Dashing towards Halloween

As previously mentioned, the current goal is complete the prototype segmentata (horrible warts and all) in time to wear it for halloween.  While I won't concern myself with the mishmash of styles (hinges, shoulder lames, fasteners) present in this prototype, I have enough pride to continue attempting to use historically accurate (or at least plausible) methods and materials.


To meet my schedule, the primary task for the moment  is replacing the temporary bolts with rivets, and leathering up the torso bands.

This means making a lot of my own copper rivets from 10-gauge wire, which is a slightly obnoxious process but worth it for the end results.


On the bright side, it looks like I did not forget how to make a reasonably pretty (and round) peened head during the last five years.

Historically constructed, but 'Fantasy' shape.  Note the poor chisel cutting.  The black marks are from annealing the brass - I'll attempt to clean this up later once things are all assembled.

Carlisle Hinge.  Very pretty, although a little bit smaller than historical examples.  If I ever make a 'good' version of my armour, I will definitely use this styling.










Leathering the torso bands will be the next big job.  I'm not certain I shared pictures of these back in 2011, but I actually finished quite a few of these, complete with decorative plates.

Cottage Part 1: Carlisle Hinges Revisited

All right, so I forgot to take some pictures of the cleanup work on the Carlisle hinges, but there wasn't a whole lot to see.  As previously mentioned, I used a grinding stone on my dremel to smooth out the rough edges as best as I could, and "finished" the rest with needle files.  I think there's still room for improvement, but until I have a realistic method of buffing these I'm not going to worry about it.  As previously noted, these hinges are only 5 cm wide, while historical accuracy would require something in the range of 6-7.5 cm.  I'm just saving material since this is still the prototype.

Cutting out the triangles turned out to be much more difficult than anticipated, possibly because I was using too soft of a backstop (wood) for most of it.  (I was using a chisel...) Anyways, as a result the hinge plates bent back and forth quite a bit and had to be hammered flat repeatedly.  This means the edges of the cuts aren't very clean - the metal around the edges is a bit wrinkled from the stretching and compressing.  On the bright side, my hinge plates are probably pretty close to full hardness after all the hammering.

Some of the more observant might notice the stamped rings around the rivet holes --  Historically, this seemed to be a common "decorative" feature of hinge and buckle plates.  However, the circles you see here are not decorative, but accidental!  They are a byproduct of the whitney punch being maladjusted.  This made me wonder whether the "decorative" rings on historical finds might also just be a side effect of the punch used to make the holes - but I haven't looked into it.

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.

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.

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!

Attaching Hinges

Over the weekend I also took my first stab at cutting hinge plates into more ornamental shapes.  I decided to use a cold chisel to do the bulk removal, thinking that this would be faster than dremel-ing or sawing.  Anyways, the results were terrible -- too terrible to show.  I'm not certain that this is even worth practicing more since one of the major issues I had was the hinge plate curling up like a dried leaf after one or two chisel cuts.  Maybe this is just bad technique on my part, but it certainly wasn't encouraging.

Anyways I tried to clean them up a bit with the dremel, with mixed success.  I am still learning what a dremel can do so this is a slow process.  No pictures of this process since the results aren't great, and I didn't use historically correct patterns for these hinges because I wanted to start with something simpler.  You'll see them in the next few pictures anyways.


Attaching hinges - Take 1

Note:  I have not polished or cleaned up my hinges at this point.  If this wasn't a prototype, I would probably have cleaned them up a bit before moving to this stage -- although nothing is final until riveted.  Also -- these hinge shapes are not historically accurate.

In order to attach your hinges, you will first need to put holes in them.  Time to break out your metal punch or drill!  I used a center punch to lay out starting divots before punching.  This turned out to be somewhat of a waste of time -- when I went to punch the actual holes I found that on the ones near the hinge tube were a little bit too close to allow the jaws of my metal punch to close.  After fooling around with things for a while, I gave up and just started (carefully!) freehanding the hole placement.  This turned out to be faster than trying to key the punch tooth into the divot, and hinges are small enough that accuracy was not a real problem.  I think on my next set of hinges I will skip the center punch entirely and just freehand it from the start.


Anyways, I took my new "hole-y" hinge and taped it onto the central upper should plate, as seen below.  I later discovered I had in fact placed it too low -- more on that in a minute.  You can see below that I have used painter's tape to hold the hinge in position.  This is because I need to make sure it holds very still while I mark the hole locations with the center punch.  One issue I had to watch out for -- the diameter of my center punch is less than my rivet diameter (1/8"), so I had to be careful to center the punch tip inside the hole before striking.

