Traditional Armor Finishing Processes

[Signo]

Yesterday just for the sake of it, I slapped together a wood block, 2 handles, and a piece of sandpaper. I tried to scrub a rusty helm with it... and wow, it work pretty well! I found at least 3 movements useful to me: using it like a common hand planer, using it at 90 degrees (like shown on depictions), and finally, again using it like a plane, but making an arched movement, just like how you saw through a log. I like how fast the metal shine again and how much rust was removed. The parallel nature of the scratches is more shiny than what you can achieve with an abrasive pad in a circular motion (that tend to give a satin finish) . It seems you can apply a great deal of pressure and the emey paper wear quite fast (maybe it was just too fine for the amount of rust). Another thing that pleased me ,is how easily revealed hi / low spots in the surface, being a rigid medium you know well which part of the metal need to be pushed down or up. I think I will start to use this method on my pieces, for maintenance and for the one I want to build in future, especially if I will be able to recreate a credibly medieval surface finish.

[Sean M]

That's an interesting image, Jason. I'm not sure I've ever seen a medieval or renaissance depiction of a whetstone in use.

The other oddity is that he seems to have a little square white "plaster" covering some small wound on his leg. Has anyone else here ever seen a 15th C Band-aid?

I saw one or two other examples in the Germanisches Nationalmuseum, all late 15th century paintings. The executioner in Gm1527 the beheading of John the Baptist has one on his cheek but I don't have time to upload my closeup photos.

Didn't the Brits used to talk about a "sticky plaster" for covering small wounds? I suspect that groups like la Belle Compagnie have someone who can explain what we are seeing.

[Ernst]

Styptic powder and a scap of paper?

[Mac]

We have another image of polishers using wheels! This makes me very happy.

This is form the MS that we are discussing over vis a vis mail making



Mac

[Tom B.]

Best images I could pull off of the web page (click on images to load slightly larger versions):

[Mac]

I just found this nice helmet finish detail.

There are a number of things about it that are worth noting...
--it is a high enough polish to reflect the background.
--it is almost certainly a heat-blued finish.
--the artist (Gerard David) has shown us some coarse grind lines parallel to the hem and brow.



I especially like the those coarse lines. This is exactly what you get in places where you can't change grinding directions. The deep lines don't get ground away; they just get wider and softer looking with successive grits.

Meester Gerhard is becoming one of my favorite artists.

Mac

[Mac]

Another goodie in the same vein: this time by my other fave, Hans Memling.

Even the sort of lowly soldier that has to stand guard duty over the tombs of executed troublemakers has polished and blued armor.



In this detail, we can see the reflection of the Arisen Christ.



It's worth noting that that bascinet is pretty old fashioned by the time Memling was painting this. There is also something unexpected going on with the way the lining is secured. It almost looks like a sort of "soft" version of one of the ways we see mail attached. It's like we have loops on the liner coming through to the outside and being secured with a cord or wire.

Mac

[Signo]

Maybe you didn't notice, but the breastplate too reflect the face of the other soldier.

[RandallMoffett]

My only worry is that in this time frame artists would often add reflected surfaces in as a show of skill. There is a term for this but I could not remember right now. We see this become very common in this period with mirrors drawn even to show the amazing artistry. Could this just be a place the artist figured would be a good place for this to be done?

RPM

[John Vernier]

I'm not too worried about the "artists showing off" issue. If an artist was going to impress, it would be by creating a rendering of an object which would appear accurate and lifelike to the viewer. If a viewer's reaction was, "wait, armor never really looks like that" - well, then, the impression was a failure. You are right that artists at this period, and their patrons, loved depictions of mirrors and shiny metal objects, but the accurate rendering of objects which people encountered in real life was - and is - key to why virtuoso painted depictions succeed.

[wcallen]

My only worry is that in this time frame artists would often add reflected surfaces in as a show of skill. There is a term for this but I could not remember right now. We see this become very common in this period with mirrors drawn even to show the amazing artistry. Could this just be a place the artist figured would be a good place for this to be done?

RPM

I have found that I can get pretty decent reflections from pretty bad finishes. Yes, they were showing off, but within reason.
Also, the part of Mac's picture that is most interesting is the lines near the edges. If the painter wanted to show off a little bit of excessive clarity in his reflection, fine, but he wouldn't have added lines in just the right places and at the right angles to reflect how much trouble cleaning up the deeper scratches is in that part of the armour "to show off."

It is nice to see things like that. We see them also in some of Carlo's pictures of pieces in Churburg. I have a piece or two that seem to be original enough to show the same thing.

Wade

[Sean M]

This has been a great thread ... art and documents and other crafts and surviving armour and experiments.

