First efforts in punched decoration

These are pretty sloppy - I am still figuring out the best way to hold my converted screwdriver punches. Being hunched over an anvil on the floor didn't help, either - planning to fix that soon.  On the triangle-decorated plates (middle) there's a pretty clear difference between when I was trying to use my nail set holder (below, in yellow) and when I held just the punch itself -- I actually did much better with just my fingers!  Compare the left and right sides of the leftmost triangle plates to see what I mean.

Above, L to R:  Chisel, nail holder, triangle, nail set (circle with dot inside), small diamond, 1/4 circle section, flat diamond (slightly crooked), and (slightly uneven) dome section.

I also found that when doing decoration, it was much easier to use the 8oz ball pein hammer than the club hammer (2-3 lbs I think?).  This is pretty much the opposite of how I felt when chiseling and punching, which seems a bit odd - the amount of force used is not all THAT different... or is it?  It might have just been the difference in my work posture -- I had a much better arrangement at the cottage than I do in my apartment.  Since I also used completely different backings (wet log for punching, anvil for decorating) it's hard for me to say without doing a side-by-side comparison. 



I've also been working on my tunic a little bit -- it might be a bit too long, though.  I'll post a picture once I finish hand-sewing up the last side.  I've been pondering whether I should buy a sewing machine, but it would probably be a few hundred dollars to get a decent one and I'm not certain how much I would use it...  although I do have a number of things lying around which could benefit from a nearby sewing machine.  Hrm...

Cottage Part 4: Slots

Last time I talked about tabs -- now it's time to look at the matching slots.  The first style I did was identical to that shown on the venerable Legio XX page - cut an "I" shape with a chisel and then fold everything in.  Two of them are shown above -- the warping is from cutting on a soft backstop.  Also in this pic, topmost - a hook which broke while I was bending it.  Remember, you can only move it so much without annealing!

Anyways, time to install a slot!

First things first - we need to make a slot in the steel before we insert the brass.  To do this I used a long screwdriver bit - a Robertson.  (Some of you more sheltered Americans might know it as "that square one".)  Note: The tip of these is often slightly rounded, which makes for a bad chisel.  I ground mine flat to get a nice edge on it.

I went to Canadian tire and bought an massive (120pc) set of these power screwdrivers bits in various shapes and sizes for only $20.  I don't think you will find a cheaper source of repousse bits and punches precut to a variety of shapes and sizes.  A tiny bit of grinding or rounding and you're ready to go, with a pre-tempered bit!

A few punches later and we have a nice, rectangular slot. 

Now we insert the brass piece, and fold the flaps over the back.  Let me assure you, this is significantly harder than it sounds if you are making a thin slot!

However, the problem that I ran into was that the flaps would sometimes fold slightly crooked -- but since this wasn't visible from the inside, I didn't discover the problem until too late.  This left me with a foolishly crooked slot in some places.

Given how difficult it was to get the flaps folded over properly in the first place, this was rather disheartening.  In retrospect I can see that it would have been avoidable if I had riveted the plates on first, and then folded the flaps second.  For some reason I didn't think of this while I was up at the cottage, but I did decide to switch to riveting the plates instead -- and skipping the flaps.

Using the square punch as shown above, I simply punched out my slot in the next batch of brass plates.  Below - cleaning up the slots with a needle file.

A batch of homemade copper rivets.  I stuck some 10awg copper in the vice, peened one end, and then nipped it off.  As you can see, these are really quite crude...

However, copper is so soft that all trace of that disappeared once they had been installed.

Also, my second generation tabs, installed:

Cottage Part 3: Tabs / Tie Rings!

Ok - it's time to connect some shoulders together!  That means slots and... something.  There has, at this time, not been any discovery of a Newstead-style breastplate or backplate with the male fitting in situ. 
There is, however, one plate found at Zugmantel which appears to have held a male fastener at some point - all that is known for certain is that whatever it was, it fit though a roughly punched hole of small diameter.  Therefore the exact nature of the historical connector has been a subject of some debate.

One proposal, that of turning pins, immediately struck me as having strong disadvantages and no discernable advantages for a practical piece of armour.  The nature of a turning pin is such that, as one would expect, it turns!  Therefore they will generally work themselves back to the "open" position when moving around in armour -- resulting in a dismaying tendency to cause armour to flop open unless held shut by a split pin of some sort. Not surprisingly, this has been borne out by the experience of re-enactors who have constructed armour with such fastenings.

While adding the split pin solves the issue of the armour springing open, it does not solve the issue of why a turning pin would be used instead of the tie rings known to have been used on girdle strips.

