Traditional Armor Finishing Processes

[Sean M]

From Roland Warzecha in DE: There is an ExArch page for Florian Messner's project https://exarc.net/issue-2020-1/at/reconstructing-medieval-polishing-bench He says he was not able to obtain emery, didn't we find a few sources for emery blocks and powder online?

[Sean M]

Celtic Web Merchant in the Netherlands sells powdered pumice https://www.celticwebmerchant.com/en/pu ... asive.html I don't recall powdered pumice being used to polish metal, but it might be worth a try. Their shipping is quick and not crazy expensive for pandemic-times.

[Chris Flagstad]

This tool came up in a fb group I am a member of. Perhaps it is an decendant to the sticks. In swedish it is called a "Pansarfil". It latest use is filing car panels and such.

IMG_20170501_122125.jpg

Does Pansarfil translate to "armor-file?"

It seems like just the right tool for the job.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-NkEsJZB7oU

[John Vernier]

This tool came up in a fb group I am a member of. Perhaps it is an decendant to the sticks. In swedish it is called a "Pansarfil". It latest use is filing car panels and such.

IMG_20170501_122125.jpg

Does Pansarfil translate to "armor-file?"

It seems like just the right tool for the job.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-NkEsJZB7oU

I think it does translate as you say. However, these are auto body solder files. They are meant for use on body solder which is used for soldering and sculpting body panels much the same way Bondo is. The solder is much softer than steel and the files have very coarse wide teeth designed to bite the solder, and they are also made from a steel which is flexible enough to take a curve when mounted in a special holder. I don't think they would function on steel as well as normal machinists' files.

[Sean M]

Its probably worth mentioning that Chris Dobson is coming out with a book Beaten Black and Blue on the surface of plate armour. Whereas JAG and Wade see middling armour in the 15th century as finished with 2 or 3 polishing media leaving scratches on a bright surface, Dobson envisions a lot of deliberately applied oxide finishes on a surface which had been roughly ground to remove the hammer marks.

I liked his book on armour from Piedmont. There is some Facebook drama about which of the armours in his sample pictures are authentic.

[Sean M]

Craig and Nathan of Arms & Armor (Minnesota) point me to this article by Jonathan Tavares, Jonathan “Arms and Armor in Ms. Fr. 640” https://edition640.makingandknowing.org ... _308_ie_19

They also have an article on Black Varnish for Armour which draws on different sources than I drew on. I need to get my big article on the surface of plate armour from 2016 published.

[Sean M]

I thought it might be helpful to post three of Chris Dobson's best examples of paintings that show bright steel next to dark steel.


The Beheading of St. John the Baptist, by an unknown Catalan artist around 1450 Met. He thinks that all the grey armour and weapons is paint over silver leaf, and that the paint or varnish has flaked off one greave in the background. He thinks that thecutting edge of the falchion is bare silver without coloured overpainting.





Biagio d'Antonio, The Triumph of Camillus from around 1470/1475 National Gallery of Art, Washington DC.



Christ Mocked or The Crown of Thorns by Hieronymous Bosch, from around 1479-1516 https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File ... ch_059.jpg. The head of the crossbow bolt is white steel, the gauntlet is blackened.

Its an expensive book and not everyone who is talking about it on social media has read it. I think most of us here agree that by sometime in the 15th century, there are so many detailed paintings with black armour, and so many alabaster effigies with black armour, that it must have been pretty common in some places by the middle of the 15th century.

I would say that the buckle of the soldier's dog collar is likely tinned or a low-grade copper alloy, not bare steel.

An armour for Nikolaus III. Radziwill with his "grey russet" finish is here https://www.khm.at/objektdb/detail/371403/

[Len Parker]

This https://quod.lib.umich.edu/c/cme/EEWill ... w=fulltext has a pare glovis of plate white and also a pare of glovys of plate blacke.

[Sean M]

This https://quod.lib.umich.edu/c/cme/EEWill ... w=fulltext has a pare glovis of plate white and also a pare of glovys of plate blacke.

I agree, that is one of the good ones. We just don't have anything from medieval England which describes the surface of so many armours as the Archivio Datini di Prato.

I might dig up some of the photos of medieval armour which Chris Dobson sees as having traces of an original grey oxide finish from letting it cool in air then quenching it in oil. It seems plausible that oxide finishes got more common as armourers started to quench and temper their armour (Datini started to mention tempered steel armour from Milan in the 1380s). "Just how common?" and "which oxide finishes?" is a big question.

[Sean M]

And here are some of the documents from seventeenth-century England which talk about the surface of armour.

Markham's Soldier's Accidence (1625) https://quod.lib.umich.edu/e/eebo/A0696 ... w=fulltext

All this Armour is to be rather of Russet, Sang•ine or Blacke colour• then White, or Milld, for it will keepe the longer from rust.

So armour for infantry should either be russet, sanguine, or black (which resist rust) or white or milled (which do not resist rust).

or an English document from 1618 in ffoulkes https://archive.org/details/armourerhiscraft00ffouuoft/

The Footman's Armor, containing Breast, Back, Gorgett, head piece, and laces (taces ie. tassets?), with iron joints, to be colored russet, at the price of £ 1 10 s.

or the long document on the prices of equipment for the trained bands from 1631

Thomas Rymer's Foedera, conventiones, literæ, et cujuscunque generis acta publica ... (London, 1704) volume 19 pp. 309-316 https://archive.org/details/bim_eighteenth-century_foedera-conventiones-l_rymer-thomas_1704_19/page/315/mode/2up

Table: The Rates for repayring and dressing of a Horsemans Armour and Footmand Armour.

For unstriking, new fyling, russetting, new nayling, leathering, and lyning of a Cuirasiers Armour: £ i s. iii

So russetting is a treatment for old armour which you apply after taking the armour apart (unstriking) and filing it. I don't know the current thinking on whether English Civil War russet armour was a red-brown finish applied cold, or a grey-black finish applied by slack quenching.