A Burgundian Book of Hours

Preparations for Battle of the Nations and Gulf War

2012-01-31T17:56:00.000-06:00

I've been going on serious runs a few times a week now since December, lifting weights, and going through little drills I've devised. On Friday I joined an MMA gym. I had some 1:1 coaching from a kick boxing champion, and took a submission wrestling class on Sunday. I'm starting to feel like what we've most of us have been doing in the SCA isn't really training. I do drills there with my students, but the physical conditioning level we shoot for is so much lower than this gym is pushing me for. The difference is kind of crazy.

So tonight I'll be fighting in my maile and gambeson to get more ready for Battle of the Nations and Gulf War, specifically for The Deed. I've been working out in my maile, and ended up tailoring it a little since it made me feel like I was drowning. Something about how the gambeson and the maile interact put just enough pressure on my throat to cause some mild panic. It was like fighting while being water-boarded. So that's taken care of. Centurion Maelgwyn and Sir Gideon are interested in fighting in The Deed, so we'll be doing some fights by those rules. It's not as brutal as BotN, but it has a closer flavor, and the armour is more similar.

A challenge

2012-01-25T22:42:00.001-06:00

I've posted this in a couple places but I'm looking to boost the signal on it.

The Deed at Gulf War is one of the most fun things you can do in armour, and I'm interested in finding ways to improve the quality of not only The Deed itself, but of late 14th century portrayals as a whole. It strikes me that we've been letting ourselves (really, me too) get away with a few things that are, at best, statistical outliers in our kits. Based on Dr. Strong's data here.
It looks to me that both the English and the French forces should be wearing enclosed steel greaves and full sabatons. I know greaves and sabatons are difficult to make, expensive to buy, and might only really change your game for this one fight. Trends changed so fast in the 14th century that what you see in the 1350s (remember the Combat of the 30 was in 1351) were pretty different from the 1380s. A shynbald is solid choice for The 30, but Doug's data doesn't support it as "right" for The Deed. It should be a cased greave. I wouldn't be surprised to find a few instances of folks of the knightly class with no sabatons in the 1380s, but in France and England, at least in their effigies, they wore them.

So I'm throwing down the gauntlet here. I'm going to take my kit up a notch this year, and challenge you to do the same. Make it epic. I want to fight folks who have gone the extra mile on this, and not only fight in correct harness, but do so with great skill. I promise if anyone can wearing cased greaves and sabatons can capture me in The Deed in 2012 they will get an exceptional ransom.

I don't mean this statement to dissuade folks with an otherwise appropriate harness from coming out. You have to have at least a frontal greave to play, and I STRONGLY recommend a full face plate and maile. Come and play. Make it amazing.

Sir Gaston de Clermont, OL, General of Ansteorra, Captain of the French forces in The Deed 2012.

My Churburg #13 pattern

2012-01-25T22:33:00.000-06:00

This is what I start with when I make a Churburg #13 body harness:

The belly and lung plates patterns are folded over so they could fit on the scanner, what you'll see is two pieces for each. They should line up simply. You'll want one belly plate, and two of every other plate. I typically roll the top and bottom edges. This is sized to fit me, and it has a fairly deep curve in the chest. It should sit between your collar bones and just below your solar plexus. The quarter is on there to help you scale your print out properly. The easiest way I find to make a pattern from a print out is to print it at the right size, spray glue it to a piece of card stock and cut it out. The extra stiffness and durability will help when you're tracing your patterns onto the steel.

Toughness and hardness

2012-01-22T09:46:00.001-06:00

This one graph explains a great deal about the mechanics of the hardening and tempering of steel. "Hardness" is the resistance to denting. Glass is very hard, but also not very tough. "Toughness" is the ability to resist cracking. A pick axe is tough, so you can hit a rock with it and the axe won't shatter. It will dent and deform some, but most of the time for that application you don't care. Every alloy has its lines in a different spot, frequently the tempering temperatures listed in the materials specs are higher to get higher up on the toughness curve, so don't take the numbers as absolutes.

This comes from "New Edge of the Anvil" by Jack Andrews. It has a TON of great information and has substantially improved my understanding and skill with steel. Go check it out.
What this does show is that by popping your hardened piece in the tempering oven, there's a major improvement in crack resistance for a small loss in dent resistance. As your tempering temperature gets much higher, it's more like you're annealing the steel, taking it to a soft, malleable state. Note that these curves are most accurate for 10xx steels, with the xx in the 40 to 60 range, but it's about right for alloys like 4130 too.
Mild steel, by which I mean iron with a very small percentage of carbon, the typical stuff you'd buy at the hardware store, is generally pretty tough. You have to abuse it some to make it crack. But its hardness is down near the bottom of the curve here. So if you have a mild steel leg harness it's either pretty heavy, you pound dents out a lot, or you don't get hit much. You can make it a little harder by work hardening it, but as anyone who has cracked the corner of the fan on a cop knows, it starts to get brittle.

A crazy shop night, and dishing a helm

2012-01-07T17:26:00.000-06:00

Last night's shop was wall to wall people. It was pretty nice, and unusually productive for the number of folks who came out. I got a brief moment to snap a pick with about half the folks in the room:

We had a solid dozen at one point. We got splints, gauntlets, body plates and arm harnesses fired, a lot of stuff got polished, some neat legs got built, a new body harness got started, things got articulated and dished, and we even had time for some experiments in acid etching. Plus I got my CO2 tank back so we had enough pressure to finish off the cider keg, and chew into a pretty tasty smoked ale.

This afternoon I cut out and dished the big plates in the skull of a new armet. The shaping work took about an hour. I started the dish cold, then tossed the pieces in the forge and pushed them farther hot.

Greave tutorial

2012-01-06T17:53:00.003-06:00

Some folks say that well sculpted greaves are the hardest piece of armour to make. When we're talking about greaves that look like medieval greaves, fit the wearer well, and function well, the two big challenges to my mind are: 1. Truly seeing the shapes you need to form and 2. Convincing the steel to be shaped like that, because really, it doesn't want to be. Not even a little.

So before we get into that second part, take off your shoes and socks, and roll up your pants. Take them off if you want, I won't judge. Take a good look at your shin. Check it out from the side. The big thing to spot here is that when you see this in profile, it's not a straight line.

You don't want the greave to dig up under you knee cap where that small depression is, so we can pretend it's mostly flat from the top of the greave to about a third of the way down the shin. It's not 100% true, but close enough, OK? After that, mine tapers down toward the ankle bone fairly dramatically, before flaring out again at the top of the foot. Now you can make a greave with a very rough approximation of that tapering in, but modeling it like a cone, then flaring the bottom. That's essentially what I was doing a few years ago, and you can get a feel for those results here. If this is your first try at greaves, your tools or time are limited, try that approach. With some determination and skill your result will be better than most of the greaves out there. The same cone with a flare will even work for the calf. The whole thing can look angular and a little bulky and robotic, but it's nicer than naked shins.

In the calf we can see the bulge of the calf muscle, and the taper toward the ankle. You knew that part. Now trace the shin and the calf onto some card stock or card board. Cut it out, and you'll have a template of what your greave should approximate. This isn't a pattern, it's a rough stab and the curves you need to form, as a silhouette.

Let's look at the leg from the front.

The rough cut- it bulges out around the calf muscle and tapers down to the ankle. But it's not symmetrical. The outside is mostly a simple, smooth arc. The inside is a deeper S curve, with an apex somewhere between a third and half way down the calf. Take a good look at your own leg. Trace it. Draw the leg. Massage it. Go jump some rope. Now trace it again. If it doesn't fit with a bunch of blood pumping through it you're going to have some uncomfortable armour. I'm not kidding. Go work out and see how much this thing changes.

Move your ankle around to get a feel for the range of motion you have to accommodate.

Sorry that I sound like you've never looked at your own legs, but most of this isn't obvious to folks who don't do a lot of drawing or sculpture. And sculpture is what you're doing. Put on your beret and be zee artiste!

Ok, so that's what your leg looks like. What did medieval greaves look like? Definitely dig through all the images you can find of original legs. Extant legs are generally the best ones to check out, though sculptures can be good if the sculptor was attentive to details. Paintings are most helpful as they get more realistic in the 15th century. An amazing thing you'll see as you dig through the art here is the emerging Renaissance, and the growth of humanism- by which I mean the more thorough awareness of the human form. Michelangelo wasn't the first one to really study it in gory detail. You'll see armour from the 13th century, and even most 14th century stuff before the Black Death (circa 1348) is blocky, and simplistic. Let's check out greaves from Chartres, The Black Prince's tomb, St. George in Dijon, and Bertrand du Guesclin (who was a total bad ass, look him up).

This belonged to the Dauphin of France. Despite him being a kid, you notice his calf is shaped a lot like mine. Some neat details to spot are that the seam between the front and the back of the greave don't make a straight line. The square cut outs are for hinges that haven't survived. It looks like they flared the greave out a bit at the top of the shin. This keeps it from jamming into the tender area below the knee when your leg extends all the way, or if the greave gets pushed to rotate farther than your leg.

These put the b in subtle. You can still see that the shin tapers in toward the heel above the ankle bone, and then flares back out to lay tangent to the arc of the foot. It's great to see how it plays with the sabaton and the spurs. There's also a bit of maile poking out between the greave and the sab. Either that stuff was really thin and light, or Edward was super-model thin.

St. George has similiarly subtle lines. His have a deep crease though, and a more angular prow because of it. So to do these right you'll have to lay the crease down along that S curve of the shin. He's more stylized, so he has some very thin ankles.

Bertrand (right) also has slender ankles, but a more realistically pronounced pull in of the shin toward the heel like my legs have.

So these examples show that sculptors and armourers in the 14th century were aware of the exact curves of the shin, and mimicked them in the armour they created. If you model your greaves on your own legs, you'll get to partly cut out the middle man of the medieval art to make something that fits you and looks right.

OK, so how do we make these shapes? Start with a flat pattern which will look roughly like the ones below. I'm liking 18 gauge spring steel for my versions right now since it gives you some room for error, sanding, and it will withstand some of the torture of the crazy Europeans I'll be fighting this spring. Trace them onto your metal, mark a center line, and cut them out. What you see there 1. Might not fit you depending on the proportions of your calf muscle to ankle thickness. 2. Are both calf sides really. 3. Are an older design I was using a few years back. The calf part and the ankle part in my most recent patterns are more similar in width, and on my shin pattern the ankle lobes flare outward a bit to give me some more metal to work with for the flare over the arch of the foot. So it's a good exercise to derive your own patterns. Shoot me a message if you get stuck.

Put these into a simple curved swage, and dish them into a gutter shape. Planish them smooth(ish). I like a plastic hammer to do that forming which reduces the planishing you have to do later. They don't have to be perfectly smooth, but wrinkles that might end up folding over on themselves are fatal. They can be near impossible to get out and can crack, so pound the bumps down. To planish, I took a candlestick stake (the brown stake), and welded a little rod on the end which I heated with my torch, bent up, and ground flush to hold the shiny shallow cone of a bracelet mandrel on it. Both stakes are pretty common on ebay, and the modification took me about 10 minutes. The stake plate that holds them is a Pexto brand, also common on ebay, and the stool it's mounted into is from Ikea. Props to Master Peter of the Golden Isles for the stake plate tips, and the loan of the bracelet mandrel (which still pops right off the hook on the end if you need it back). A very shallowly domed hammer like the one pictured here planishes pretty well from the outside.

I made the ball stake on the left from a cannon ball and some round and square stock. It's small enough to get inside the greave for a lot of shaping.
For the calf, you'll want to dish the muscle part out a lot like you would with a cop. I like a large round dishing hammer and a fairly shallow bowl for this, and then a big round ball to planish it some. The shin doesn't get that extra shape. The calf should look something like this at this point:

So the greave is fairly smooth, and shaped like a gutter. You're ready for the hot work! I made a stand for my oxy-acetyline torch so I can wave the metal in the flame for a bit, and go right back to hammering without picking the torch up, putting it down, and losing all my heat. Having a buddy help you out works too, and it may even be safer, but I love my torch stand. Oxy-acetyline isn't strictly necessary for this either. I understand that Jeff Hedgecock uses a propane or oxy-propane rig which may be more cost effective. I've seen Jeffrey the Younger use a fire brick based setup. I like the oxy-acetyline rig because it heats up fast, it takes me a long time to burn through all the gas, and the heat can be focused to a small area.

Safety first- ventilation is important, as are goggles and I like working with a welding glove on my left (holding) hand. Tongs could work in place of the glove, but I feel I get better control with the glove. The full dark tinted welding goggles are perfect for when you're using the cutting torch, or welding stuff all day, but they're too dark for hot work IMO. I use didymium glasses like some glass workers use. It cuts a lot of the UV and IR out, and protects your peepers from sparks and hot forge scale without leaving you fumbling in the dark.

Why heat? If you just try to pound the saddle shapes into your greave, it flattens out. Steel doesn't like bending into that shape much, so it needs some help. When you heat a small area it lets you deform just that bit, leaving the rest effectively untouched. To be clear, I've made some greaves without doing them hot. It's bitch to do, and you don't get the control you want to get the more complex, graceful and correct shapes.

So get a circle about 4cm wide red hot with your torch, brace the greave over the raising stake, and start tapping it down with a fairly broad faced raising hammer. This is what my stakes and hammer look like:

I use the center one for the middle of the arc of the greave, and the bent legged one for working the edges. Halberds on the Armour Archive made the stakes out of some pipes, thick square stock, and some bad-ass-ninja-welding-fu. The hot spot should be over the void in the middle of the stake, and you probably don't want to pound it all the way down to bottom out here. These guys aren't all that wide, so they'd create too acute a bend. Check your template. The lines you're forming will be a little more exaggerated since you'll lose some curve when you planish, but it's still fairly stuble.

