Heat treating, and spaulder work with Max

Max came over Sunday afternoon to heat treat a leg harness he's been working on. The demi-greave and the cop went fine, but the cuise went all twisty. I anealed it, Max re-aligned it, and I put it in the other way up. There was a nice meaty roll at the top to grab on to, and that worked much better.
While we were tinkering with those, we cut out a new spaulder cop and a few lames. Max did a couple thigns differently than I'd been doing, and it worked out well. First, he put more of an S curve in the lames- think of stacking them in the order they'll lay in the final piece, and pounding on them. So each lame is forced to lay closer to its neighbor. The second thing which I think made the biggest difference was using smaller nails as rivets. He found some nice small headed tacks at the hard ware store, and set two of them side by side on each of the straps. We did two straps, and the third column was slot articulation. The slots do keep everything from sliding sideways, but I'm not really wild about the exposed slot, and it's quite a bit more work.
Max also showed how he gets his articulation to line up gapless at the completely open and completely closed spots in the knee. He just took a smallish rubber mallet and pounded on them in those positions over a big ball stake. Four things seem to help this work well for him. 1. He leaves more metal on the cop side of the lame than I usually see. 2. His cops are deeper than most folks do (which also seems to be more common in the period examples). 3. He dishes the lames more deeply than most. 4. The lames are fairly short. The theory he's expressed there is that the armour should hinge as close to where your body hinges as possible. This also creates the disappearing lames we see so often in extant pieces.
It all it was pretty interesting. He brought up his stake plate to show me how he'd mounted it to a cheap stool from Ikea. It worked quite well. He brought up a big ball stake to loan me that will probably be quite handy, and the fiesel wheel I'd forgotten last time I was down. Perhaps most excitingly he brought a couple CDs of armour pictures which I still have to dig though.
I really have to get my pictures from our trip pressed to a CD in return.

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