Second Set of Breast/Back/Collar Plates (Long Weekend Part 3 of 3)

I cut out the three plates - breast, midcollar, and back as before. I made an error on the breastplate's neck hole - since it wasn't fatal I decided to ignore it since this is a prototype unit anyways. However, I did fold it a bit differently to try to hide the error, as shown below.  Purple line indicates approximately where I should have made the original cut, which I hid by progressively shrinking the width of the fold.

As previously mentioned, I attempted to copy the folded & flared look shown in Peter Connelly's drawings of lorica segmentatae. This turned out to be easier than I expected, although I still managed to make a mistake or two in my rush to get these pieces done. For the first plate, I folded the edges as described in this post, except that I switched to the planishing hammer much earlier -- when the fold was still about 45 degrees away from being finished. This resulted in a much neater edge, as seen above.

To flare the edge, I positioned the plate on the anvil such that the fold was hanging over the edge a little bit. (Sorry, no action shot.  Maybe next time.) Some gentle hammering along the edge of the closed fold was enough to flare the metal over the edge of the anvil, resulting in exactly the desired result. The trick here is to move the plate along the edge of the anvil to follow the curve of the neck so that you end up with a flare with a constant width.  Results are illustrated below.

On the second and third plate, I speeded up this process by starting the flaring before the fold was completely closed -- basically I merged the flaring passes with the last couple of fold-closing passes. This turned out just fine, so I will probably continue to do things this way from now on.

I had originally intended to practice rolling edges a bit more, but since that takes much more time & effort I decided to skip it this time. Perhaps I will practice it on the edge of a lesser shoulder guard plate later on.

When I got home and compared my two sets of backplates, I realized I had made a very basic error -- my folded edges were at slightly different heights because I didn't bother to check the second one against the first one.  I guess if I had cut out and hammered both left and right sides at the same time, I wouldn't have made this mistake, but it's something to keep in mind in the future.

Comparison of the mostly-assembled first shoulder and the new neck plates.

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.

(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.

(Belated Weekend Part 2) My First Breastplate - Midcollar

I started by cutting out a rectangular piece, and then broke it out into the separate sections.  This might seem like a mistake, since the midcollar plate has to slightly overlap the other two, but you will find that once you've accounted for material lost in folded/flared edges it won't matter.  The plate labelled "scrap" will probably be reused for a shoulder or manica lame(s) -- it's not actually going to waste.

PS - I am using soapstone to write on the sheet metal here.  This is convenient since you can remove it later with only a rag.

An important point to keep in mind about the breastplate sections is that they are going to be rubbing against your neck.  This is not a place where you want rough metal edges!  Typically ( and historically) these edges are finished slightly differently from other edges as a result.  There are three basic options:

• Flared;
• Folded; or
• Rolled.

Since I don't like the "flared" look by itself, and since it is reputed to be significantly less forgiving of mistakes, I decided to ignore it in favour of practicing my folding and rolling.  On my next breastplate section I will attempt the combined folded and flared edging shown in the famous lorica segmentata diagrams by Peter Connolly.


Disclaimer:  I am not a smith of any sort, I'm just some guy with a bunch of newly-purchased hammers who read some tutorials on the interwebs.  I will be telling you how I have done things, and whether or not they worked for me.  That doesn't mean that they are the easiest or best way to get things done.

In this post, I will be covering the midcollar, where I chose to use a gentle fold for the part going against my neck.  Unfortunately it appears that I forgot to take a picture of starting the bend -- I'll remedy that in a future post.

Anyways, I used soapstone to mark a fold line about 1cm back from the edge.  Laying the plate more or less flat on the anvil, I shift it so that the fold line is level with the edge of the anvil.  (With that 1cm section hanging over the edge)  Once it is aligned, I can start lightly tapping along that overhanging edge, aiming just past the edge of the anvil. The key here is to do a little bit at a time along the whole edge. To better understand why this is necessary, please read the excellent writeup over here.  While you're there, read the whole rolling armour edges tutorial -- I certainly did.

Anyways, the trick is to just keep shifting that plate, keeping the fold line just on top of the edge of the anvil.  When you've completed one or two passes, you should have something like this:
Note: The edges of my brick hammer's face have been rounded out with files.  I should really radius and polish the whole face of the hammer before starting work on the final pieces.

After a few more passes, you should be approaching a 90° bend.

 

As you try to surpass that 90° mark, it might help to switch orientation with the fold on the face of the anvil, and the body of the plate hanging off the side:

After you reach that stage, you can lay the plate flat on the anvil and brace it with your hand.  You should be aiming the hammer for the top of the edge here -- be careful since a miss will likely ding the anvil.  Your hammer stroke should be expecting to "slip off" the top of the fold.

Getting closer -- Hammer strokes should still be slipping off the edge of the fold.

On the last two or three passes, be careful to strike along the edge, NOT directly on the fold.

 

If you did the last step correctly, you should have a nice-looking rounded edge:

Next update tomorrow-ish will cover the rest of the weekend material  (other two breastplate parts), and hopefully the assembly of a complete shoulder unit.