Once inserted through a slot and secured with a split pin, a turning key fastener patterned after known examples from sports armour is almost indistinguishable from a standard tie ring.  Therefore any claim that the turning keys were selected on some sort of aethestic grounds seems dubious at best.

Considering that the turning key would in fact be slower to use than a simple tie ring, (it adds the extra step of turning the key after inserting) it does not make the armour any faster to put on.

Lastly, the method of installing the turning key on the armour - cutting a wide slot into the plate to allow it to be inserted, and then hammering the metal back to close it.  This weakens the armour far more than punching a small hole and peening the tang of a tie ring, so again it seems an impractical choice for combat armour.

In short - I'm not making turning key fasteners - instead I will make tabs/tie rings.



I spent a very great deal of time thinking about how I could make my tie rings/tabs - my sketchbook is littered with ideas both good and bad.  The main issue is that I do not have the facilities to make them by casting, which would be historically correct.  I also don't have ready access to a piece of brass sheet thick enough to match my taste.

One idea, which I think I first read on Arik Greenberg's article about his own newstead seggie, was to start from a piece of rod or square stock and cut off "coins" which could be further shaped as needed.  Although I did purchase a 12" piece of 3/4" brass rod, I  now intend to use it for something else entirely -- I realized that without a bandsaw or similar apparatus, I would not only spend hours cutting it up, but I would also lose at least 50% of the metal as cutting waste.

I still didn't have a real solution when it came time to connect my two proto-shoulders together.  As a result, I picked something out of a hat and tried it.   It's basically a folded piece of mild steel pierced with a tapered punch, wrapped in a brass sleeve, similarly pierced.  I won't say much more about this other than it wasn't a good idea and I don't recommend it.

 You can also see that I got too carried away with hammering one of them without annealing - it cracked right along a fold line.  Also featured - rust! :'(

Anyways I was very disappointed with these -- even after installing the first one I knew that I would need something better.

Fortunately, the next day while I was climbing onto the dock, I had an idea - I could flatten some of the round stock I purchased to make hooks, and use those as tabs!  Pictured below - the proto-tabs for my first girdle band, with matching slots and a hook.  I'll talk about slots next time since this post is getting rather long.

Below - my friend JB very kindly brought a vise up to the cottage while I was up there.  Anyways, as you can see here, I stuck the business end of the tab in the vice and then dropped the pre-punched band on top of it.  I then nipped off some of the shank, and started whacking away on it with the ballpein hammer.

Below - the installed proto-tab.  Much better, but still room for improvement.  This one is too tall - the hole for the split pin is ridiculously far away from the plate.

Thinking about the time spent annealing, etc. I decided to try to speed the process up by doing four tabs at once instead of two on my next pass. First of all, this meant tying them into some sort of bundle so I could anneal them all at once.  Fortunately I had some brass wire handy - steel would have been better, though.  It was still rather fiddly, so maybe I'll buy a firebrick or two to simplify this next time.

Anyways, between annealings, there was hammering!  Since I had cut these so short, I had a hard time striking them while also holding them still with a vise grip.  Fortunately, I finally discovered that my swedish cross-pein hammer was good for something after all!

Tabs, flattened and punched.  Maybe I'll try a slightly larger hole next time.

Excess tab length trimmed off, and ready to be cleaned and installed.

So that concludes today's post - I wanted to talk about slots too, but this is already very long and I'm hungry. See you next time!

Cottage Part 2: Girdle Vertical Connectors (Hooks)

Now that I had two more-or-less complete shoulder sections, it was time to start thinking about the girdle section.   The first stop on that train of thought was connecting the girdle to the shoulders.  (What's that? I skipped the part about connecting the shoulders to each other first?  Stay tuned for the next update!)

For Newstead and/or Corbridge B/C, the girdle hangs from the shoulders via hooks and eyes.  As suggested by Matthew Amt, I made these by flattening one end of a 3/16" brass rod, annealing 3 or 4 times during the process.  Below is the first hook after hammering... you can see I wasn't hitting it very straight in the early stages since it looks a little lopsided.

Fortunately the lopsidedness doesn't matter since this will be going on the inside of the girdle band.  Following the much discussed but never published Stillfried artifacts, my hooks are riveted on the inside and then pass through the girdle band itself, as shown below.

For the sake of simplicity I put a 7/32" hole in the band to provide some additional wiggle room for the bent shaft.

I have installed my hooks with screws for the moment since I plan to anneal the rod shaft before doing the final bending -- which will happen after the girdle sections are assembled.  Below - one of my work stations up at the cottage, with more hooks in progress.