Don't bite off too much to pound at a time, and particularly if you're working in spring steel, don't work it cold too much or your can easily crack it. There's usually a phase where it just resists your pounding before the cracking starts. So you'll pound a bit, heat, pound some more, doing lots of humble passes, pushing the metal down into that curve from mid shin to your ankle. Think of it a little like clay, and you're squeezing it down a little at a time, almost like forming a narrow neck on a pot on a spinning wheel. Don't push too hard on any individual pass, or difficult wrinkles will form. After several passes and a little planishing on the bracelet mandrel, and you'll have a shape like this:

So the ankle is pulling in well, though you can see some small wrinkles around the ankle bone. Not a big deal yet. It's flaring out a little still by the heel (that's in the upper right of the picture). The rainbow lines are from the edge of the hot spots I made.

This is from the inside of that same calf. I still need to pull in the sides a fair bit. I focused on that in later passes partly because I use different stakes for the deep part of the greave (the apex of the arc) and the edges.

The shin in a similar state (pre-crease) looks like this:

So, not as deep a curve since there's no calf bulge, but there is a flare out over the top of the foot. Do that flare hot too. The raising stakes I have work well for it, working with a straight peen from the inside. A simple U shape on a swedge block works great too.

I pulled the area in around the sides of the ankle in some. Notice that the bulges around the upper calf aren't symmetrical. The muscles on the inside of the calf make that smoother arc down to the ankle, and on the outside it's a more abrupt bump with the deepest part lower down toward the foot. So this is a right leg.

This is after another set of passes, pushing the shin down a little more, and pulling the ankle in more:

See how the ankle's smoother, more graceful and just more right than the one from the previous pass? This will get tighter still when I put the crease down the front.

More heat, more raising passes, more planishing. You may have to anneal it if you find you have to do large scale changes, like if it's too tight or too loose around your leg. Fit it often, and do so wearing what you'll wear to fight in. I can wear these under jeans and they're invisible because they're shaped like my leg. Over jeans, they're uncomfortably tight. I've found that planishing hot works faster and with less annoyance, though if you're working with mild steel you can totally do that step cold. Here are some pieces in the forge getting a hot soaking before the slow cool down step to soften (anneal) them.

Planish, sand, and polish to get to here:

From this point you'll have to match the front and the back so they fit without gaps between. There are few universal statements in how armour was configured, but it looks like the calf edges tended to nest inside the shin plate's edges so you wouldn't catch any weapon tips in your greaves. I've seen the hinges on the inside and the outside, though it feels like the straps and buckles would be less likely to rub if they're on the outside. They'd be easier to buckle up on the inside though.

If you've gone to this much trouble you should make your own hinges and at least chose some pretty buckles. From here on in, it's small adjustments, lots of comparing plates, checking fit, and polishing. I hope you make a set and post some links to your work!

Addendum: My friend Maelgwyn recently made a blog entry on tooled leather greaves that's well worth checking out here.

Battle of the Nations

2012-01-03T17:43:00.000-06:00

This spring, for the first time, America is sending a team to The Battle of the Nations. I'm on that team.
The video in the link gives you a very quick taste for what it looks like. They fight with rebated steel weapons, and there are judges in place to push folks to have internally consistent harnesses. There's a little youtube series on the event based on the previous meeting in Ukraine that starts here.
I'm very excited.

Advice to myself

2011-12-26T19:10:00.000-06:00

If I had a time machine and could go back to tell myself a few things years ago I'd tell me these things:
1. Buy tools. Stop being so cheap and get the ones you really need. A few more hammers and another good instrument will make you better at what you do, and have more fun doing it.

2. The two best tool investments I've ever made are my Beverly shears and my oxy-acetylene rig. The first gives you the freedom to experiment with flat patterns, and the second gives you the freedom to make many tools and do hot work. The forge has a lot of very useful applications, but the focused heat of the torch will let you sculpt things far more easily. Whitney punches, angle grinders, and swages are great too.

3. Talk with every armourer you can. You'll learn something from each of them. Try out what they suggest. Some of their ideas won't work for you, and that's OK.

4. There is truth to what they say about opinions and assholes. If you ask for an opinion, which is something you do when you enter a competition, don't be totally bent out of shape with what you hear. These opinions will make you better.

5. Realize your opinions can sound just as harsh or uninformed as those other people have, and do your best to soften the blow, particularly when you're talking about something another person has spent years learning about, lots of money acquiring tools and materials for, and possibly days of their life creating. It's their baby. Even if they see the warts too, and even if they asked you about them, it hurts to hear about them from others.

6. Draw more. Getting things to fit just right requires a deep understanding of how bodies are shaped. You only really notice these things if you draw them. If you can't draw it, you can't sculpt it in steel.

7. Put more lights in the shop. You don't get extra credit for armouring in the dark.

8. Record more. A recording is unforgiving of any issues with pitch or rhythm, so recording, particularly with a metronome and playing it back will show you the bumps you're too busy to hear when you're playing.

Fascinating painting

2011-12-19T10:13:00.000-06:00

This fascinating painting was completed around the last decade of the 14th century. The musical instruments and the hoods on the praying laymen are particularly worth noting.

Welding a helm

2011-12-18T15:30:00.000-06:00

Just a few shapshots Tamooj took during my last open shop. It's kind of weird that it doesn't look any where near that sparky when I'm wearing my goggles.

A philosophical note on welding- I used to be strongly of the opinion that welding was a bad path to go down if your ultimate goal is to make great armour with the right, historically accurate lines, using historical technique. There's still some truth to that. But it does allow you to make fantastic tools to make great period armour that you can't otherwise make without welding. An oxy-acetylene rig lets you do hot work, which in turn lets you create the correct shapes that they used for historical armour in ways that you pretty much can't do without getting some parts of it red hot.
That said, it can be over done. I've seen a lot of armourers make amazing metal shop creations that are very much the product of a good welder, and quite obviously so. Most bar grills have the welds out flapping in the breeze. While bars are a necessary evil for any open face hat, there are some ways to conceal the modern techniques. Many helm styles are made a lot easier by welding parts together. Sometimes that works out just fine and you can't really tell. Sometimes it's painfully obvious. At least try to hide your work if you can.
So I'm not trying to dump on people's hats- just point out that we can do a little bit better with this one thing. We can raise the bar. On your next project, try to do just that.

New greaves, new gaunts

2011-12-09T09:32:00.001-06:00

I've been in sort of a stealth mode lately, not updating much. My big projects right now are improving my kit for The Deed at Gulf War an The Battle of the Nations this spring. For both I want new cased greaves and gauntlets.
I've been playing with an hourglass gauntlet mitten design for a bit that I generally like, but it needs refining. Here's what it's looking like so far:

There's room for improvement in the thumb, and I need to make some better tooling for cleaning up the shapes of the fingers. I found a decent gun bluing compound at WalMart of all places, and it's given me a color I like. I built these in 4130 which allows me to weld the cuff, and take the bluing.
I've been playing with the greaves a bit, doing a lot of hot work on them which has been a lot of fun. I have a couple saddle stakes from Halberds that work well, and when I heat up just a small area I can get exactly the shape I'm looking for without deforming other areas which was as big problem with some of my earlier attempts. This has let me get more extreme shapes with less effort.

So I've been able to get some great depth in the curve at the ankle. I should continue it higher up the shin. But it's sucking the lower point of the plate forward, which I'll have to compensate for in the pattern.

Shields

2011-11-13T14:15:00.002-06:00

Master Jovian just sent me a link to a great German book on shields, available free on line.

An open shop tutorial

2011-10-23T17:23:00.010-06:00

What Happens:
In my open shops we start the evening off by chatting about each of us wants to work on, and setting some loose goals. It takes a LOT of time to make good armour, so the goals are usually fairly humble. Things like gorgets and simple spaulders can be finished in a session if you have some skill and focus, but the more complex the shaping is, and the more pieces involved, the more time it takes.

From the initial plan we'll track down or derive patterns for new pieces, or get to grinding away at repairs. The more skills you come to the shop with, the more autonomy you get. So if you can work a Beverly shear, you can cut out your own pieces. If you can work a grinder, you can smooth them out. If you can dish and shape, pick up a hammer and start whacking. If you're brand new you'll get a quick safety tutorial and the basics of how the tools work. I'd much rather have you ask questions than get hurt.

We frequently have a couple good armourers in the shop who can help you with various tasks. If you're not getting the attention you need, you might have to be the louder baby bird. If Max asks you why you're doing something a certain way, he's not trying to shake the foundation of all you're doing, he's trying to get the root of what you're trying to accomplish. There are a lot of ways to get metal to move, and he's tried a lot of them, so he might have a suggestion for a different way that will work for you. If it seems like I'm ignoring you it's probably not intentional. Just ask.

We'll work on these projects and get as far as we can until we have to put the hammers and grinders down at 10. This keeps my neighbors from trying to kill me. In general it's best to take your projects with you so they don't clutter up the shop, and you can make progress on them at home.

What to bring:
If you're building something brand new, bring pictures of what you're shooting for. What you're doing is essentially sculpture that has to conform to your body and move with you while people are trying to kill you. So having the final image firmly in mind and close to hand helps a great deal. Basing it on armour that people developed for that same purpose is both more effective than something you're likely to make up as a rookie armourer, and more likely to look like something medieval. Making something that looks medieval is a lot of the point, isn't it?

Bring anything that interacts with the armour you want to work on. So if you're making a new gorget, bring the body armour and the helmet. If you're making new legs, bring your knee pads. Bear in mind that if you're fitting things closely that jeans aren't always the best choice. Bringing your old armour can help so we can see what worked for you in the past, and what didn't.

You're welcome to bring something to drink if you'd like, help your self to what's on tap in the beer fridge, or get some water from the kitchen.

Safety:
There are only a few safety rules I'm insistent on- eye protection must be worn when you're using any of the grinding or sanding tools. They spit hot metal at you and can do permanent damage. Loaner goggles are in the white rack at the back of the shop. Tinted goggles are required when welding, or assisting.

The door has to be open when we're using the forge. It spits out carbon monoxide which could kill us all, so ventilation is important. The fire extinguisher is on the shelf under the Beverly shears. Orange hot metal always has the right of way in the shop, and it's usually moving quickly.

As you can have half a dozen people beating sheet steel with hammers and whirling grinders, hearing protection is recommended. It's something that causes cumulative damage, so one evening of wear and tear isn't going to make you deaf. Please don't be too offended if I grab ear muffs for myself first, but you can help yourself to a loaner pair (they're under the blue vice) if there are any left.

Wear some shoes. There are sharp, twisted scraps of metal floating around which exist mostly to impale your feet. Something that covers your ankle and toes is a good idea, since every once in a while you'll have a red hot rivet or a steel scrap fly at your feet. I normally wear long pants to give a little extra safety margin. You can armour without a shirt on if you really want to, but it kinda hurts.

Materials:
We work mostly in steel, and lately I tend to work mostly in spring steel for greater durability with less weight. Think of it as +2 armour. There's frequently leather work involved for straps, gloves for gauntlets and such. We can work in other materials, like aluminum which does a fair job for shields and hidden armour. I'm just more drawn to working in materials which would have been more familiar to a medieval armourer.

A word about alloys- I like working in 4130 and 410 steel, and these aren't quite like what they would have used hundreds of years ago. 4130 was concocted by the US Army to be very tough, and relatively easy to weld in the field by guys with limited training and equipment. So it can be made much harder than "mild" or simple low carbon steels. It has chromium and molybdenum in it, which only exists in trace amounts in typical iron blooms. These help it resist rusting, and work with the 30 points of carbon to allow hardening. 410 resists rusting much better, to the point where folks call it a spring stainless. To my eye, it's much less bothersome than the 300 series stainless steel that's fairly common in the SCA. Some stainless doesn't stand out so much as "not quite right" depending on how it's shaped, how clean it is, and the color of the piece. Some of it makes you look like you stumbled off an old Battlestar Galactica set. 410 has a more gray undertone like mild steel has, and as it can be encouraged to develop russet hues, (which are fortunately easy to remove) it's not hard to convince folks it's not stainless at all, but without the work of scrubbing off what look like coral reefs of rust. My squires are good to me, but they have better things to do with their time than polish my gear.

Spring steel needs to be heated uniformly red hot, then quickly quenched and tempered to have the optimal hardness and toughness. This takes extra time and equipment, but I think it's worth it.

When I first got started in the SCA I was treated very well particularly by Duke Gregor von Heisler and his squires. They invited me to their shop, put me to work, and helped me make my first armour. Honestly it was mostly their skill in exchange for my grunt work. I'd like to pay that debt forward and recreate the camaraderie I had with that crew while we make some neat stuff and get more fighters on the field. That's the core of why I do this and I hope that others are inspired by what we do to take a similar approach. Because few things in our modern world operate without some profit motive some folks are more comfortable with chipping in some cash to the cause. I can usually find you a good deal on supplies, but to be clear- I don't charge for use of the tools, help or whatever I can teach. But if you would like to donate to the shop, there's a red coffee tub under the lumber rack were you can put a few bucks. This goes toward consumables like sanding supplies, leather steel and rivets, and sometimes tools or books.