One reason I launched Armour in Texts was that I hope someone will go off and do the research in archives and guild records which would clarify some of these things. The guilds that did polishing probably had rules and apprenticeship contracts and whatnot. I don't know the right languages well enough or have time to do that, but I can give people a taste.

[Aussie Yeoman]

The only thing about using metal I wonder about would be that wouldn't you want some flex with the boards? I could see that you would have stiff sticks for hard grinding and thinner more flexible ones for fine polishing. The thinner ones would more conform to the surface shape than the thicker ones.

In the illuminations above, it appears some of the sticks are convex and some concave. Perhaps to conform with inner and outer curves?

That could be a possibility for sure. My only counter to that is if you look at the housebook illustrations you can see that the boards that are not being used are very straight.

It did get me thinking that Mac's idea for using copper (or some other metal) could work. If you attach the metal plate on to the stick with sliding rivets, the board could still flex and the metal should flex with it (if it were thin). The slots wouldn't even need to be very long, just enough to allow the board to flex. The problem with this is that the metal plate would float around as you were polishing. But I don't know how much of a problem it would be, especially if the slots were fairly short?

If you wanted to do this, the metal plate (is that what people are calling a 'lap'?) would only need one sliding rivet. The it wouldn't float back and forth with the strokes.

If I could ask a naff question here: There's lots of talk about water and oil being used for lubricant. These days, many sorts of oil is readily available. But in the context of our grinding and polishing forbears, what oil would they be likely to have used?

[Mac]

I don't see any advantage at all to having a polishing stick that flexes. It would be sort of like expecting a file to flex. Am I missing something?

Mac

[Keegan Ingrassia]

Well...offhand, a stick that flexes wouldn't dig as deeply on any one pass. It would soften the contours as it bent around the surface...in much the same way as a foam sanding block does instead of a wood-backed one.

[Tom B.]

Well...offhand, a stick that flexes wouldn't dig as deeply on any one pass. It would soften the contours as it bent around the surface...in much the same way as a foam sanding block does instead of a wood-backed one.

I think Mac's comment below is relevant to this.

The first grinding operation differs from all subsequent processes in an important way. It must remove the hammer marks and other small irregularities from the surface. It is a leveling process. This requires an unyielding presentation of the abrasive that will take off the high spots without flowing into the low spots. The first grinding operation defines the final form of the armor. All subsequent processes are just about removing scratches.

Mac

[Thomas Powers]

When I'm polishing a knife by hand I have two types of "backing" for the abrasive paper: One is hard and rigid and and is used for blades that have flat ground or filed surfaces, the other one has a layer of garment leather fastened to the face and is used for hammer finished blades or blades where the surface is a bit rough on purpose.

[Jason Grimes]

I don't see any advantage at all to having a polishing stick that flexes. It would be sort of like expecting a file to flex. Am I missing something?

Mac

I only suggested it because of how I was interpreting the illustrations. The only other thing I can think of, that allowing the stick to curve would bring more grinding surface area onto the plate, which might help in the later polishing (removing the scratches) a bit faster. This might depend on how the stick was used, perpendicular to the long length, or using it side to side with the length. Of course a combination of both could be used. Some of the illustrations have a, what looks to me, a soft puffy type of pad applied to the stick or a thicker baking then the others. Maybe like the leather backing that Thomas uses? This might be used to get into the nooks and crannies more easily for the final polishing?

I marked what I'm seeing in these two illustrations of the polishers. you can see the sticks bending as they are used, maybe just from the force the polishers are using them with?

[Thomas Powers]

Having some give to either the stick or the backing helps prevent facets from being 'polished into" the piece. So helpful on curved surfaces.

[Aussie Yeoman]

This is not actually with respect to 'finishing', but to 'maintaining' metal in a pre-industrial era. I thought it might be of some interest here.

https://hemamisfits.com/2017/03/03/how- ... c-soldier/

[Thomas Powers]

I'm betting that "coal" was actually charcoal; it's a fairly common mixup as it's the same word in some languages---like Spanish both coal and charcoal are carbón. (Just checked and yup coal and charcoal are charbon in French)

Coal makes no sense but powdered charcoal makes a fine polishing paste.
The sulfur in coal could make an antiquing compound---my viking silver jewelry tarnishes extra fast when around coal smoke!

[Sean M]

If I could ask a naff question here: There's lots of talk about water and oil being used for lubricant. These days, many sorts of oil is readily available. But in the context of our grinding and polishing forbears, what oil would they be likely to have used?

For sources from southern Europe, its a good working assumption that oil is olive oil unless specified otherwise (just like every medieval European language which I know has a word for "cloth" which means woven wool unless otherwise specified). I don't know what alternatives were available north of the Alps: a few nut and seed oils were probably available, but olive oil too.