For now the matching eyes for the hooks are simply holes punched in the back and breast plates.  I will add the decorative brass work a bit later -- ideally after I've figured out how to get my repousse work to really pop out the way I want it to.

Carlisle Hinges

Back to the dremel - time to rough out the shape of my next set of hinges. I plan to use Carlisle-style hinges on my final version, so that's what I made today. At 5cm, these are wider than all of the other hinges I've made so far; but they are actually still too small. The real ones were around 6-7.5cm wide!


This time I wrapped the plates in painter's tape - it's like masking tape, but less sticky.  That makes it easy to peel off without leaving a residue.  I sketched out the rough cuts in pencil for the bulk removal - after the big chunks were gone I would need to do some finer shaping.

I am getting much better with the dremel, but I still need to learn more. I did all of this shaping using only a cut-off disc. Need to smooth things out a bit more with needle files, but otherwise not too bad!

On second thought, I should try some of the smaller dremel grinding stones first, and then use the needle files for those little nooks and crannies... hrm.

Hinge Plates - Improved Manufacturing (Long Weekend Update Part 1)

In preparation for the next breast/back plates, I cut out some more brass for hinges.  These are a fair bit wider than some of the earlier ones - I think I will try to make these into carlisle-style hinges.  Anyways, I took a slightly different approach to making these hinges and it turned out much faster than the previously detailed method.  The finished plates also look better than my previous attempts, in part because the painter's tape in step#5 reduced the number of hammer marks left on the tube and plates.  Documented below is the "new and improved" hinge-making method.  I skipped pictures for most of these steps, since they are already documented in detail in the posts starting here. 

1. Measure & Cut brass plates and hinge pin.

2. Anneal middle of plates until literally red hot, then quench in water.  Ditto for the ends of the hinge pins.

3. Mark middle line on hinge plate and hand-fold it over.

4. Use a rubber mallet to further fold and flatten on a "soft" surface - I used a piece of firewood as my base.

 

At right - rubber mallet.  I bought this many years ago and I can't remember why.  Anyways, this weekend it finally proved its worth.  Much faster than the jeweller's pliers and better results, too.

 

5. Insert hinge pin, and apply painter's tape to help hold it in place.

6a. Use radiused head of brick hammer to finish flattening the plate, starting near the middle of the plate and working in towards the tube/pin.

6b. Use the brick hammer's wedge to finish forming the tube.  You will probably need to stop and flatten the hinge plate once or twice while doing this.  Pictures from the last thread.

7. Tap the top of the hinge tube gently to free the hinge pin.  If your hinge pin is already loose, you probably still have room to close the tube a bit more.

8. Lay _half_ the hinge plates on top of your paper guide and mark the slots for the tubes.  Do not mark the other half of the plates at this time.

9. Cut the tube slots on the marked plates. Make sure the cuts are all the same depth.

I used my dremel for this, but this time I made several improvements over my previous attempts.  First, I managed to find some thin cut-off disks which made the cutting faster and less wasteful.  Second, I made a metal "tongue" to allow me to clamp my dremel in a vise.  This greatly improved my accuracy by keeping the tool perfectly still while I moved the piece around it.  I am looking forward to using this when I try to shape my latest hinges in the Carlisle pattern.

10.  Lay your cut plates out flat and pair them up with the uncut plates, and mark the cuts for those.  At this point it's a good idea to keep track of which plate goes with which, to get the best fit.

11.  Cut the second set of plates and compare them with their mates.  Make any necessary adjustments to the size of the tube "teeth".

12a.  Using a combination of dremel and cold chisel, nip off the unwanted tube sections.  Note that you will need a backstop softer than the chisel -- I used a hunk of aluminum that was donated to me.

                I found a reversible nail set which would also accept my homemade cold chisel.  This made this step go a lot faster and helped save wear on the hammer face.  After nipping off the tubes, I used the dremel to smooth off the cut surfaces.

12b.  Flatten the hinge plates again if needed.  (Using a cold chisel will often bend the plates slightly.)  Try inserting the hinge pin (one hinge plate at a time) to see if you've gotten things back into alignment.

13.  Perform final cleanup with needle files.  Test fit your hinges and insert the hinge pin. 

14.  Cut hinge plates into final shape.  (Coming in a future update...)

15.  Peen the hinge pin and enjoy!

(Belated Weekend Part 1) Miscellaneous

As previously mentioned, I visited a friend's place on the weekend and did some work there last weekend. There are a lot of pictures so I'm breaking this up into several parts.  First, I'll deal with some miscellaneous stuff.