Pictures!
You can see a bunch of shots of what working in the shop looks like in these entries.

Roman brewing link

2011-07-14T10:10:00.000-06:00

So busy these days. I stumbled across a nice little article on brewing in Roman era Britain.

Things I've learned lately:
I can weld 0.032 thick steel with my #1 welding tip. I can even make it look fairly pretty with enough grinding and sanding. It's kind of a pain, and it only makes sense to do it on things that aren't going to get hit much, since it's so darn thin.
Dilute muriatic acid is saving me a bunch of clean up time and cost. Sanding off forge scale is just too much work otherwise. I put the pieces in a big plastic tub to soak for a couple hours, wiping them down occasionally so they don't etch weird patterns in themselves. Then I rinse them off in the slack tub, wire wheel them, and polish. I had one vambrace splint which I didn't pay enough attention to come out looking like it has a wood grain from the layers of forge scale and gunk on it resisting the etch. The downside to this acid is it can turn my hands black, and that black doesn't come off easily. Gloves help.
Time spent making good tools, or money spent buying good tools is usually well spent. I've been limiting my capability by skimping on tools. I work much faster in a tidy and orderly shop.

A quick video year book

2011-07-04T23:42:00.000-06:00

I grabbed a bunch of pictures from the armour shop and put them into a little video year book here. Check it out. You might even be in it.

Effigies

2011-06-17T09:26:00.000-06:00

I'd forgotten just how many great effigies there are on this site. I'm particularly interested in the big chunky plaque belts.

Upcoming classes and a sacbut vid

2011-06-04T22:45:00.000-06:00

I've quietly working on a couple classes for King's College which is coming up in a couple weeks. One is on a few simple songs. My intent is to encourage more people to come out and make music. There are a ton of people who used to play something in high school but just don't any more. Some just lost interest, or are intimidated by the idea of playing in front of people. Some need a formal setting like they're used to from their days in band. Some are bothered by not playing an instrument that's perfect for the era. So I want to break down some of those barriers.

The second class is on the Hundred Years War, which I'll be covering as a great sweeping overview in just an hour. It's tricky to boil down so much neat stuff into just the big picture. I want to whet some appetites for people to learn more.

I've been expanding my collection of recordings on YouTube a little, and I started working on a new recording by building a baseline first. So out came the sackbut. I made a short video lecture on how I hacked it in the hopes that other folks will take the plunge. Considering how expensive a lot of early instruments are, and how challenging they can be to buy, this is a reasonable investment for a very useful instrument. So go check out my channel and the little lecture. There's some fun stuff on there. If you're not careful you might even learn something.

An embroidered girdle book by Helene

2011-06-04T22:22:00.000-06:00

My buddy Helene gave me this beautiful little book as an elevation gift:

Her work is based on this image and a number of images Karen Larsdatter collected here. You can tuck the knot into your belt to carry the book hands free. When you need to scribble a quick note, or check a little reminder it flips right up. It's a little strange that despite the centuries we've had to improve things, the arrangement is more convenient than answering a cell phone.

Check out Helene's other embroidery work. She's doing some neat stuff, and she gives interesting and thoughtful gifts.

Pictures of my rig

2011-05-02T16:54:00.001-06:00

You're allowed to be self absorbed in a blog, right? I've gathered a few pictures together to get a better feel for how my rig is coming along. Above I'm on the right at Bjornsborg's Althing from over the weekend, fighting in a holmgang. It's kind of a judicial duel. I'm wearing the new gauntlets I'd made for my cousin Tegan (they didn't work out for him, so I brought them home). The hourglass cuff is pretty decent, they're very light, and I'm generally liking them. They could benefit from having one more lame, and I'd like to redo the wrist and the metacarpal plate on the next version. I want to redo my legs and get a plaque belt. Photo credit- Elisava Illiesca
Below I'm about to bludgeon Murdock in The Deed at Gulf Wars. My bardiche is normally straight rattan. The water soaking method I used to get the curve in the blade weakened the rattan though. I managed to break it on Duke Kein after only a few uses. The deed was tons of fun, and deserves its own post. In this I wore my sabatons and maile shirt. Photo credit- Ursus of Anglesea

This is sort of a weird shot. It shows off my general's jupon. The epaulets weren't my idea. People stole my clothes and sewed them on, which is why I'm giving them that look. Apparently, that's how my peeps show their love. It does show off another of the jupons Clalibus made for me, and what I wear under them. The breastplate is a spring steel globose with a rib stop based on the Churbug #14. It needs a good polishing, and maybe replacement. The arms are new ones I made. Photo credit- Magdelena Cortez.

Bascinet picture collection

2011-04-10T20:21:00.000-06:00

Dmitry Nelson will not go thirsty in my presence due to his work on this project, which has pulled together a great number of pictures of bascinets. Go check it out.

Polishing

2011-04-08T12:51:00.000-06:00

There's a pretty good article (and sales pitch) on polishing wheels over at Caswell here.

A boy and his rauschpfeif

2011-03-30T21:05:00.000-06:00

I posted a few new videos of what I can squeeze out of my rauschpfeif. Now you have a morbid curiosity about just what the hell a rauschpfeif is. Go ahead. Click the link. I double dog dare you.

I'm trying to get better, and I've been working with a couple mentors on this stuff who live hours away, so this can give them a glimpse into what I need to work on. Plus someone suggested I get a decent snapshot of what I'm able to do at the time of my elevation to the laurel circle. It's part year book for my own amusement (which is pretty much what a blog is anyway,) and part a reference to give some idea of where this mystical bar of worthiness might be.

Why am I just finding out about this now?

2011-03-23T13:49:00.000-06:00

There's a neat looking medieval festival in Mexico.

A really nice site to help flesh out a persona

2011-03-22T11:58:00.000-06:00

An Tir has this neat site full of questions to help fill out your persona.

Update on French armour and some pitiful musings on a competition

2011-03-08T18:59:00.000-06:00

While I was trying to answer a question for a guy in the Netherlands I found a piece one of my own old puzzles. It's cool when the karmic boomerang brings you good things and so quickly. One of the guys I couldn't identify in my post on French armour was Louis de Sancerre, who was marshal and constable of France. Check out some great pics of him, including his awesome haircut and super simple conical vambraces here.

OK, the subject of vambrace shapes has me a little raw still, but I think I'm recovered enough to slice off a little on this topic. Maybe this will be sort of a rant, we'll see. I entered these arm harnesses in a two competitions in February, Candlemas, and our kingdom's arts and sciences.

Here they are on display:

At Candlemas (a pretty big event for a pretty arty barony), they didn't win, but they did OK. They got a 45/50 from one judge and I think a 37/50 from the other. At Kingdom A&S they didn't score all that well. OK, one of the judges, and I should be honest, most of this is about my bewilderment with one judge, gave them the lowest score I've ever personally witnessed in an A&S competition. They got a a 30/50 from one judge and a 35/50 from the other. For what it's worth all my judges in both competitions were laurels. Kingdom A&S is pretty competitive, and there honestly were some outstanding entries, so I can understand harder grading. 17 out of the 29 entries scored an 40 or better which I guess is an average of the two judge's scores.

There were some scratches in the finish, and one of the vambraces had a bit of a bend in it from the firing step that I wasn't able to get out. I got dinged a lot by The One judge for not having straps and buckles installed. I provided both a short and a long version of the documentation which I think helped in general, though the long version, at 22 pages was probably too long and technical for a judge to really dig through. I wanted to share a lot of what I learned about metallurgy and historical approaches and should have edited it down to a shorter final copy.

Back to the vambrace shape- in my documentation (which I probably should just entitle TLDR) I explicitly said the vambrace shape was based on originals which were essentially cone segments like Louis up above or the Black Prince, not on the more tulip shaped lines of the Dauphin's harness from Chartres. The latter is a beautiful kit, and I've made versions of the arms, greaves and sabatons. Some arm harnesses from this era have a sharper point to the elbow. Again, I've made those, and have built some tools to make it fairly easy to do, but I cited the Black Prince and Bertrand du Guesclin's effigies, with their rounded elbows as my inspirations. Comments from The One judge lead me to feel I lost some points for not incorporating the tulip shaping, or the pointed elbow. Now I get that if I said I'm trying to create a clone of the Chartres arms, and just cheesed out on the sculpting. But it would have been wrong to shape them like that when it wasn't part of my target piece. It's like drawing a perfectly fine duck and getting marked down for it not having sharp talons and a razor sharp beak. It's a duck, you say, show them pictures of a duck, and make quacking noises (seriously I had essentially this conversation with the judge). The One says "No! It should look fierce!"

Oddly, The One that took off points for the vambrace shape also gave me a 10/10 for materials, which I wouldn't have. Of course it's all subjective, but to me a 10 says you went insanely far out of your way to get the perfect materials- like you smelted your own ore from a historical mine using a period method in a furnace you built yourself from clay you dug out of the Bavarian alps, fired with charcoal you made using a documentable European wood etc. I like having something extra out there to inspire us to go farther, and I'm totally OK with getting a 7 or 8 on that when I buy sheet steel from a supplier. My TLDR documentation talked about the difference in atomic content and crystal structure between historical steel and what I had. In my mind the differences are significant, and only partially justifiable, though you'd literally need an electron microscope to really tell the difference. So some pluses here, some minuses there (neither of which make sense to me) may have cancelled each other out.

There's a section in our judging forms which is ten points on presentation/overall impression. There's less guidance on it that in other sections. The One gave me 3/10 on that. The 5 blank lines that follow, and allow you to give a contestant a bit more detail, maybe specifics to work on had a single word fragment: "Disp." I think he meant the display could be... um, more? Dunno. Frankly it felt like a random kick in the balls. My display was pretty spartan, without a lot of fru-fru stuff. So are most museums and I think they get the idea across pretty well.

So the experience left me frustrated with myself for not doing better, and possibly having unrealistic expectations. I'm sure I can make better pieces, and in a way this is an inspirational challenge. I can make the judge's job easier with improvements to my documentation. It was mostly the work of one judge that has me disillusioned with competitions some, and that bugs me. Honestly I think I'm fairly tough and sure of myself. I'm aware that my value to the world isn't just what I can create or how I do in an art contest. But if something like this happened to most people I think they'd either be intensely angry, or take their toys and never come back. I'm not sure if my statements here are fueled just by self pity, but I'm concerned that this judge might do the same thing to someone else if I don't talk about it. As an occasional judge myself (I ran two competitions just last weekend) I'm determined not to discourage anyone like I've been discouraged here, and this may be my first step in ensuring that other judges don't do it either.

Open shop and pics from Candlemas and Kingdom Arts and Sciences

2011-03-03T23:45:00.000-06:00

Giovanni and Gideon at Candlemas.

Open shop pics from a couple weeks ago.

Kress cutting out some bazubands.

Suzanne was interested in doing some black smithing, so we fired up the forge. We did a little bar twisting and shaping, but the shop was sort of crowded and busy for a lot of this kind of work.

My display at kingdom A&S.

My girls came to Kingdom A&S.

Ariel helped out mounting buckles on straps.

Nicola assembled his full arm harness.

Attack of the metal pill bug!

2011-03-03T22:32:00.000-06:00

I've been working on a new gauntlet design for a bit. I'm shooting for something lighter than my present style, easy to build, and more in keeping with the lines of an hour glass cuff. It's been through a few iterations of the pattern so far, but above you can see how it started out.

I'm still not sure if I want to roll the edge of the cuff or not. It makes it stronger, but I've been wearing an unrolled cuff for about a year with no issues. Making the roll takes a while if you want it to be even.

I'm cheating on the metacarpal plate's transition to the cuff. Surviving gauntlets from the end of the 14th century had these as a single piece, but I'm doing it with an articulating piece in the middle.

Tonight I made a little pill bug.

It's just the finger bits of a new gauntlet design. It's giving about 180 degrees of bend in the five lames, and it hyper extends a bit. The originals were generally finger gauntlets, but I'm doing mittens for simplicity and safety.

Burgundian basse dance

2011-01-31T21:42:00.001-06:00

I've been griping too much about how much of the music we play is either very late period or post 1600. I'd like to be part of the solution to that instead of just bitching, so here's a project I'd like to sink my teeth into when I have the time:
http://www.pbm.com/~lindahl/almond/basse/index.html

Another Gaston's work

2011-01-21T15:28:00.000-06:00

Take a few minutes to check out Gaston Bonneville de la Croix's blog, particularly here and here. You won't regret it.

The Deed

2011-01-17T17:00:00.004-06:00

The Deed of Arms at Gulf War is a 14th century ransom melee, and it's more fun than a barrel of poleax wielding drunken monkeys.

There are some great pictures of last year's Deed here.
Go join the Yahoo group by clicking here.

Assembling more armour documentation

2011-01-17T09:02:00.002-06:00

All the pictures I can find of armourers and metal smiths at work will be collected here.

15th century German smelter:

De Re Metalica. This contains a lot of information about mining and smelting, so there's good information about the tools, how they refined ores, and there are some good related pictures.

http://www.larsdatter.com/aprons-smiths.htm
http://www.larsdatter.com/bellows.htm
http://www.larsdatter.com/coining.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Giohargius_Tubalcain.JPG
http://www.larsdatter.com/armorers.htm
Armour polishers
Armourers 1
Armourers 2
The other links in the Hausbuchen are interesting too. They have images of a ton of different craftsmen over a span of about 300 years.

Open shop January 2011

2011-01-16T22:41:00.001-06:00

More open shop pics and the completion of the steel bits of my arm harness. I got the second arm polished up. It could be a little smoother, but I'm pretty happy with it.

