More rounded corners

Riveted the other girdle section together (sans top band).  Look at all those clothing and finger-safe round corners!

Next I spent a bit of time puzzling over the leathering attachments for a shoulder section as there were several corrections to make and straps to adjust.  Then it was time to take it all apart, being careful to mark which holes were to be used during reassembly.  This was followed by a few more hours with the hammer and dremel, straightening out wobbly edges and smoothing sharp bits and corners.

Mission accomplished for now.

Tomorrow's task will be riveting the lesser shoulder lames together, and then disassembling and rounding the corners on the other shoulder section.  That will be a bit trickier since portions of it are already riveted together (from back in 2011).

Before I can finish riveting the shoulder sections together, I will need to finish riveting the hinges and (if I have time) making and attaching a brass decorative plate for the holes where the girdle band hangs.

A picture of a carlisle hinge, for no particular reason:

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.

New Leathering Method in Practice

I decided to put my theory into practice, to see if it could repair my faulty shoulder section.  The short answer is...  YES!  The only thing I changed was the holes in the straps! 

Below: Series of pictures demonstrating how the leathers flex when you raise your arm.  Note how the front & rear leathers stay flat and relaxed - only the central leather has to move.  You could optimize this by using a thicker leather on the front & rear and a thinner one centrally.

Some pictures of the releathering process...


Attach central leather to set the minimum overlap.

Below:  After attaching the central leather, I am tilting the lame to the desired angle so I can mark the new hole locations on the straps.  Note how this results in more overlap at the front & back than it does in the center.

(You don't strictly need to clamp things in place, but it definitely helped me to take pictures of the process. )

Again, attach central leather first to select overlap.

Angle the plates, mark the holes, etc.

My mirror is dirty... need some windex.

Maybe a little bit too much clamping....

Here are the leathers from inside that shoulder section...

Purple dots - original rivet placements (BEFORE picture)
Green dots - revised rivet placements (AFTER picture)

Below: The same image, except I have clearly labelled which sets of holes go together. 

A different method of leathering shoulders

I'm going to introduce a "pet theory" here, so excuse my prefatory rambling while I set up for my point.  A fair bit of thought and self-doubt went into it, but I've managed to satisfy myself that this is worthy of consideration, so here it is...

After a fair bit of reading here and there, and asking around on RAT, I couldn't find any "unearthed" historical evidence on exactly how shoulderguards were leathered or how much overlap there was between the plates.  As far as I can tell, the only thing we do know is the pattern of rivet holes where the leather was attached and the width of the shoulder lames.  It would seem that this is largely due to the fact that in all present finds, leather survives only as mineralized fragments near rivets - it tends to rot away without being preserved for future study.

We do, however, have some pictorial evidence - the occasional stele, frieze, and of course Trajan's column (whose authenticity with detail is widely doubted.)  While my investigation of these depictions can hardly be called exhaustive, I was struck by one element which seems to remain constant - The lesser shoulder plates just barely cup or cover the shoulder and then stop.

I believe this is a reliable datum, since it seems to persist across different time periods and styles.  And examining the "digital reconstructions" included in Bishop's Lorica Segmentata, Volume I: A Handbook of Articulated Roman Plate Armour, it would seem that I am not entirely alone in this belief.

Furthermore, a helpful RAT member has confirmed that a contemporary source listed 5'6" (in modern units) as the preferred minimum height for a legionary.  While this doesn't mean that there weren't any legionary midgets, it does suggest that most legionaries were slightly taller.  A quick check on google informs me that the average male height in the US, Canada, and UK is about 5'9", from which I conclude that the average legionary shoulder width was not significantly different from modern people. 
So if we know the width of the plates, the width of the shoulders, and how far they should reach on the shoulder/arm, the amount of overlap can be deduced to a certain extent.  We also know from unearthed plates where the rivet holes go.  Great!  We've answered the question of how the shoulders were leathered...  or have we?

While trying to reach the answers summarized above, I ended up looking at more than a few pictures of reenactor's seggies.  (This was motivated in part by the problems with my first complete shoulder. ) One detail which appears to a greater or lesser extent in a number of different people's photos of  both Corbridge and Newstead seggies is lesser shoulder lames hanging in a "stepped" pattern.  I've taken an edge-on shot of my own shoulder to provide an exaggerated example of what I mean - below.

This is a natural result of a riveting the edges of inflexible plates to a flexible strap.  You can minimize the visibility of this phenomenon by either loosening and/or narrowing your rivets, or by increasing the floppiness of your strap.  The latter option has the added bonus of helping the lames to lie down on your upper arm instead of rigidly projecting from your shoulder; but this requires thinner leather, constant/careful oiling, a long break-in phase, a different part of the animal hide, or some combination of the above.

But what if there was another option?  One which gave a more "natural" shape to the lesser shoulder guards even with thicker and/or less flexible leather?