When I packed up all my gear and materials, I was surprised at how easily it could be collapsed into a transportable package.

1. Brass Sheet (kickplate from a door?)
2. The remainder of my uncut steel, about 2' x 2'.
3. All hand tools and patterns fit into this plastic tray.
4. Dremel Case and sketchbook
5. Brass Rod Stock (1/8" & 3/16")

JB (my friend) has a very nice workshop, and a number of nice things that I don't - like a bench grinder.  When I was talking to him about my issues with hinges (specifically about nipping off the unwanted tube sections), he had a bright idea.  Since I was having trouble finding a cold chisel small enough, he pointed out that we could make one.

We started with this double-ended screwdriver bit, since it was some form of tempered steel that was already more or less the right shape. All that needed to be done was to put an edge on the flat end, and to grind down the phillips end as a strike point (so that it wouldn't ding the hammer face too much).  Anyways, this was fairly easy although a bit slow since we made very frequent pauses to dip the bit in water --  we wanted to keep it from getting too hot on the grinder and ruining the temper.

Below, you can see the results of our first test using a piece of aluminum as the strike plate.  (You want something softer than the chisel as the backstop...)  It works surprisingly well, too.

Not pictured - I made two more hinges, bringing my total up to 4.  This is to support the assembly of a complete shoulder section in the near future.



JB also had a small anvil which hadn't seen the light of day for a few years.  He dug it out for me and suggested that I put it to use -- he didn't have to ask me twice!

At left, I am radiusing one edge of the anvil very slightly.  This is to provide a smooth surface to bend metal over -- the unfinished edge would marr or possibly cut my work.

Next update:  Using that anvil!

Hinge #2 - Much Better, but not quite there yet

Proof that I learn from my mistakes:

I completed hinge #2 in about 1.5 hours.  That should drop even more once I find the right size of cold chisel to take off the unwanted tube sections.  On the other hand, I haven't cut the plates into an ornate shape yet -- that will obviously add time back in.  All in all, though, I can already see how I could "assembly-line" the process to make a whole batch of hinges at once and save a lot of time that way as well.

Above: You can also see that I tried one of the polishing attachments for my dremel on the top-left plate. I'm not impressed -- waaaaaay too much effort for the result.  I will have to try pickling and/or light sanding next.

One thing I don't like about hinge #2 is that I didn't get the barrel quite as tight as the first one.  I think I need to add a third annealing step in the middle of the hammering process.  Like this:

1. Anneal
2. Hand Fold
3. Plier Fold
4. Anneal
5. Hammer
6. Anneal
7. Hammer
8. Cut
9. ...etc.

One other thing I learned -- when using a dremel on metal, both hands should be wearing gloves.  When I was shearing off a tube section it fell on the hand holding the dremel and gave me a pretty good burn.  Ow.

My First Hinge (ugh) Part 3

Seen above - several sketches of hinge and fitting designs.  I am laying the first hinge plate down on the graph paper to mark the tube cuts.
It turned out that the bizarro-style hacksaw that I purchased was simply not up to the task.  Too much flex in the blade to saw quickly.  Fortunately, I had a better alternative anyways:

Don't forget eye and hand protection when using something as dangerous as a dremel.  Hot flakes of metal are flying around!  On a similar note, best to do this outside - I use my balcony.

 Below:  This is actually the first project I've used a dremel on.  It kicked once or twice when I wasn't holding on to it very well, gouging the brass.  There is an attachment for Dremels called the detail grip -- I was much happier once I stopped to put it on.

Below - I was trying to compensate for the thickness of the cut made by a dremel wheel, and I overdid it a little bit.  You can see these parts aren't going to match up properly.  Back to the cutting for me.

Okay, cutting the slots is complete...  now how the heck do I get rid of the unwanted tube sections?  I originally planned to nip them off with a cold chisel, but I haven't yet found one small enough for the job.  I decided I would have to weaken the unwanted parts and bend/twist them off.  I tried several methods and wasn't very satisfied with the results from either.  More details when I figure out a decent method or find an appropriately sized chisel.

After finally getting rid of the unwanted tube sections, all that is left is test fitting and filing down the high points.

At last, I can insert the hinge pin and watch my new creation flop around!

You can see that the hinges don't quite line up- one is higher than the other, and the tubes don't slot together very well.  I'm satisfied with a good first attempt, though -- I learned a lot!

Tomorrow I might cut and file the plates into shape and peen the hinge pin.  We'll see.