So I started working on a pair of "soup can" knees. They're an earlier 14th century style like I did here. This is how they start off as a flat sheet, and below a slightly dished version.

The dishing is getting deeper.

I managed to rush both of these and crack them. You can see light coming through the one below. This alloy is a pain to weld, so I just trimmed them a bit smaller and resumed the pounding.

This was taken during the open shop on Friday of me pounding the trimmed version deeper.

Hands ground the cuffs off his gauntlets and those for his fiancee. They're well wrought, but unnecessarily heavy. Nicola and Barnet are polishing in the background. What you can't see is the cloud of steel filings in the air. I think I could pick my nose with a magnet even a couple days later.

Jeanne-Marie learning to planish- which is using a flat faced hammer over a ball stake to pound out small bumps.

Barnet is pretty stoked about his progress polishing his greaves. They're coming along quite well.

Master Jovian was racing around the shop so fast that this is the only picture we got of him, and he's still a blur.

Nicola showing off the polish on his arms. In his right hand is the forge scale encrusted version. In his left is the polished one. The circles under his goggles are from the steel filings and rouge off the buffing wheel.

Oh, and Caitlyn got a decent picture of me kneeling at crown on Saturday:

The long slog of polishing the arms

2011-01-06T22:43:00.000-06:00

Polishing off forge scale, then getting a smooth surface feels like it takes forever. The forge scale is very tough, and sand paper either clogs with it or is ground down by it within minutes of use, since the spring steel I'm trying to smooth out is extremely hard and tough.

Ever try to take a picture of your own elbow? It's surprisingly difficult.

The harness of on the left is as polished as I could get it with a few hours of work. The upper vambrace is around the 3 o'clock area, with its dark grey forge scale. That's the toughest stuff to take off. The couter below it (most folks still call it an elbow cop) has had the forge scale sanded off but you can still see the scratches the process leaves behind.

What you can't see in a picture is how smooth the articulation is. They flip open and closed with virtually no effort, and the gaps at the extreme ranges of motion are minute. With a little more pounding they might become virtually non-existent. I'm starting to like these arms so much I might have a short sleeve jupon made so I can show them off. It's a style that was more common a little earlier than most of my harness, but you see it on Bertrand du Guesclin here.
Bizarre little side note: Bertrand du Guesclin the musical.

Arm update

2011-01-02T12:34:00.000-06:00

I finished off the second hinge, installed it, did some last minute tweaks, fired and tempered both arms. Below you can see one in the forge, and what they look like fresh out of the slack tub.

Teaching a class

2011-01-01T18:55:00.001-06:00

A couple weeks ago I had some kids from a home school group over to teach them about armour and metallurgy. Here are some of the pictures from their visit.

More maile research

2010-12-31T08:47:00.001-06:00

Galleron has been doing some good research on how maile was worn in the late 14th century in a similar vein to mine which he's shared over at his blog. The pictures he's dug up are thought provoking. Here's an easy link to some of my findings.

Arm hinges

2010-12-30T22:26:00.000-06:00

The left arm showing that it can hyper extend. My elbows don't even straighten, and neither can my brother's. It's only a problem when I try to bowl.

I built hinges for this and inset them like the Churburg arm harnesses are. In the Churburg link go to the armoury. The site rewards some digging around there, and it's well worth going to the castle if you get the chance. That's where I picked up one of the posters that hangs in my shop. I should give some props to Visigoth for piling on some guilt to get me to build the hinges. I don't make them often, so hinges take me far longer to make than I'd like.

I've been happy with the symmetry on these in multiple axes.

The backdrop for all of these shots is the bench box Master Jovian made for me. I've been all slack-tastic not installing the handles I've made for it.

2nd Lance work day- trestle tables

2010-12-23T01:24:00.001-06:00

Trestle tables are like 3 legged saw horses with wood slabs on them like this example:

Check out the trestle table which was a sad little death bed for the last Valois duke of Burgundy. Or this one or this one. Sorry about the corpse theme. I'm not sure what that's all about. I can only blame Jovian for the last couple since he dug those up. We settled on trestle tables for our camp since they're relatively easy to build, ubiquitous, and inexpensive. Why got to all this trouble when you can get a collapsible folding table at Walmart? For me it's for those little moments that happen every once in a great while when the sun has set, and the world is lit by fire and moonlight, where everything you touch and everything you can see is just about right. When you don't have to block out the glare of a flashlight, or the ignore the plastic thud as your glass touches the table. It might be bits of wood to most folks, but it's part of a time machine for me. Thanks to our past works we have some good seating (I need to take more pictures of the great bench/boxes Jovian has been making for folks.) Now we need tables.

My math teachers always bugged me for not showing my work. Well, here it is. They're just brief sketches and a little trigonometry to get the settle to be the right height with the legs a reasonable distance apart. Our second lance work day was focused on building trestle tables for the camp.

I did a few calculations (which historically would most likely have been done by proportions but using trig saved me some paper and time,) scrounged up some poplar, figured out how the joinery would work, and we were off to the races. Here I'm about to bevel the feet so they sit square on the ground:

I made a little jig to allow the drill press to match the angle of the bevel on the feet, and did a bunch of cuts with a Forstner bit to open up the mortises in the cross bar. Jeanne-Marie and Barnet chipped in to clean up the holes with chisels, knives and files. Here you can see Barnet filing away. The larger square hole below his left elbow is the mortise for the third leg of one of the trestles. That leg is vertical, so the math we started with saved some fiddling work trying to get that to be the same height as the sloped legs.

Barnet remounted the bench grinder that got broken off its moorings during Friday's open shop, and he got to use it to grind some forge scale off his new greaves. Looks like it made him happy.

I'd like to thank Barnet and Jeanne-Marie for their time and efforts building the trestles and taking pictures of the good time we had together.

Burgundian research pics

2010-12-22T17:11:00.000-06:00

For Jeanne-Marie, a tapestry version of Philip the Good's armorial achievement. This was completed in 1466.

For John, a neat shield tree on Mary of Burgundy's tomb from the end of the 15th century.

Jeanne-Marie challenged me to find an image of a trestle table used out in the field, like in a war camp. Ideally I'm looking for one about 1400, but this one is from 1515. It's a relevant source in Burgundian history, so there's some extra value there, it's a decent table, and the caption made me giggle.

Open shop 12/17/10

2010-12-18T22:45:00.006-06:00

Friday's open shop was full of people, and very busy. Wilhelm brought over the baronial guard's halberds, which needed some TLC. He'd managed to get the thick, crusty rust off, but there was some deep pitting, and some of the welds had gotten a bit pithy. We popped the rivets out so we could take them off the hafts, and got aggressive with our improvements. Here he is polishing one of them:
I've sunk a couple rods of extra steel into these guys. After all the rust, the original welds are like sponges.
Barnet fired his greaves. Martel made some gauntlet repairs and worked on strapping her shield so she can play left handed.

Nicola fired his elbows and got the worst of the forge scale off. This is what they looked like out of the tempering oven:
Hands and Diane made progress on vambrace splints. Wilhelm's in the background grinding away. You can see a snippet of my neighbor's winter wonderland through the open door. It's really spectacular, and even contains a festive Christmas frog. Seriously, I love that goofy little frog.
Conspicuously absent from the wall is my slightly racy poster of ladies getting armoured. I took it down Wednesday morning because I was teaching a class here on armouring to a homeschool class. It didn't seem quite appropriate. The class went quite well. We covered a great big overview of armour, and managed to give a good lesson on metallurgy. Through the wonderment of science these little kids managed to snap a steel rod into little bits with their fingers. An apparently identical rod they couldn't even bend, and another they could turn into a pretzel, but not break. They got to watch and even help with all the firing, quenching and normalizing, but I'm not sure if they really understood what was going on. Hopefully it sparked some curiosity.
Life in the busy shop. Nicola grinding out temp rivets, Hands fitting splints, Martel polishing her gauntlets. You can see one of the halberd heads sparkling in the foreground.

Arm progress

2010-12-09T00:43:00.004-06:00

The new arm design is coming along pretty well despite not having a lot of time to spend on it. I might cheat a bit and just put the hinge on the outside. It's not quite right for this era harness, but without a square punch it's a lot less tedious work.

Arm work and glass

2010-12-01T23:45:00.010-06:00

Having folks over for open shop nights helps them out in a pretty direct way, but it's also a little selfish on my part. The energy nudges me in different directions and keeps me looking for new things to build. Nicola's need for arms has led me to build new ones for myself despite the fact that my jupons hide my arms and the ones I have are functional enough. I pounded out a couple cops, articulated them. Tonight I rolled the edges on the vambrace and curled them using the new swedge block and the bracelet mandrel Max loaned me. The swedge still needs some sanding from the initial casting which is a lot of the reason the vambrace looks scratched up.
There's still a lot of fiddling to do on this, and the rerebrace needs to be built, but it's coming along pretty well. My vambrace patterns need some revisions. They're too big and I was trying to accomplish too much with the complex adjustments I made to the edges. I'd love to make a pattern that would let me just pound these out in a couple hours so we could have more decent steel arms on the field.

Over the weekend I got some time in Aaron Gross's glass studio. We made these three pieces:
The inspiration for the two bottles came from this painting by Taddeo di Bartolo in 1393 in the Cathedral of San Gimignano (very happy this puts the style so close to my 1396 target date!):
And this extant piece from northerny Italy estimated to be 14th to 15th century:
The major features I was shooting for were the optical swirl, the foot, the kick in the base (which you can only see in the extant piece), and the applied collar. I didn't get the necks elongated in mine as much as I should have, and the collars aren't as even as I'd like. I didn't get a great first gather on the smaller one which resulted in it being shorter than I was shooting for. It's about the size of a beer bottle as it is though, and it's comfortable to hold, so it's still a very practical piece.

The orange glass on the right was inspired by a 15th century German "keulenglaser" or club shaped beaker. Specifically this one:
We forgot to put the swirl in this one, it didn't elongate as much as I wanted, we didn't coordinate well on shaping the opening which caused an asymmetry and a more open mouth than the original. I used damp newspaper to sculpt the base which was much more difficult than anticipated. It turned out OK, but it was hard to stay focused on turning and really get the fullness of the shape. We got most of the way through a second iteration of a keulenglas but it broke in the furnace and we didn't have time to start over.

I found the coordination between Aaron and me to be much tougher on these more complex pieces. I'm handling more of the procedures than before which is great for my growth, but the end product is a bit shaky. Still, it's a lot of fun, and it's making me kick around the idea of saving up for a proper furnace of my own some day.

The research pictures all came from a great new publication, "Medieval Glass for Popes, Princes and Peasants" published by the Corning Museum of Glass. You can pick it up on their web site. It's a fantastic resource with a number of good articles and a lot of images I hadn't seen elsewhere.

Charny- jousts, tournaments and wars

2010-11-29T21:36:00.001-06:00

Some chivalric philosophy with Dr. Muhlberger. Check it out.

Open shop

2010-11-28T17:07:00.009-06:00

We had a well attended open shop on Friday. Jovian, Hands, Diane, Doug (Hands' dad) and Jeanne-Marie came out. Jovian made some progress on his sabaton scales:
I had some cops laying around the shop which we finished up and made a new lame for. Hands wanted his legs and arms to match, so he trimmed the leg fans to match. Here he is marking them:
And cutting on the Beverly shears:

We cut some rattan to length and carved a handle for Jeanne-Marie's new sword. She helped clean the shop up before the other folks came over.

Diane's kit is intentionally mismatched. We pounded out a cop and some lames for her from scratch. We were just ironing out the articulation and ensuring everything fit here.
So over all we got a sword, some scales, a clean shop, and three cops formed, fired and tempered. Not bad for an evening's work!

Wood!

2010-11-22T09:33:00.002-06:00

I got this phenomenal link from an early woodworkers list I'm on, and just had to share it. Get comfortable and go check out Peter Follansbes "joiners notes" blog.

A call to arms

2010-11-16T14:43:00.002-06:00

Attendance has a been light at the armour shop since it reopened for business. A lot of it is schedule since it's been intermittent Fridays. In any case Helene and Nicola came out and we all ended up working mostly on arms. Helene's fixes were pretty quick, just a few holes to pop really. Nicola is getting himself outfitted with a new harness, and he's wisely chosen to go with something 15th century and Italian. So we spent a couple hours patterning, cutting, pounding and articulating a pair of elbows in spring steel. His are on the left, and the pair this inspired me to make for myself are on the right. A couple little tweaks and those gaps will go away, then we can fire them, polish them and mount them to vam and rerebraces.

Settle assembly

2010-10-19T09:27:00.002-06:00

I carved the arcs for the upper tracery/supports in the arms of the settle, finished up their mortises and sanded them to size, then glued them together.

Settling in

2010-10-18T13:08:00.005-06:00

Last night I made a little more progress on the settle we started a few weeks ago. On the surface of things the design is really simple, but it looks like the decorative looking pieces serve a structural purpose, so I've decided they really should be included. I've cut in the mortises and tenons for them. You can see some of that detail and details of the original bench I'm basing it on here:This is what the end pieces look like now:
Last week I bought some more wood for the panels in the back, and over my lunch break today I picked up some new bits to help me carve the fancy cut out pieces. If I make this look pretty enough maybe my wife will even let it live in the house. Maybe.

Display at Laurel's prize

2010-10-11T22:58:00.000-06:00

My display at Laurel's prize.