No matter how consistent you might think you are being, chances are pretty good that the holes in your hinges won't be interchangeable.  It's not a bad idea to mark which hinge face will go with which plate to simplify your life later -- since I was going to do an immediate test assembly with screws, I just left the tape on the face of the hinge as seen below.  Note that I have also marked my shoulder plate with "(B)ack" and "(F)ront".

After attaching the hinge to one plate, it's time to mark the holes for the other plate.  This is where it's important to have some appropriately sized screws and nuts - the only way to make sure that the central plate lines up correctly with the front and back plates is to have the hinge already attached on one side when positioning the holes on the other plate.  Seen below -- I am using my stump to support the work while taping down the hinge.  To be honest, I could have used more tape on this stage since the weight of the central plate tended to pull on the hinge quite a bit depending on the position I put it in.  I think I'll use more tape in the future to make sure things turn out OK.

After some punching and threading, I have attached my first hinge!  Huzzah!

 

But wait!  What's this?  Something isn't right with my new hinge install!

While I was careful to make sure that the long plate would be under the central plate, it seems that I wasn't careful enough.  The long plate is overlapping so much that it is catching on my "rivet heads" and can't flex far enough.  While this might go away when I replace the screws with rivets, it will be much safer to avoid the issue completely.  The pink arrows illustrate where the hinge would have to be moved on each plate to correct the problem.  Since this is a prototype I'll just ignore it for now and do a better job on the next hinge.

Attaching hinges - Take 2

Same basic steps as before - except this time I got the overlap right!

Coming soon -- assembly and leathering of a complete shoulder unit!  This will be a bit of a hybrid between Corbridge shoulder plates and my Newstead breast/back plates.  Note that for historical accuracy, vegetable tanned leather should be used instead of second-hand belts.  :)

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.

My First Hinge (ugh) Part 2

 In order to get that nice barrel definition I'm looking for, I had to turn to yet another new tool.  Allow me to introduce you to the common masonry / brick hammer.

Before you're ready to use this bad boy for metal working, however, there's a bit of work to be done first.  The wedge needs to be rebated (a fancy word for "sanded/ground down smooth") with a file or a grinder.  You need to have all of the edges rounded so that they don't cut or mark up the metal you're going to hit.  This isn't hard work, it's just boring.  Fortunately, I was already mostly done.

Getting back to the hinge -- Since I was going to be hammering it I decided to anneal the brass again.  Back out to the balcony, back into the quench pot, then back inside.

I threw the hinge (with pin inside! Don't forget that part!) onto my "anvil" and started tapping it gently.  You're not trying to hit a home run here, not much force is needed.  I started off aiming about halfway between the hinge axis and the plier-folding line.  I did this for both sides.

 After a bit of that, I was ready to tilt the hinge up and start aiming much closer to the hinge pin.  This is the final stage of closing the barrel.  Again - light taps, both sides.

On one plate, I realized I had shaped the barrel a little bit too closely... the pin didn't want to come out!  This was fixed by some gentle taps against the edge of the hinge tube to open it back up slightly.

Here is what one plate looked like after I was finished hammering.  Not bad for my first time, eh? 

My First Hinge (ugh) Part 1

This was a bit of an adventure, and ended up involving more tools than I expected to use.  Fortunately I had what I needed more or less ready to go.  

The first thing you need to do is figure out what size and pattern your hinges are going to be.  For my prototype, I wanted a hinge "face" about 4 cm square.  I added 13mm for the hinge barrel (for a 1/8" rod), but it turned out that this was not enough.  Anyways I cut out two blanks 40x93mm -  Although now that I think about it, I might have done 40x83 by mistake, which would explain why I came up short at the end.  Oh well, there's always the next hinge.

I then went outside on my balcony and lit the propane torch.  After dialing the flame down to around 1.5", I annealed (heated) the middle of my plates, moving the flame back and forth along the hinge axis.  Something sizzled slightly near the beginning - it was probably some kind of protective coating or film on the brass.  (This piece was donated to me, so the exact specs aren't known)

I wasn't certain of how long exactly I should be heating it, so I gave it "a while" (more than 30 seconds) on each side before quenching it in water.  I'll ask RAT about annealing times and see what they say.

Back inside, I hand-folded the plates around my hinge pin.  I wasn't very careful with one of them and it ended up slightly crooked, as seen below.

The next part would probably be easier with a vise, but I don't have one in my apartment.  Therefore I had to use the jeweller's pliers and something else.  I will console myself with the thought that this method is probably more authentic.  

 Now that I've taken it as far as it can go by hand (above), I started pinching down the sides.  Note that I am using  jeweler's pliers (below) so as not to scratch the surface.  You have to do this slowly, alternating sides.
 

Eventually you'll get to this phase, where the pliers aren't doing too much anymore, and there is a slight bulge in your hinge barrel.

Continued in the next post...