Lance, but I'm questioning their strength.
What gauge and what type of steel should be used for guantlets that *will* take heavy abuse? The guantlets I'm looking into are either 18-ga. carbon steel mitten guantlets from King's Lance, 16 gauge polished steel fingered guantlets from Medieval Armour England, or 18 Gauge Stainless Steel clamshell guantlets from Grendel's Cave

From what I know, the 16-ga seems like the best choice.

What kind of weapons do you use in these battles? SCA rattan? (unlikely, since you wouldn't get on the field without proper armour)? rebated steel? bokken? foam-padded PVC?

Saying carbon steel is like saying wet water.

All steel has carbon. This would be mild steel, with just a little carbon (18-20 points likely-1018 or 1020 steel)

18 gage mild steel gauntlets are disposable for general SCA fighting. They will look like crap quickly.

to be perfectly honest, none of those choices for guantlets are very good. The 18 gauge mittens from kings lance are too thin to take heavy abuse, they'll probably dent with a few blows. The 16 gauge fingered guantlets from Medieval Armor England would be ok as long as your sword has a basket hilt on it to protect your fingers. The scales on the fingers will protect against cuts and slashes, but are horrible against heavy hits, they won't absorb any impact and you will feel it and it will hurt. The 18 gauge clamshells from Gendals Cave might be ok, but once again, 18 is kinda thin. Stainless steel is harder than milder steel so you might be alright. Personally, I make all my armor from no less than 16 gauge mild steel.

I have used a component mixture of 16 and 18 guage for gothic gauntlets quite well... I guess the fluting and rolling helps out substantially.

RedHandArmoury wrote:to be perfectly honest, none of those choices for guantlets are very good. The 18 gauge mittens from kings lance are too thin to take heavy abuse, they'll probably dent with a few blows. The 16 gauge fingered guantlets from Medieval Armor England would be ok as long as your sword has a basket hilt on it to protect your fingers. The scales on the fingers will protect against cuts and slashes, but are horrible against heavy hits, they won't absorb any impact and you will feel it and it will hurt. The 18 gauge clamshells from Gendals Cave might be ok, but once again, 18 is kinda thin. Stainless steel is harder than milder steel so you might be alright. Personally, I make all my armor from no less than 16 gauge mild steel.

A simpler solution would be to stop blocking with your hands.

I'm not joking. Putting the equivalent of two mini helmets on your hands will slow you down a lot! Think about why your hands are taking a beating and adjust your technique to minimize how much your hands are hit.

Just a thought.....

I myself use two handed swords no matter what they are made from. Eventually I will be joining the SCA once I get all of the armor needed, but outside of the SCA I battle with bokkens. I have a wooden lowlander from hollow earth works (exellent quality and craftsmanship), though my friends weapons include: hollow earth one handed swords, wooden staffs, wooden junk swords that I make myself (weak but cheap and quick to make), shi-ni (not sure on spelling), and one of them only has a poly-carbonate lightsabre to fight me with. I need something that could take a beating from all of those. The lightsabre has no crushing power, so any metal should be able to stop that...the shi-nis mostly seems to pinch the hell out of my hands, and all the other weapons give pretty decent crushing pain.

I'm guessing that I should get a higher grade of stainless steel clamshell guantlets? I always did kind of figure 18-ga would suck...
The biggest problem I'm facing right now is price.

Shinai -- refers to the four bamboo strips the things are made of, if I understand this correctly.

Mitten-type, rather than fingered, gauntlets protect your hands best.

Konstantin the Red wrote:Shinai -- refers to the four bamboo strips the things are made of, if I understand this correctly.

Mitten-type, rather than fingered, gauntlets protect your hands best.

But if you really have your heart set on fingered guantlets, make sure that the curvature of the fingers (meaning how it curves around your finger, not downwards towards the nail) reaches down to the weapon you are grasping. That way the energy is transferred from the guantlet and into the weapon... as opposed to your hands taking the full brunt of the blunt force trauma.

But, Konstantin is right... mittens do afford better protection from both blunt trauma (as there is no loose fingers to get spread and smashed) and they are much warmer than glovess in the cold winter

So without basket hilts, then the best ones would be mitten>clamshell>fingered? I really don't mind which I use so long as they are functional. Fingered have an undeniably cool look, but if they wouldn't work so well for my cause then I'll gladly use another.

And I should try and find them in 16-ga stainless steel, right? I can already tell that 18-ga is terrible, and 14-ga sounds like the slightly added weight would make swinging my sword a little difficult. And I saw in a recent topic that mousepads make good padding for guantlets, now is that inbetween the glove and guantlet, or inbetween the hand and glove?

Mittens and clamshells pretty much fall into the same category from what I have seen. 16 ga. stainless sounds fine. The mousepad goes between the glove and the metal.