Lance work day

2010-10-05T14:14:00.011-06:00

We've been informally putting together a lance- a group of folks who fight together and support each other- really for over a year. A couple weeks ago we finally got together to work on some projects specific to that group. The two things we've needed to tackle are livery and furniture for a for War of Ages and furniture for a musical gathering based around 1400.
Jeanne-Marie only seems to be shy around cameras, but I managed to catch her whizzing through the laundry room while we washed the reams of red fabric she donated to the cause.
Her camera fear proved contagious during our hunt for materials. Barnet used his army training to find good cover behind an oak plank.
Master Jovian worked most of the day on a 6 board chest with Barnet.

This is what the chest/chair looked like before the lid was put on. Jovian made me one too.Jovian doing scary things with a jig saw to make dowel tennons/plugs. I'm amazed he has all his fingers.
I got vaguely obsessed with a settle- a kind of bench with a back that flips from one side to another. We looked a bunch of pictures from our books and on line, and settled on a design that's a bit later than our target, but looks really nice and should be durable and comfortable. Here I am sawing out bits of it in oak.
Over all we got one box done, a lot of wood cut out, a tabard design figured out and the fabric washed. We also demolished some pizzas and hopefully started some momentum on a few projects and a group that will last a long time.

Pictures from events this summer

2010-09-20T23:35:00.004-06:00

Caelin on Andrede posted some great pictures to the kingdom list.
This is from a class I taught on the I.33 manuscript at King's Collge:
Eleanor binds from above:
Jamming with Alessandro at Glaslyn's arts event:
Shots from a cool repouse class. The gooey mass Viviana is working in is a pitch pot.
I pulled out the pipes for a bit. I need a good drummer to travel with...

Lists to join!

2010-09-15T11:08:00.004-06:00

I run a couple lists which may be of interest to musicians. This one is for my baronial music guild:

Click to join bryngwladearlymusicguild

This one is for any performers in the kingdom. It's intended to help groups work together, to organize events, dances etc.

Click to join ansteorran-performers

Brewing with Zoe

2010-09-06T15:37:00.003-06:00

Little Miss Giggles spent part of her last day of summer vacation helping me brew a batch of cider, a batch of 14th century meade, and rack some brewing. It seemed like a good opportunity to teach her about sterilization, microbiology, and how siphons work. Of course to her it was all about tasting honey, and giggling about "yeast farts."

Grill update

2010-09-06T09:23:00.002-06:00

This takes a while. Measure, cut, grind, weld both ends of each piece, flip over, weld some more... Hopefully today I'll manage to fill in those bottom triangles, heat the whole piece and shape it, then bend the top hook to fit. Then I'll need to make a strap to keep it closed. Might be able to get it done before practice tomorrow.

Swage and grill

2010-09-03T00:09:00.006-06:00

Picked up a new swage block which has some great shapes for vambraces and greaves (and a shovel die I may never use):
But these shapes will be helpful- some different curves of bowls, and a couple different spoon molds.
I spent a little time with a grinder cleaning up the edges and smoothing out the larger bowls. My sinus passages were magnetic for two days. Probably over sharing, but you get what you pay for here.

Tuesday night I fought really well, but my helmet was driving me crazy, shifting around so I could barely see. I guess the force was strong with me that night. Anyway, I've finally succumbed to the idea that using a grill, and maybe training hard, and trying to win bigger tourneys rather than just being pretty might be OK. So I'm working on this grill:
It clearly needs more bars, the welds need clean up, and it needs some curvature to mimic my dogface. I'm forming it flat so it's easy, then I'll heat the whole thing and put the bend in hot, and fix any welds that might break, though if I did everything right they should be fine. One neat note- the outline on the anvil- it's to help me match the curves of the outer frame. I got the idea from Lorelei Sim's book "The Backyard Blacksmith" which Stef picked up at Half Price Books. Simple idea, but it improves the final product. It's a great book over all, and has contributed to my itch to smith more stuff.

Making tools, and raising them right

2010-08-14T22:36:00.008-06:00

The theme of the summer is HOT. It's been so humid that time in the shop means dripping with sweat regardless of what you're doing, so I've been going to extremes and doing way more hot work than is healthy. On Wednesday Maelgwyn helped me with some hot raising on this shield boss:
This is after 4 passes. The sides will be a bowed in vertical ring, so there's a number of passes to go.
I felt a little bad asking a friend to hold the torch for so long on such a hot day, so after we worked on the boss I made a torch stand:
The base is a giant engine valve which was a gift from Ysfael and Eleanor. I made three rings and a hook, and welded them all on.
I also made a stake to help with some of the hot work (well, and partly because it was fun to do). I started with 3/8 inch thick steel plate which I heated red hot in the forge. I feel I need to put 3/8 inch into perspective. The helmet I wear has a 12 gauge skull which, despite may touch and preux folks trying to concuss me, has never dented. Great big pole arms swung two handed with intent to kill don't leave a mark on that helm. 12 gauge is substantially thinner than 1/8 inch. So just taking a little hammer after a 3/8 inch thick slab isn't going to get you anything but tendinitis. When it's red hot, getting this fancy curve took maybe a dozen blows with my dishing hammer- it literally dished more easily than the 14 gauge boss I was working on above.
I cut off the excess with my torch, and welded it to a shaft which I'll have to taper down to fit my stake plate.
Tonight I managed to taper an eye bolt for my chest hardware project, and bent it around to fit the next link in the chain. I cut four more links out to make armour chests. It was hot though, so I bailed at 10 and went to the store for supplies for our tubing trip tomorrow. Really if you're not in the water or air conditioning right now you're probably insane.

Quick update

2010-08-05T20:55:00.003-06:00

Didn't spend a lot of time in the shop tonight. I welded some straps onto the lid of the forge so I don't inhale quite so much nasty fluff. In the process something red hot flew off the forge frame and embedded itself in my fore arm. I'm either going to have a 2nd degree burn, or a fire salamander laid eggs in my skin. I'll keep you posted on which one it was.
I used Max's bracelet mandrel to round out the chest handles. They just look like they did yesterday, but rounder. I built a hook for getting things out of the forge. It's a bit on the short side, and I finished it conveniently right after finishing up all the round handles which it would have picked up perfectly. I started making the staples to attach the chest handles to the chest and just ran out of muse. It's too not, and I'm too tired to push on.
Master Jovian planted a seed a couple weeks ago that's starting to germinate. We've been talking about doing an immersive medieval experience with music, games, and good ambiance. It's going to be some work, but also a lot of fun. This is the sort of thing I thought the SCA would be all about, but the majority of it falls short a bit. It's all still fun, but it's like a chocolate chip cookie without enough chips. We're shooting for a lot more chips in this cookie, and hopefully other folks will enjoy it.

More chest handles

2010-08-04T22:31:00.004-06:00

Zoe went to bed late so I had less than an hour to work tonight. I managed to burn my eye, my knee, my arm, steamed my hand in my glove like a lobster, ran a tank of propane dry, and inhaled some of the nasty forge lining which is carcinogenic. But the rings turned out well, and I got to play with the #3 Harris tip on my welder, which works about a hundred times better than the larger tip I've been using.

A few projects

2010-08-02T22:04:00.018-06:00

I've been playing around with a few projects, really just toying with some new things. One has been spurs. I've worn spurs off and on for years, but almost never with my fighting gear, since the ones I have are very nice, gold plated, and somewhat soft. But St. George wore them, so I should too. Making a spur is practically impossible unless you do some hot work, either casting or forging. The spurs I wear were cast off an original pair, which is why they're so flexible, but it looks to me like the originals were forged.
So I started with some half round stock I picked up (super cheap!) at Metals 4 You here in Austin. I heated parts of them up with my torch, tapered the arms with my a couple different cross pein hammers, flared the middle where it hits the Achilles tendon with a ball pein, flattened and spread the tips of the arms, and put in the bends. Half round stock is also half flat- so it doesn't like to do a bend against its thick plane. It needs some direct heat, support from two points like in a swedge block, and I found a straight pein hammer worked well to get the shape. All that gets me to here:
Then it needs to be bent into an arch to wrap around the heel, and have the flanges to hold the rowel welded on. Those originally were either forge welded on, riveted on, or split off from the body of the arms of the spur. I have the welder laying around, so that's what I used. I punched holes for the straps with one of my giant Whitney punches. Below you see the one I'm doing on the left, and the one I'm copying on the right.
They need some clean up still. They're pretty fun to do though the welding is a bit fiddly. I'll have to try the smaller welding tips I bought.
I made a little book of pictures of late 14th century spurs to get a better feel for what these were like. It looks like many of them were made from rounder rod. It's a bit easier to do than the approach I took, so I may move in that direction. The rowel could be welded together, cut from thick stock or cast. It's not clear to me what the best path is there yet.

I did a quick project for Jeanne-Marie to display her hats on. It was really just a matter of cutting some wood, countersinking a hole and screwing the pieces together. Still, they turned out nice:
Last week Jovian showed me a nice 6 board chest he built. He offered to build me one, and I offered to smith some handles for him. The research into chest hardware I did was eye opening. The handles on the 14th and 15th century chests were nothing like I expected. Some were wide bars which brace against plates on the chest. Hopefully Master Terafan won't mind me swiping his picture from this chest from Alsace:
The extra plates to keep the handle from digging into the wood were a bit invasive, so I opted to mimic this design:
It's an oak chest from the early 14th century, All Saints' Church, Stansfield, Suffolk. It looks like the handle is twisted iron with an eye ring staple. Historic Enterprises sells a similar design which reaches over the top of the chest to accommodate a carrying pole. They have some nice research pics which I'm not going to steal. Here's how I made my rendition-
Heat a couple of bars in the forge- a torch won't do the trick since the whole bar has to be hot to get a uniform twist:
Then twist them by bracing the hot bar in the vice and grabbing with vice grips (this part is really fun):
Then bend in a circle. Pounding it around a ball stake ended up being the easiest. I found a weird trick to smack the ring back into a single plane (i.e. a ring rather than a saddle shape which it wanted to be in) -using the giant piston valves Ysfael gave me. They're bigger than the handle I was making, so you can smack the whole thing at once. If it's red hot a couple taps is all it takes.
They're pretty tough without anything more, but just to be thorough I welded the rings closed:
Tonight I tapered some round stock by heating the end and pounding it at an angle on the anvil face. Then I slapped that in a vice, and tapped the head into a loop to wrap around the handle. The result looks like this:
It might make you want to play Quake. Sorry about that. The points get nailed into the wood, and probably bent over to hold in.

I heat treated some stuff for Master Peter a couple nights ago, and he brought over a big thick piece of steel he calls a "helmet cradle" which provides a nice non-rolly surface to weld a helmet in. It's the beam leaning against the stumps:He's very generous with tools, so I intend to pay his generosity forward. I cut the beam in half, which suits my needs better, and lets me give away the other half. It will make a nice portable anvil or even a helmet cradle for someone. It was almost a half inch thick in places, so it gave me a chance to really rev up the cutting torch. In the words of St. Bevis, "Fire is cool!"
So here's the great beam cloven in twain by the breath of a firey wind:
I'll give one of them to the first local person to post an interest in it here.

Last project of the evening- a cudgel for Ysfael. I started with the thickest rattan I've ever seen:
Which I slapped on the lathe and turned into a mean old bat:

Light box

2010-07-09T19:37:00.004-06:00

My SCA cousin Jeanne-Marie came over a few nights ago to throw together a light box for her glass and scribal work. Here's what we managed to put together:There is a plexiglass sheet that rests on the little ledge to the bottom right of the box. It's screwed in there already, it's just very hard to see since it's clear. A drop light clips to either one of the upright trapezoids or the top, shining through the plexiglass so you can see her work.
You can see some construction details on the bench it's resting on here.
And did you notice the little diaper on the glass to the right of the light box? That's Jeanne-Marie's work. My cousin is so weird. It was a fun project!

Teaching at King's College

2010-07-01T19:59:00.003-06:00

Last weekend I taught a class on I.33 and one on the Cantigas de Santa Maria at King's college. I have an older write up on some I.33 material here. The class was very well attended- maybe 20 people including king Jean-Paul (on the right above). I covered some of the history of the manuscript, the 7 main wards, and most of the plays from first ward.

In the foreground here you can see Therese (hope I spelled her name right) in blue rocking along with my spring steel buckler and Eleanor on the right. I made some mini-posters of the manuscript so folks could see them during the class without fiddling with handouts, and Therese was nice enough to hold them up for me.
Brian Price taught a great class on short spear, and finally made the fenestre guards make sense. I'll still have to work quite a bit to make them work for me, but I think I get it now.
I searched back through my blog and was a little surprised that I haven't talked at any length about the Cantigas de Santa Maria. They're a collection of about 400 songs of praise of St. Mary written down in the 13th century. Some of them are really great tunes, and I've been working on my own transcription of a few of them for a while. The music system is one of the earliest that we've been able to sort out and reconstruct with any certainty, though there's still a lot of examination and research going on around them. I played a couple and put them on my YouTube channel.
The class went well, though I may have gotten more into the technical details than the students really were looking for. I'm into recreating this music, and, well, not everyone will be doing that. So I sang a little and played about 8 of them on my recorder and bagpipes so they'd get a taste for what the Cantigas sound like. I'm still a little concerned I sounded preachy. The nature of the material is pretty religious, and with the Reconquista going on it was still a pretty charged era, so hopefully the students were able to focus on the music and the history and not get too distracted by me rambling about saints and miracles. Oddly, I.33's main protagonists are a priest and his student too, and the collegium I was teaching at was in a church. Honestly, I'm not out to convert people, and I'm sure I'd suck at that job. Anyway, the classes were fun, and I hope the students got something out of them.

