(Belated Weekend Part 3) My First Breastplate - Front & Rear

For the front breastplate I decided to try a much sharper fold.  Basically I repeated the steps from my previous post, except that the final passes involved smashing the fold with a 2-pound swedish crosspein hammer.  I will not be doing this again since it doesn't really save that much work and the result isn't nearly as attractive.



For the rear breastplate, I decided to try rolling the edge.  The first thing about this that I should mention is that I did it backwards -- I rolled it on the inside instead of the outside of the plate.  Oh well.

Rather than try to reinvent the wheel, I will direct you to read the armour rolling tutorial located here since that is what I was working from anyways.  Some pictures of the process:

Rebated cold chisel as my stake.

 Planishing hammer:

I had some trouble closing the roll properly, and I dinged it up a bit trying to convince it to obey me.  End result isn't terrible but is certainly not spectacular.  I will be practicing this some more in the future since it seems to be within my reach and has the potential to look great.


Anyways, below you can see all three plates laid back out on the table in their original configuration.  You can see how much metal was trimmed and folded!

Up next - attaching hinges and then leathering a complete shoulder section together.