A Swiss text describes staves for pikes and halberds being treated with linseed oil (flax oil) so that was commonly available.

[Johann ColdIron]

This is not actually with respect to 'finishing', but to 'maintaining' metal in a pre-industrial era. I thought it might be of some interest here.

https://hemamisfits.com/2017/03/03/how- ... c-soldier/

Neat link!

[Kristoffer]

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 (56.71 KiB) Viewed 4641 times

[Tom B.]

I was just look back through some of the old Dragon publications by the Companie of Saynte George

Dragon 10 - PDF
Dragon 11 - PDF







It took quite a long time looking through the Spiezer Chronik to find the image John Howe was talking about.
It is page 387 - "The bishop of Basel wants to cut down the Bremgarten forest, for which the Berners provide him with the grindstone, 1367."

Here is a cropped image:


Full page here click to open a huge version

[Sean M]

So over on myArmoury, Peter Messent has heard of "strickles - a shaped wooden stick (the strickle) coated with tallow and sand. I've mostly heard of it used for sharpening scythes." Does that ring a bell with any of you? I am a city kid and did woodworking not metal shop in high school.

It seems like it might be related to Strichholz.

[Gustovic]

Here's some pictures of the A69, the hounskull bascinet at the wallace collection.

Most of the armour there seems to have the same surface treatment. A lot of small scratches and a shiny surface.

If these pictures are under some copyright infringement, I'll take them down asap.

[Peter Spätling]

Now I remembered that I wanted to show you my grinding experiments I did months ago
There are threee pieces. One of mild steel, one of C45 and one of C45 and hardened. I gave them a beating while hot to get a 3D shape. Afterwards they were ground on a big waterpowered wheel with a grit similar to 150. (The stone needs to be sharpened). The reason why all these facets can be seen is that I gave the plates to the one working at the forge. And they had the stone running for the first time in decades. He had no experience, with a bit more of training the surface would show no facets. After the grinding I used our polishing machine and a wax for mirror polishing. I added descriptions to each plate so you know which one is mild steel and which one not.
The pictures and a video can be found on imgur.

[Indianer]

Has there ever been some kind of conclusion to this thread? Like concrete consensus on what they used for polishing? Greetings.

[Sean M]

Hi Indianer,

I see a lot of evidence but I can't take the time to turn it into an article:

- polishing was its own trade for most of the time that articulated plate armour was made
- the process involved few steps and often left scratches visible to the naked eye
- the scratch marks are normally straight
- they milled, filed, and cross-polished armour in 14th century Italy
- we have some evidence for how the wheels of water-powered grinding mills were constructed in later times
- they used emery powder and stones of emery as files
- they used "files" which are normally the steel tools that we still use today
- in 15th century Nürnberg they used polishing sticks, which probably sometimes had sheets of lead fastened to them and covered with emery powder

So we have more than enough for plate armourers to go out to their shops and start experimenting.

[Peter Spätling]

Forging scale as a substiture for "Polierrot", (= Polishing red) was probably used. Pumice stone could have been used.

In Innsbruck the armour was filed, hardened and then brought to the polisher. That 's what a letter from ~15-11??? or so tells us. Look at Golls thesis he wrote about it.

[Sean M]

Forging scale as a substiture for "Polierrot", (= Polishing red) was probably used. Pumice stone could have been used.

In Innsbruck the armour was filed, hardened and then brought to the polisher. That 's what a letter from ~15-11??? or so tells us. Look at Golls thesis he wrote about it.

Peter, I would like to have more sources for pumice as a polishing medium for armour ... so far the only source I have is wearers buying it for maintenance, not polishers buying it by the hundredweight. It should show up in tax records and whatnot because it was imported by sea.

Looking at other crafts which ground things, like goldsmithing or carpentry or glassworking, would probably be helpful. But we have some evidence for the powders they used, for the lubricants they used, for the tools they used, and for the marks which polishing left ... that is enough to experiment with.

[Kristoffer]

I found a clue in the bienno bucket maker video.

The guy in the video uses a little bowl/cup and a brush to apply some kind of lubrication to the axle of the power hammer. This could easily be the function of the little bowl and stick (brush?) we see in the woodcut. That would make it not at all related to the grinding and that would force us to rethink the wet part of the grinding process.

[John Vernier]

That's a very good observation. Thanks for pointing it out!

[Sean M]

Facebook does not really work for me because of the security precautions I take. If it works for you, there is a post about Florian Messner in Innsbruck's reconstrustruction of a polishing bench (Polierbank) for swords. https://m.facebook.com/projectklang/ I can't find any information on the real web.

Apparently it will be on display in Belluno, Italy in September 2021 and existed in 2019.