Firing a hat

2010-06-30T22:45:00.005-06:00

Master Peter came over to have me fire a few things, most notably Baron Avery's new helmet. Here he is putting the final touches on it:

Note that he's sitting on the bench I made here. Here's the burgonet engulfed in flames:

I also fired a couple cops, a shield and part of a rapier hilt, we talked about helmets and welding. It was hot as hell, but not a bad time.

Cost of an armour shop

2010-06-18T12:45:00.002-06:00

Master Jovian asked what a basic armouring setup might cost. It's very subjective, as you can build some functional armour with about $15 worth of tools, and some folks make decent stuff that way. Some have thousands of dollars of tools and the quality they produce isn't much better, though it might save them a lot of time.
Here's my list of key things and my guess at their cost:
A forge (about $100 if you can build it, $400-700 if you can't)
Various hammers (all told I have about $400 in hammers, though I use 20% of them 80% of the time)
Beverly shear. Mine cost me about $300
Whitney punches. The small ones go for about $40. My shop has 3, and two larger ones.
A drill press ($75)
Angle grinders ($35)
Buffing wheel ($75, I got super lucky to get that price, though I limped along on one of the baby models for years. They go for about $30, but polishing takes FOREVER)
Some dishing dies and stakes (I have about $750 worth of those in the shop. A couple are borrowed from Max)
A welder. My rig cost ~$200, which is about as cheap as you'd want to go. Rebuilt regulators would cost a little less. The cheapo arc welders aren't worth the shop space IMO.
I'd wager I have about $1000 in books specifically for armour research.
Punches, files, a vice, a bench or at least stumps to work on a tool box, lighting, wiring, a file cabinet for patterns, a quench barrel, leather tools (punches, slickers, shears, needles), pliers, tongs, goggles, ear protection, gloves (light and heavy), clamps, an anvil, a stake holder....
All that stuff probably would run into about $2-3000, depending on how well you scrounge and what you can buy. Like I made my own tongs, which cost me about $5, but the commercial ones of that size are about $65. They're prettier and more robust but not functionally different.
There are lot of expendables like sand paper, rags, flap wheels, hard wheels, wire wheels, rouge, file folders for patterns, pens, sharpies, gas, rivets, washers, nails, oil, goof off, leather lube, dyes, steel, leather, buckles, drill bits, steel wool.....

Neat French search engine

2010-05-26T14:02:00.003-06:00

Master Peter tipped me off to this neat French search engine.
In the Auteur de l'oeuvre field try entering one of these guys:
Baerze
Sluter
Werve This is just from my weird little Burgundian scuplture fetish, but a lot of other artists are represented.
Or in the Nom de l'objet field try
Armure -you'll see the armour from Chartres
philippe le hardi -you'll find the tomb and mourners of Philip the Bold including some works not by the sculptors above.
verre - more glass than you can shake a stick at (not that you should shake sticks at glass)
bois - wood, including many sticks for shaking at glass stuff.

Take some care, since even in my brief searches I found two pieces which were later copies (one painting, and one scupture). The searches are all in modern French so a quick swing by your high school text book and you can find a ton of neat pictures.

Good practice

2010-05-26T08:03:00.003-06:00

Duke Kein has been doing his fighting school again, but this time it's convening at the regular baronial practice site. I managed to participate last night and got some good things out of it. And some serious bruises. We started out with some drills on doing a quick close which I like, then did a "circle of death" where you fight each person in the circle. We had a big turn out, so the circles were split into advanced and intermediate fighters. I only brought my glaive, so I ended up fighting with it against some of the best fighters in the area. Doing so against lots of sword and shield guys on a smallish field kind of hurt. Sometimes even the other pole arms hurted. But then we went on to do a tournament in the style Ansteorra does its crown tourneys, and I got more focused. I ended up winning. It's funny, I was waffling about even fighting last night, and I worked insanely late to put off the decision, but it turned out to be a good time and a good boost of momentum.

An edge rolling tutorial

2010-05-12T13:14:00.000-06:00

A great tutorial on how to roll an edge.

Santiago de Compostella

2010-05-06T13:01:00.002-06:00

I've been wanting to walk some of the road to Santiago de Compostella for years. A Finnish group has done it in medieval gear.

Bagpipe surgery

2010-05-02T22:11:00.005-06:00

I love my bagpipes! They're fun to play, fun to talk about, look nice etc. My one issue with them has been that, since I have tiny girlie hands I have a hard time reaching the hole for the low C, which has limited what I can play on them. The contortions my hands have to do to cover the hole have meant a lot of air leaks, which the chanter doesn't tolerate well, creating squawks and ugliness. So, encouraged by a conversation with Al Cofrin about his own bagpipe mods, and armed only with the things in the picture below (ok, and a drill) I set about to either fix, or mangle my beloved pipes.
Fundamentals of Musical Acoustics is a great book. It's very technical, but covers a wide range of instruments and discusses how their sounds are produced in terms which make sense to an engineer. The ideas I used for this modification are 1. There's a trade off between the distance from the oscillator (in this case the double reed in the chanter) and the size of that hole, so a small hole near the top of the pipe creates a similar pitch to a larger hole near the bottom and 2. The wood is thick enough to slant the hole. You can't just put the hole anywhere and expect a nice sounding instrument, since you might have to make a tiny hole to get the pitch you want, which will mean some notes will be very quiet. There are also a limits to how much you can slant the hole because of the structural integrity of the chanter and the way the air flows through that hole gets disturbed when it has to turn tight corners.
The little silver box is my tuner, to help keep me in the right range. I used a cherry dowel to fill the hole, sand paper to get it to the right size, and a little glue to keep it there. This picture gives you an idea of how much the original hole was slanted:
You're seeing the chanter without its bell (which is mostly a filter really, though it does change the pitch some), and the black waxed cord used to make a decent seal to the bell.
I sawed off the protruding part of the dowel, filed it flat, and drilled the new hole for the low C. It took a few adjustments around that hole and the un-fingered adjustment hole below that to get the pitch just right. Taking the tuner after it made me far more aware of issues elsewhere in the range of the chanter that I'd like to address, particularly the high C and D. The B is a bit unstable for some reason. The low D now has a throatier sound about it which I think is due to oscillations in the air flow as it leaves through the very slanted hole I drilled. It's a little like guitar distortion. See if you can hear it here.

Being cute and making some noise

2010-05-02T21:51:00.007-06:00

Here's Zoe with the racket my Aunt Mary bought me:
Its name comes from "rocket" since it looks like a firework. The little white trapezoid by her right hand is a double reed, and there are series of pipes on the body and holes on the sides to let you change the notes. It's also called a pocket bassoon, since it sounds like one, and could fit in a big coat pocket.
Here she's posing with one of my shawms, which is a double reed ancestor of the oboe. The shawm has a louder, coarser sound, though much of that depends on the maker, the reed, and the player.
Those two instruments are out of town right now getting examined for new reeds by a fellow from Piffaro.
Here's a little video I put together this evening of Cantiga de Santa Maria 353 on the shawm I bought from Baron Ihon. Here's another I did on the bagpipes (again, thanks to Aunt Mary). I was particularly eager to get that sound recorded, since I recently did some surgery on the bagpipes.
I started putting up other random videos I've been collecting. Here's one of me and Goetz fighting back in September.

Just screwing around with glass

2010-04-29T23:00:00.002-06:00

Last night I made some re-fried beans for Zoe's dinner, and tonight I used the can they came in as a make shift crucible and melted a few bottles down into it. I poked a blow pipe into it, gathered a blob, shaped it a bit, blew a bubble into it, and made some globes. Here are the big things I observed:
1. It's very difficult not to get detritus from the garage, and the forge onto the glass. If I'm going to do this seriously, I need to build or buy a brick lined kiln or glory hole.
2. I'd prefer a side opening on that hot box.
3. It can be much smaller than my forge. I went through a fair amount of gas tonight.
4. Because glass working is quiet, I can work well past my usual 10pm curfew.
5. Given a clean heat source, clean materials, and some better tools, I could probably make some neat stuff at home, possibly even solo, though working with a partner would be a big plus.
6. When the blow pipe is red hot and you plunge it into the quench tank, it can boil enough water to make a 7ft geyser.
7. This was a fun end to a stressful (but successful) day.

Delayed glass pics

2010-04-25T21:37:00.009-06:00

Months ago my wife got me a class with a hot glass worker here in town. It was a lot of fun. I had some pictures from the experience on my cell phone which I just got around to uploading.

This is where a lot of the magic happens. It's all industrial, so it's only exciting if you're a geek, which fortunately I am. This is the main furnace, which houses the crucible of clear glass. This one is electrical, and runs constantly. I think the little number in the box on the right is the temperature setting.
You open the metal door using the foot pedal that's just below the frame, put the blow pipe into the bucket of hot glass, and gather a blob of glass on it. From there, you shape the blob a bit at this station:
You sit on the other side of the corrugated sheet, on the bench. If you look carefully you can pick out the two steel rails that are like wide arm rests. The blow pipe rests on those as you shape the piece, allowing you to roll it back and forth evenly with relatively little chance of catching yourself on fire. From what I've seen it looks like medieval glass workers rolled their blow pipes on their thighs, possibly on a leather pad. It takes a bit more skill to do that. The bowl of broken glass at the bottom of the corrugated sheet is where all the little broken bits fall when pieces are removed. You can see diamond sheers (named for the diamond shape, not the stone), jacks (like giant tweezers) and various wooden blocks and cups in the water bucket behind that. The big black box is a fan.
When we had the big blob of molten glass in a workable shape, we added colored glass with the same coefficient of expansion from the assortment over at this bench:

The bowls of what looks like sand on the right are frit, crushed glass. There are rods on the left which we used to make my candy bowl and paper weight (which turned out to be very useful while filing taxes with the ceiling fan on). The little furnace in the middle got the glass warmed up, and then we just roll the clear blob in it and take it over to the steel rails to shape.

Sorry only one of the rails is really in focus. You can see the water bucket more clearly, the jacks, and even the wet newspaper which is used for some shaping. These next guys are optical molds:
You push your glass into them to get textures on the outside. I used the ridged one on the bottom right to make this piece. You plunge the glass in to get the ridges, and then roll it on a marver to get a twist. You can then shape the glass with the wet wooden cups and such without loosing all the ridges.
The last big step is annealing the glass, cooling it slowly to reduce the stresses and avoid cracking, which happens in the steel midget coffin to the left below.
After that, the base of most pieces is sanded on a diamond sander to keep them from scratching your table.
Thanks again, Stef! It was awesome!

Casting link

2010-04-22T16:54:00.000-06:00

An interesting but vaguely unnerving casting site.

Spear tiny tourney

2010-04-21T00:19:00.003-06:00

I had a great time tonight, and I'd like to publicly thank Maelgwyn and his son Artorius for their roles in it. Our regular fight practice tonight was taken over by a two man spear tourney, which Maelgwyn put together and ran. It's a great idea, as it encourages us to work together as teams, and improve our spear prowess for wars, and it's a lot of fun besides. So thank you Maelgwyn for doing the work to make such a good tourney happen.
Artorious, Maelgwyn's young son, asked me if I'd be his partner in the tourney. He has impressed me in the past. He works very well in teams like his father does, and being young and fit, he has the speed and stamina to keep up in a long fight. We ended up discussing strategy together quite a bit, plotting out what our approach would be for each fight. He had some good ideas, and was responsive to commands during the fights. He fought like a lion. He was measured, smart, balanced, and kept his cool. It was a round robin format, so we got to fight against all six other teams there, and only lost to one. Our combined efforts took us to the finals. We faced down Sir Corwin, who's a notorious demon with a spear, and one of his squires named Orion (I'm not sure how he spells it, but folks pronounce it like that, but with the stress on the O). We'd beaten them earlier pretty solidly, but it didn't pan out so well in the finals for us. Anyway, all the fights were great, and it seemed like folks had as good a time as I did.
So between that, some hot wings and ribs in my belly, and a Tenacious D album I picked up at Half Price Books, I'm a happy camper tonight.

Great bascinet progress

2010-04-07T21:11:00.004-06:00

There wasn't much of preamble to explain the helmet I'm working on, which I'll rectify here. It's based on the image below, which comes from a tournament book commissioned by King Renee. He was an interesting figure, much like the dukes of Burgundy in his support of the arts and approach to expanding his realm, but unfortunately at odds with them for much of his life.
The armour depicted in his 15th century manual for the ideal tournament is some of the earlier specialized sporting gear we have evidence of. Armour for war at this time had a similar form, but was less open to arrows and thrusts. Since much of what I do for fun is a form of tournament I don't feel bad about copying tournament gear of the day and getting a similar competitive advantage from the vision and air.
So far I have the skull formed, planished and welded, one of the back neck plates welded on and the second one tacked in place. There's still a fair amount of forming to do at the base of the skull and the neck which I might have to do hot. I might need an extra pair of hands to do it right.

New helm in progress

2010-03-31T23:05:00.005-06:00

I've started working on a new helm in the style seen in King Renee's tournament book. I'm hoping to have it done before Lysts, but it's going to be tough. So far it's dished, bouged, and I welded the two main parts of the skull together tonight.

Since I'm doing this in spring steel the heat from welding caused some hardening along the weld line, so I tossed it in the forge to anneal.

