Learning from my mistakes - First shoulder unit. (Long Weekend Part 2)

Next time I will do the leathering more sensibly and take pictures along the way.  For now, I will just give a summary of things I've learned from attempting to assemble my first complete shoulder unit.

1.
I had (unwisely) punched holes in my shoulder lames according to the pattern I was working from, and as a result my leathering did not turn out as quite as smoothly as I had hoped. One of the more noticeable issues is that part of the side straps are visible between lesser shoulder plates 3 & 4 because the holes were too close to the edge of the plates.  In the future, I will follow the more sensible advice from Alex Matras in his pdf - more on that in a future post.

2.
Less obvious is the slight bunching/twisting (shown above) of the shoulder leather to reach the holes in each lame.  This may look like I just goofed up on placing the holes in the leather, but the actual problem is that the leather is trying to bend in a zig-zag pattern to reach the holes.  I think this is what is causing the shoulder to be so stiff - Note how in this picture (further above), the lesser shoulders remain horizontal even when unsupported, instead of drooping to cover the upper arm. My choice of leather may also be to blame for this issue - perhaps I should have used something softer and more flexible? (i.e. thinner)

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3.
Attaching hinges to the breastplate - I had a bit of trouble trying to get the hinged breastplate/backplate sections to overlap correctly with the mid-collar plate. The biggest problem was that I had put the rivet holes in the hinge plate very close to the hinge tube, making it difficult to get an overlap which would not bump into the rivets as seen in my previous post about the upper shoulder. I should be able to correct this on my next set of hinges by placing the rivet holes a bit further back from the hinge tube, giving me more room to work with.

The other issue with making these plates overlap is getting the folded edges to play well together.  You can see in some of these pictures that I had to bend one plate a bit to make things snug up properly.  

Also seen in the above pictures -- Markings for leathering attachments.  This post is already getting pretty long so I'll talk about those later.

I will also need to purchase more nuts & screws -- I have used up 48 of them just for these four hinges!  Upon checking diagrams of historical hinges, I realized that there should only be five instead of six -- oh well.  As previously mentioned, these weren't historically accurate shapes anyways.

Below - closeup of my unfinished "Kalkriese-Inspired" hinge on the breastplate/midcollar plate.  You'll note that I haven't even peened the hinge pin on this one.  In the background you can see where I've marked the leathering point on the backplate.

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4.
Folding the mid-collar plate. You can see here (above) that I ended up with a few kinks in my nice folded edge. These were introduced while I was bending the plate, despite attempting to avoid this exact problem. I wonder if I should be folding the edge on this part AFTER it has already been bent... that would be much harder, though. Maybe I should start the fold, but leave it not quite closed?  Now that I've thought about it some more, I suspect the kinks formed in places where I had dinged the fold a bit, creating stress concentrators.  Maybe a better-finished fold would kink up less? Anyways, this is something I'll have to ponder after I've tried again with my second mid-collar plate.


Next post - Conclusion of progress from the long weekend.  I will talk about about the new breast/back plate combo I made and hammered.  After that - Installation of the final leathering points on the back/breastplate and upper shoulder guard.