While trying to resolve the issues in my own segmentata, I sat down with this proto-shoulder and experimented quite a bit with the position of both lame and leather holes.  While some options were better than others, nothing ever really looked 'right' when draped over my shoulder.  Eventually, I decided to ignore what I "knew" about leathering and just try to make exactly the look I wanted - by building the shoulder curve into the spacing of the holes on my leather.  Instant success!  Not only that, but the funny-looking "stepped" pattern is gone too. 


Initial Attempt - Mild curve, Leathers widely angled

The only "secret" here is that the spacing of the holes on the front & rear straps is smaller than the spacing of the holes on the central strap. When the shoulder is right-side up, the load is still distributed evenly among the three leathers -- the tension needed to tuck in the corners of the plate is negligible. It doesn't appear to affect mobility very much -- lifting the arm up requires flexion only in the central leather, and reaching forward-and-back motion is no different from the typical leathering method. I also think that pre-tilting the plates this way might allow the armour to "shed" glancing blows with less stress on the leathers. (We would need a reenactor to try this leathering method in order to get more concrete answers on these suppositions).

In terms of looking at the shoulder edge-on, this method greatly reduces the bizarre "see-through plate armour" issue, but the effect on protection against edge-on attacks would be negligible at best. However, it does ensure that the lesser shoulder more closely "cups" the shoulder -- just as it is depicted in friezes and steles. Given the level of detail in such depictions and the nature of artistic license, it's difficult to determine if there is any significance to this, but one can always hope. :)

One might think that this would not have been used historically because it reduces the "stackability" of a segmentata, but this is in fact false.  When placed flat on the ground, the central leather flexes and the lames all lie flat, just as is it does with the leathering method traditionally employed by reconstructionists -- I had to carefully position the shoulder guards to take the pictures shown here of the inverted shoulders.


Second attempt - More pronounced curve, and leathers follow a straighter rivetting pattern.

So in conclusion, I submit this as my own "speculative reconstruction" of the leathering of a segmentata shoulder section - one which to the best of my knowledge is compatible with all unearthed artifacts and historical depictions.

Adventures in Leathering and Assembly

OK - As previously mentioned, I put holes in the lesser shoulder plates according to a pattern I was working from, and that turned out to have been a poor choice.  Anyways, no pictures of that process, but I will be outlining a leathering method of my own devising in the next post.  Above is our starting point - for better or worse, the lesser shoulder plates are assembled, and now we want to attach the upper shoulder guard and breastplate assembly.  As you can see above, I've laid the plates out flat so I can check how they are lining up while still accessing the central leather.  In this pic I've already marked and cut the holes on the central leather - that's the easy part.  Now we need to do the sides.

As you can see in the picture above, (and in several other pictures from recent posts) I sort of traced the strap outlines on the breast and back plates -- this was done while holding them upright (as though the shoulder was being worn).  After I marked the outline of where the strap would run, I eyeballed it and marked an "X" for the riveting point near the center of the plates.

After drilling the holes, I repeated the "hold upright and lay strap against plate" process, but this time I used a screwdriver to push through the new hole in the plate and mark the location on the strap.  Then all that remained was to punch the hole in the strap and connect the plates.

Below, I have connected the breast plates to all three leathers.  It's now time to attach the front and rear leathers to the upper shoulderguard - which turned out to be the most annoying part of the process of all.  Below, all plates are attached on the central leather -- only the front and rear leather remain to be completed.

I planned to use the same technique -- I'd fold the plates up as though the shoulder was being worn, and then mark the outlines of the strap on the plate.  This turned out to be a lot more difficult than I thought, with plates flapping all over the place, lames twisting out of true alignment, etc.  Then I tried setting the whole unit on a stump and tried to let gravity do the work for me:

Unfortunately, this made it more or less impossible to see or reach the parts I needed to reach.  Part of the problem here was in getting the upper shoulder to lie down properly on the collar pieces -- I'll talk more about that in a moment.  Anyways, after several minutes of hell trying to figure out how to do it I applied some engineering wisdom and solved the problem with duct tape.

That let me get inside to mark the outlines of the straps with my piece of soapstone.

However, while I was in there, I noticed a major problem in the making:

One of my leathers was running right across the corner of a plate, right along the hinge line.  That would probably wear out the strap and break it in no time!

So when I marked the riveting point on the upper shoulder, I deliberately put it a bit low on that side to force the leather to move away from the hinge line.

The moment of truth!

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So there's a couple of problems with this shoulder. The top two issues:

1. Upper Shoulder Doesn't Fit Well.

This is because I took what is essentially a Corbridge A shoulder unit and attached it to a Newstead breast/collar/back plate set.  The central upper shoulder plate isn't wide enough to match the curve of the mid collar plate - In order to make things lie nice and flat, the upper shoulder front & back plates would have to make a sharp curve right in the middle of the hinge face.

2.  Lesser Shoulder Plates Don't Hang Properly

There are several potential causes for this, not least of which is wrong holes, wrong leather, wrong angles, etc.  Solving this issue is the topic of my next post.

Breaking News!

Details and previously promised update coming soon.

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.

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.  :)