Gulf War 2010

2010-03-31T21:54:00.014-06:00

Stef, Zoe, Aedinius, Franki and I all piled into the van and sped off to Mississippi with the trailer in tow. It was a fabulous week. Zoe and Franki made new friends, I got to fight and carouse a bunch, and Stef got to shop and take some classes. We ended up with no pictures from our camp, but I've found some random fighting shots.
If you're looking to play Where's Waldo, I'm always in the red jupon. I'm on the left in the pic above. That was the day of the open field battle.
This is the Bryn Gwlad War Company before the ravine battle. Rachel and Helene got the barding for the gear cart put together. Aedinius (in the scale shirt next to me) fought like a lion despite some spearmen targeting him below the belt. I didn't fight as closely with the war company this year since I was Lt. General of Ansteorra's southern region, so I did get to go to the commander's meetings and Bryn Gwlad was one of the units under my command. I missed some of the close contact and camaraderie of running with the crew, but the command role was a lot of fun too. The vantage point I got let me see some outstanding team work between Maelgwyn and Artorius in the ravine, the tenacity of the whole left line in the town battle- big asside- my new buddy Sarin, from North Shield commanded the leftmost edge of our line in the town, and his crew stood up Blood Guard, which is rightly considered one of the top units in the Knowne World- phenomenal column charges by the Midrealm, and Bryn Gwlad led a charge into the castle on Saturday that had me grinning ear to ear.

Rhoadd and CAID lined up with Bryn Gwlad before the open field:

I conferred with Il Generalisimo Caladin before the open field. I wore my pig face and sabatons that day so I'd be well kitted for The Deed.
The Deed is a fight unlike most others in the SCA. It's a two sided ransom melee. If you manage to strike three good blows to your opponent's head they're stunned, and you can take them captive. Open grille face plates are simply safety gear, so they don't count as armour. Thrusts to unarmoured bits can kill you, which means you're out of the combat. Maile counts as protection against those thrusts, so most of us wore maile. I went out of my way to add maile to the backs of my thighs to reduce the odds of getting taken out. I've discussed some of my preparations and similar deeds here.
These end up being a vicious, violent swirl of gorgeous armour, and an excuse to trade some great loot. This is gives a good idea of what the chaos looks like.

Here I'm taking Thomas captive. He tried to save one of his team mates whom I was taking off to be ransomed. We had a good little fight until he fell and was forced to yield. You can see a decent shot of my bardiche (the pole arm) here.

I love the armour in this shot. I'm taking another hostage (with sweet finger gauntlets) back to our lines. You can see Sir Nigel in the background in the beautiful cased greaves. I got mistaken for him 5 times at this war because our kits are looking similar. Fortunately his friends and admirers are very nice.
A cool shot of the victorious French side:
I love the token ransoms folks bring to these. I traded a necklace Domino made for me out of glass beads to Mandin (he's on the left above with the pole hammer) for a ring. I gave another necklace to Seamus, whom I unfortunately don't have a picture of, for an outstanding pole fight from the second time we ran the scenario. I received a fantastic pair of garters, a book on 15th century horsemanship, and a great big pile of crisp belt studs. Some of them were surprisingly fitting, as they were coquilles St. Jaques- the symbol for pilgrims to the shrine of Santiago de Compostella. We'd decided at the war that Zoe would have a persona from Compostella.

A lot of other great stuff happened that I don't have pictures to help tell about. I got to play a bagpipes with Al Cofrin, who had some tips and tricks to share. Wolgemut played at the Knowne World Party. I donated a keg of apple cider to the festivities, it got drained quite quickly, and I had a great chat with Jean-Paul de Calmont while his comrades served the brew. We had a great gathering of folks from The Armour Archive in our camp Wednesday night which gave us all a chance to talk to Nissan Maxima (whom we made a major point of killing in the town battle, since he's too lethal to let live), and Mistress Marcele (Tasha who's practically a patron saint on that board, with good reason) commended me for my head to toe outfit. I guess girls really do care about shoes and hats more than most guys do.

So over all, it was a great time. I loved getting to spend more time with my friends and family, commanding, fighting, and The Deed was again a major highlight of my war.

Pre-Gulf Shop

2010-03-31T21:30:00.005-06:00

T'was the night before Gulf War, and all through the shop, many creatures were stirring...um... making stuff for Gulf War. Jovian worked on his scales:
Lucas (in white) finished up his greaves, and gave Aedinius a hand installing his shield boss:

I didn't get any shots of Duke Hoegarden, since we were busy fixing his arms up. I did get a shot of Martel. I don't think she normally has that halo of light over her head.

Making a bench

2010-03-07T12:04:00.011-06:00

I made a couple benches when my wife and I were dating that were just the right size for the two of us to sit by the fire together. They've served well as seats in many kingdoms, for over a dozen years, but as they were made of cheap shelving pine, they're a little worse for wear, and need to be replaced. Here you can see some of the details, like the chip carving I did in them, the dark stain that makes them nearly invisible in the dark (they function as a primitive sobriety test) and the split which formed in one after Zoe and I got caught in a downpour at Three Kings.

Since I loathe modern furniture at events it's clear I needed to make some new seats. My recent obsession with Van der Weyden pushed me toward these paintings for my research:

I picked up some oak and new saw blades at Home Depot, and set to work. I decided to inset the rails to reduce warping and make things fit together more snugly. It ended up taking a while, but the chisel clean up was sort of therapeutic.
A clean slot ready for a rail.
Patterning the legs. I based the shape on the bench Van der Weyden's Virgin is sitting on. It has shoulders for the rails and the rectangles at the top fit into the seat.

In the background you can see the seat (we're looking at it from below), the slot for the rails, the rails, and the legs.
Test fitting a seat.
The assembled design:

I still have to peg the rails and the legs together, but that should only take a few minutes. In all, it was a fun and quick project.

Open shop 3/3/10

2010-03-04T19:52:00.008-06:00

Barnet returned to the shop after a long hiatus and worked on his avantail and his greaves:Some cops I fired for Master Peter:

Detail of a sabaton scale Master Jovian is working on:Lucas and Master Peter working on Lucas's greave:
Don Maelgwyn brought some thick piano wire he'd found as his contribution to the shop. It's high carbon so it should be good for making tools. He chopped his parts of the rod into workable segments and we annealed them.

Open shop for late February

2010-02-27T00:50:00.003-06:00

Lucas pounded out another greave this week:Here it is just before firing next to the loaner helm he brought, which we cleaned up, strapped and padded:

Legs done

2010-02-21T19:47:00.005-06:00

I still have a little work to do with the new belt I'm making for these legs, but I hope to have that done tonight. To keep track of how I'm progressing as an armourer I'll compare my new legs with the set I've been wearing for a couple years. Here are the buckles on the new ones, and a close up of the cuisses:

The wrapped over steel strapping is how the medieval buckles in my collection all work, and it makes for a very durable design. The straps are dyed with a mixture I made myself. I did the folded pieces of steel, and cheated a bit with a commercial buckle.
How I strapped my present legs. There's some extra weight and complication in the straps which seems unnecessary. Okham's razor shouldn't just apply to philosophy. I made the buckle myself, and they haven't failed me, but the pin has been a pain. I used commercial dye, two piece rivets (which I've seen used in surviving knives, but never on leather) and a folded-over-the buckle approach on the strap which isn't super durable (it's held for years, but it's a weak point in the design), and it's bulkier.
My existing legs, in all their rusty glory. I don't like the cop shape at all, and the demi-greave is too wide. There are about a dozen things I don't like about them really, but the pity party would be embarrassing.

The new design is shiny, sleek, trimmed in brass, and has attached maile cuisses which will have the right look for the St. George statue I'm copying and help keep me alive in The Deed of Arms at Gulf war.

Two open shops and some leg progress

2010-02-18T08:27:00.007-06:00

Last week was a fairly quiet night in the shop. Don Maelgwyn and Martel were able to get some work done on their helms; a crested spangen in Maelgwyn's case, and in Martel's it was installing vervelles in a new helm gifted by Sir Lyonel.
Martel maniacally displaying the bolt cutters she used to trim the vervelles and adding to the quiet fears many men have of lesbians:

This week though, the place was packed. Centurion Robert got some adjustments made to his helm to keep his chin safe:

Sir Ysfael started work to install a new avantail on his helm, Centurion Eleanor got another part of her helm patterned, cut out and formed, Master Jovian worked on his scales more and polished a hammer face for me, Martel finished up the vervelles on her helmet, Aedinius pounded out the bowl of his new center boss, and Lucas worked on his second greave and learned a bit about metal fatigue.

I've gotten a little done on my legs over the past week. The brass is almost all on, and the mail is almost completely attached:

Talbot's analysis of effigies

2010-02-12T14:21:00.002-06:00

Check out Talbot's great analysis of effigies

Racking

2010-02-12T00:55:00.001-06:00

Tonight I racked 3 gallons of sweet port, 5 gallons of pear cider, and 5 gallons of spiced ale. All of them were tasting good, and well on track to be good final products.

Feb 2nd 2010 Open shop

2010-02-03T22:35:00.004-06:00

Tonight I helped Lucas pattern, cut out and form a Roman inspired greave:It still needs some work, but he was pretty excited about it and had a good time working on it. Master Jovian "Tablesaw" Skleros punched a lot of scales and started shaping them:

Centurion Maelgwyn (whom I just realized will be commanding the Bryn Gwlad War company solo for a number of key battles at Gulf War this year) dished some spring steel panels for his new spangen ridge helm:

Hot glass

2010-01-31T19:49:00.005-06:00

Thanks to the kindness of my wife I got to spend some time working with Aaron Gross in his glass studio last weekend. Here is what he helped me make:

The main reason I mention all this here is because of this piece:

which is my first attempt at recreating this 15th century German glass:

Judging by other similar works of the era there was a lot of variety in the exact shape that folks were OK with, so I'm not to upset that the profile isn't identical. They did seem to like the swirled optical mold effect that my glass has.

Right leg done, Centurion event and open shop update

2010-01-22T22:31:00.008-06:00

The Centurion event last weekend was a blast. Caladin (on the right in white and green) got knighted, we had some great classes, including this one on Fiore that Earl Brion taught (he stayed with us, and he, Aedinius and I had a nice chat Friday evening):
Photo credit: Laura Martin
Chiang and I taught a pole arm class:
Photo credit: Cyrus Mallison
I worked with Baroness Druinne of Elfsea on some pole techniques after the melees, which were a blast. We did a bunch of open field skirmishes with about 40 on a side, and a series of bridges. You can see one of them here (I'm in the center in the beautiful red jupon Clalibus made for me):

I commanded one of the sides, and had a great time doing it. I over used pulse charges a bit, which is kind of funny since I don't really like them a whole lot. I only over extended myself once and caught Duke Hoegaarden's spear in my chest, and our side won more than it lost. Rhoadd and the Bryn Gwlad War Company both did great jobs, as did all the folks filling in on reserves. I was particularly happy with our archers.

I screwed up two things which I'd like to apologize for. 1. I thought Cal's knighting was going to be later, so I was putting on my armour when the dubbing took place. I'm sorry I missed it. It wasn't intended as a message or anything, and I even brought out a keg of mead that night to help celebrate. 2. My timing sucked going home to get the keg too, and I missed court. I wanted to publicly acknowledge Haroun, for doing very well with archery, and standing stalwart in the shield wall on the bridge. She kept me out of the water and unbludgeoned multiple times, and managed to pulse, kill spearmen and get back in position multiple times. She got her talon that night for such actions, and deservedly so, but I'm bummed I didn't get to say something for her in a more public forum than this. I also missed out on speaking up for Artorious. He brought a poleax to the bridge battles. As much as I love the weapon it's hard to use it to the fullest in that scenario, so I encouraged him to fight fiercely and seek a worthy pace in Valhalla. He did exactly that, fighting like a man possessed. It was fantastic.

The evening festivities were outstanding. My clove and citrus mead was a hit, and I got to try some of Madog's braggot, which had an excellent warmth that made me smile. We chatted about brewing a bit, and hung out with Helena and Rachel. I chatted a bit with Eule, Shamino (aka Richard Garriot), and Ivar about a couple ideas for Lysts in April.

In the shop this week, Centurion Maelgwyn worked on his ridged spangen helm, getting the dimensions just right for the padding he wants:
John of Severn is polishing his helm up in the background. Master Jovian worked on some scale sabatons, and I commissioned more glass beads from his wife for ransoms. Speaking of glass, I'm taking a glass blowing class tomorrow which my wife got me for our anniversary. It should be lots of fun!
I finished the right leg of my St. George harness:

The brass work was more time consuming than I expected, but it turned out OK. Here you can see how I'm cheating on weight by riveting the chausse to the cuisse:

A long quote from Master Roberto

2010-01-14T09:32:00.002-06:00

Since it's very relevant to the work I'm doing right now, and I greatly admire his work, I'm going to shamelessly quote a big chunk from Robert MacPherson:

"Historically, decorative brass strips were applied with flush rivets. this is true from the late 14th c. to the end of the 15thc. It was not until the the heavily pierced work of the late Gothic, that dome headed rivets were used.

The visual impact of flush riveted brass is very different than that of the later brass work. Its smooth uninterrupted line goes well with the clean lines of pre-gothic armor. It also provides an uninterrupted surface for the engraved decoration. The engraver can cut his lines right across the rivet heads as if they weren't there. The #13 armor at Churburg is a good example of this.

