Open shops and tailoring cuisses

Shots from last week, where Master Jovian drills my red hot balls:

They've been in the shop being unproductive for months, and there was enough of a lull in our activity and enough generosity from Master J that a few of these got holes drilled in them. We'll use them for forming and planishing.

Robert purposely focuses on cleaning up his elbows. Mostly to avoid thinking about red hot balls, or the drilling thereof.


I didn't take any pictures in the shop this week. We did some work on Jovian's Maciejowski bible helm and started sorting out Jean-Marie's armour. Hammer-wise, it was a quiet night.

So if you look closely at the St. George statue I'm trying to copy, we see mail on the backs of his thighs. I picked up a pair of mail chausses from Icefalcon Armoury since the blackened maile they're doing looks good and they were on sale. Still pricey, but worth it. I washed most of the oil off them, and tonight started figuring out how I'm going to use them with my leg harness. I've never seen anyone else do this in the SCA, so it should be fun. Remember the articulation on these legs is also a pioneering move. In other words, I'm finding new wheels to invent. This is what the maile chausses look like:

I weighed the chausses first and they tip the scales at a whopping 10lbs each. Go weigh your leg harness. I'll wait. Less than 10 total, isn't it? So between the weight and the bulk I've been thinking of ways to lighten this load so I can actually fight competitively. It's obviously long for me. I'll be wearing cased greaves with these so I don't really need maile under those. It looks like the Black Prince may have had maile under his greaves, since you can see it at the back of his knee and at his ankle between the greave and the sabaton. I trimmed the maile off though, and trimmed off the part of the chausse that's already covered by the plate cuisse. That leaves me with some puzzles about how to hang the maile how to tailor it, and how to adjust it if my leg changes shape much.
It's a little sad to admit, but it took almost two hours to get to this point:

I learned a few things though. 1. Yes, you can clip mail rings off one at a time with nippers, and it's quite precise, but the Beverly shears chop through riveted mail like butter. I probably won't have enough mail to make two legs out of one cuisse, though it will be close. My frugal nature makes me want to give it a shot, but it takes a lot of time to trim very precisely. 2. There's a mystery in how Jaques de Baerze imagined the strapping to work. He shows a combination of straps riveted directly to the cop and straps threaded through the demi-greave and greave. This will be complicated by how I'm hacking my design to match his look. 3. Really close inspection of the big poster of this statue makes it looks like one, but not both of the leg harnesses have two lames below the cop.
I just realized I haven't really talked a lot about the inspiration for this whole project much in the last year. I need to devote some discussion to it.

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