I use soft brass wire for my rivets. McMaster sells a five pound spool of .0907" wire. I bought one many years ago; it's practically a lifetime supply. (Perhaps you can find the same thing in smaller quantities.) In a pinch, you can use 3/32" brazing rod, but it is really too hard, and a poor color match.

Proceed thus:
-get your brass to fit over your finished plate.
-hold it in place temporarily with small c-clamps or tape.
-mark your rivet locations (one at each end, and every 1 1/2 to 2 inches)
-punch the first hole with 3/32"
-countersink the brass and the steel (edit- use a 60 degree multi-toothed counter sink tool, not a drill bit)
-straighten out a couple of inches of brass wire and square the ends
-cut a length of wire which is long enough to fill the hole and the countersinks.
-put the wire/rivet through the hole with the squared end on the outside (against the brass)
-put the work down on a clean anvil surface (brass side down)
-peen up the inside of the rivet with a ball hammer, the outside will swell to fit the countersink in the brass.
-place the plate over an appropriate stake ( brass side out) and finish the rivet with a flat hammer. Don't hit it any more than necessary or the surrounding brass will become too hard to "set down" later.
-repeat with subsequent rivets, trying always to "pull the slack" out of the brass.

Once the brass is riveted in place, you must get rid of any lumps or gaps in the fit. Do this by hammering the brass down with a rawhide hammer. (this is practically the ONLY thing I ever do with a rawhide hammer) Do not hammer it too much, or it will stretch, and spring away from the steel!

I usually finish the brass with 80gr., followed by 180gr., followed by black emery on a sisal buff, and finally the same on a cotton buff.

When all that is done, it is time to engrave!

When the engraving is done I sometimes go over the entire piece with my "sacred wire wheel". This is a wheel with very fine wires (.006") which has been very well "broken in", and has ALWAYS run in the same direction, and NEVER been reversed. I run this wire wheel in a little WD40. This yields a "softer" looking finish."

Come together, right now

2010-01-11T23:07:00.002-06:00

Attaching the maile and brass edging on the right cuisse:

Fight practice

2010-01-06T15:37:00.001-06:00

We had a great practice last night despite the cold. Kein, Eleanor, Ioannes, Ysfael a new guy named Miklos from Fynon Gath and I all fought until we couldn't feel our feet.

I made some progress attaching brass edging to my legs before realizing that the "solid brass" that I'd bought was only "solid brass" for a bout 1/64th of an inch, then some kind of zinc or nickel, and another thin sheet of brass stuck to the other side. So it's soft, and damaged irreparably if it's ever scratched or even polished agressively. Silver colored metal shines through. There should be a new (and unreasonably expensive) sheet of brass from McMaster-Car waiting for me when I get home.

Lots of bits and pieces

2009-12-18T01:20:00.008-06:00

Tonight I kegged 5 gallons of apple cider. It's clear and tasty:

I finished planishing, fired and tempered a cuisse to replace the one I mangled.
Just after firing. I'm glad I didn't make a lot of tough forge scale on this one, and the work went much faster than before.

After tempering:

We had a good open armour shop last night. Martel (foreground) did some forming and welding for her helm and got some rivets replaced on her gauntlets, Grayson (Al's son, center in black) did some research on what kind of kit he wants to do, Al made great progress on his vambraces, and Maelgwyn welded together the top of a loner helm.

Maelgwyn (shown welding below) brought some nice rolls and his grandmother's rhubarb jam. Stef brought out cookies. Between those and the beer I'm sure we consumed more calories than we burned.

Baby steps

2009-12-12T02:37:00.002-06:00

I did some planishing on a new cuisse tonight, and started laying the crease. Then I started brewing a batch of pear cider. The juice was a deep caramel brown, so I'm curious if it will lighten in fermentation like commercial ciders tend to.

Tubing

2009-12-03T16:24:00.002-06:00

I recently installed a bunch of new hoses into the beer fridge and found that treating the ends of the hoses with hot water made a world of difference. The hoses don't really mind going onto the get side taps, but the nipples for the door are thinner, sharper, and harder to get good leverage on. Putting them into a cup of water that I'd microwaved for 30 seconds made it a snap.

Bitter sweet

2009-11-30T22:51:00.008-06:00

I should start this by saying I use angle grinders a lot. They're amazingly useful for shaping steel and wood, finishing edges, polishing pieces, removing skin, and flinging pieces of metal at your friends. I've owned several, burned a couple out from years of use, and normally keep two on my bench all the time with different abrasives on them because I use them so much. Polishing can be a very time consuming and somewhat costly endeavor, so I'm always trying to improve how I do it.

I picked up a new Norton abrasive wheel with the hope that it would speed my polishing along. It's essentially a hard rubber backing plate which supports a sandpaper disk that screws to your angle grinder with a special flat nut with two holes in the face of it. I followed the instructions, mounting it on my trusting and innocent angle grinder, and naively flipped the switch. The angle grinder immediately locked up, and screwed the nifty new wheel onto the spindle so hard that I couldn't get it to budge with a vice and a commercial tool for loosening such beasties. My efforts bent the tool. Ever try to loosen a nut and have the handle of the wrench bend instead? That doesn't ever happen, you say. But yeah, it was like that.

I had some hope that I could disengage the lock by disassembling the grinder a little. A few loosened screws later and my fancy angle grinder had transformed into a useless fist full of grease, gears and wires, with a tenacious and equally useless abrasive disk still firmly attached to its remnants. So um, that was fun. The little puritan in my murky gene pool assumed all this was my fault- some direction I didn't follow properly, or something that was wrong with my grinder to begin with, so I went off to Home Depot to buy another angle grinder, and yet another one of these nifty Norton abrasive wheel sets. They looked so nice! They said they last 10x longer than flap wheels! (Even though the only flap wheels my Home Depot are all made by the same company, so maybe they're just saying their own flap wheels suck!)

So, new grinder, new wheel, what could go wrong? After taking that useless spark guard off the new grinder I again followed the instructions for the hopeful Norton abrasive wheel. I plugged it in, and flipped the switch. Can you guess what happened? Really, try. Did you guess the same exact thing? I had a brand new sanding wheel seized hopelessly to my brand new angle grinder. Yeah, that's what happened.

So most angle grinders come with a nifty little wrench thingie. It's a flat plate with two pins sticking out the side that slide into the faces of the special nuts that hold sandpaper wheels on. You can then get the torque you need to loosen even the most stubborn wheel that your buddy over tightened onto your grinder. The one I had came with pins that were about a quarter of an inch long, giving this wayward and insanely stuck wheel the leverage it needed to bend the quarter inch steel bar/wrench thing into a taco. I'd like to think it was just my massive strength, but really it was just poor design. I spent part of a meeting today at work coming up with an improved design, and built one out of the handle of a similar tool and some parts of a nail for the studs. It mostly needed a thicker handle and shorter studs. The new tool design worked great, and let me unjam the tragically flawed Norton abrasive wheel on my new grinder. It felt good to engineer my way out of a situation created by poor engineering. Seriously if you can't make a sandpaper wheel that doesn't make a grinder try to implode or a wrench that regularly bends itself into the shape of Mexican foods you shouldn't be a mechanical engineer. If a guy like me without all the strength of materials classes you had to take can make a better tool from crap he has laying around his shop in 5 minutes, you officially suck.

Anyway, I still had one angle grinder left in pieces. If you have a grinder like the one above, they're great grinders, but be careful not to just go unscrewing it. I did, and the gears come apart in a greasy mess, and motor comes right the heck out of the case, leaving the bushings behind. They're spring loaded so they make good contact all the time, but it makes disassembling it one way trap. You have to take the whole thing apart more so you can access the bushings, holding them away from the motor so you can slide it back into the case. I did all that, and got the gears to mesh back together properly. It now makes a slight scent of ozone, but otherwise it's good as new. It's as if my grinders, and even the new addition to my grinder family had never met these awful Norton abrasive sets, and I feel like I've done some brain surgery.

There are a couple down sides to this whole tale. Because of my limited shop time due to having a job, a family, and this project, this whole saga took a few days. I reverted to some more aggressive flap sanding wheels to polish the forge scale off my cuisse. One little part of the cuisse was getting very hot very fast, which is a bad sign. Then light started shining through it; an even worse sign. This cuisse is made of tempered 410, which can't really be welded with my oxy-acetylene rig. It makes the steel take on the texture of a sponge. I tried it anyway, with some nice 4130 rod, and the hole just got bigger and uglier. So I'm stuck with either making a whole new cuisse, or finding someone who can fill this hole. The guys at the welding shop I go to didn't even have any rod for any welding rig that could do it in their catalog, so I'm not overly hopeful. I wanted to enter these legs in a competition this Saturday, but it's unlikely that they'll get done in time. So now I have three happy angle grinders, a distrust of Norton abrasives, a tool that can exorcise their demonic wheels, and a big hole in my armour.

Short term goals, long term goals

2009-11-28T10:04:00.004-06:00

I really want my legs polished this weekend. The forge scale on the right leg has been a roaring pain despite soaking it in muriatic acid. The fumes it made rusted every piece of bare steel in about a quarter of my shop. I just don't like working with the stuff. I picked up more sanding stuff which hopefully will lead me to a more cost effective long term solution.
After getting them polished, there's brass and maile to mount, and documentation to take care of. I'd like to enter these in a competition this Saturday, which means I have to build a display for them too. I'm thinking of doing it like a mannequin with an armature inside. That alone is a fair bit of work.
I was asked to write an article on western martial arts for the new Knowne World Handbook, and I really need to get cracking on it. I'd like to get a rough draft done this weekend. Oh, and I'm in the middle of building an attic, and trying to be a decent dad.
Longer term, I started getting folks excited about making a proper King Renee style gallery for the site for Lysts. We might get some support from Richard Garriot on this, since it's his land. There's a ton to do on this- drawing up plans, figuring out exactly how we're paying for it, figuring out where it might live when/if we break it down, buying all the lumber, doing all the joining, and making all the fabric bits. There aren't any ladders or stairs in the original pictures, so we have to figure out that part too.

Bordermarch Autumn Melees

2009-11-26T09:39:00.006-06:00

The war company had a good time at Bordermarch Autumn Melees. They have what may be the best SCA castle in the world there, and we got to play in it a lot. The picture above was taken from the main gate tower during a zombie assault scenario that turned out to be one of the most fun battles we did. It was simple, novel, and everyone got a lot of stick swinging in.

Wolf and Illaria did a great job cooking and baking for our dinner, and folks chipped in with bread and deserts. I brought a keg of 14th century German meade, and a keg of raspberry dunkelwiesen which were both well liked. There was a great Middle Eastern dance competition which brought out a number of good musicians and some dance styles you don't often see- more expressive and lyrical work.

One of the surprising highlights of the event for me was chatting with Willow (Don Maelgwyn's lady, who led me to this) while she simmered her dyes over the fire. She was working with a number of different period ingredients to make mordants and various colors, and was happy to show folks what was going on. We talked chemistry and history a little. It was great to see someone doing a period art in a period way, particularly at what's essentially a war event.
So all in all, it was a good time.

Pied Piper

2009-11-20T22:03:00.005-06:00

Last weekend Zoe and I went to help out with a demo for the Cedar Park Library. She got to go on some rides and do some crafts. Mistress Brynhildr and I played for the dancers, and I did a little parade for the kids as their pied piper.

Kathy Goeke took the pictures.

Shop hazzards

2009-11-16T21:49:00.005-06:00

So tonight I went out to Home Depot in search of some abrasives which could take off forge scale a little faster and more economically than the flap wheels and gator wheels I've been using. I can get a mirror polish out of what I'm doing as you can see here:

but the right leg alone took about 2.5 hours to polish, and the whole deal cost me about $20 in abrasives to do. You can see what the forge scale looks like in some of the darker gray pieces here, in contrast to the polished pieces next to them:

So I got a new brand of flap wheel I hadn't tried before that claims 20x the performance. I'm not sure how they measure that, but it sounded good at the time. I also picked up a coarse abrasive stripping wheel that looked interesting and a twisted-wire wire wheel for my angle grinder, which is the one I tried out first. here are the pros and cons I found with it:
Pros:
1. Does an OK job on the forge scale
2. Doesn't scratch the surface in an obvious way
3. Doesn't heat up the plates very quickly (which is important because over heating can kill the temper)
4. Should last a very long time
Cons:
1. Cost $17
2. While it doesn't dig through forge scale quickly, it eats any human flesh it touches like a starving zombie.

Shop update

2009-11-12T20:06:00.003-06:00

On Wednesday we had a fairly busy open shop. Master Jovian came and got the chin strap installed on his Maciejowski bible helm. Renee and Giovanni got some reinforcing installed in a rapier gorget. Don Maelgwyn cut out the plates for his new helm, and we worked on welding up a tool for him to form the crest ridge on. Martel made some progress on the bars for her helmet, and I welded a crack in her knight's hat.

Maelgwyn gave me a 1/8 inch punch and die which fit my Whitney punches but not his. It was mighty generous, and that's the size I use most.

Leg progress

2009-11-03T08:55:00.003-06:00

I've plotted out what I need to get done if I'm going to wear these legs at Bordermarch, and it's a lot of effort to go. Ideally I need the greaves done too, but I'll quietly ignore that for now. So last night I spent an hour and a half punching holes to mount the brass edging in both legs, and began making the sacrificial washers for firing. I still have to make slots in the demigreaves for the straps, and I should probably do the same in the cuisses, though it's not obvious from the angles I have of the statue that those were done as slots.
I'm cautiously optimistic right now about there being enough maile left over from the first chausse to make the second one out of.