Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Imperialus" data-source="post: 2099285" data-attributes="member: 893">I used to work for a place called Valentine Armouries here.  We turned out a full suit of 16th century english round armour for a wedding once in a little less than a month.  It acutally just makes perfect sence that there would be devision of labour in an armoury.  For example, since I was quite young at the time and mostly just working there as a summer job since the owner and I were friends I was typically religated to rough cutting the peices out of the steel sheets.  After I was done one of the more experianced guys would clean the cuts and hammer them into their rough shape at which point Rob (the guy who'd been making a living at this for 20 years) would take over and do the detail work and ensure peices fit together well when it would go onto a final aprentice who would add the buckles, rivets, linseed oil wash and polishing.  If anyone else was avelable we would subdvide the final step further with one person polishing the peices while another added buckles.  However there is a limit, you can really only effectively have 4 to 5 people working on a single project before they just start getting in each others way.You don't become a master armourer overnight, and it's a complete waste of Rob's time to cut the peices if I am capable of doing it, that's what aprentices are for, grunt work.As for the SCA comment, I'm not sure how much stock I would put in them.  Their armour construction methods are run by lawers not historians.  IIRC the required thickness of a helmet according to SCA rules is somthing around 8 gauge.  8 gauge steel is almost impossible to work without a metal press which was not a common sight in the 16th century. This combined with their use of bizzare materials (I saw one suit of "armour" made out of tires and a helmet made from an old propane tank complete with the valve) makes them look like a bunch of casting rejects for power rangers villins and cirtantly makes the anachronistic part of their name all the more fitting.  BTW if you're in the SCA dont' take offence.  I've actually made exellent friends with a great many SCArs and have enjoyed the limited chances I've gotten to go to their events, I just dont' think that the SCA should be the first source people consult about how things really were.On average it took us between 1 and a half to 2 and a half months to compete a suit of Gothic, Round or Millanese armour, the three quintissential full plates if you will.  This depended a great deal on the style of amour with Gothic taking the longest due to the fancy sweeping fluits covering the suit with the function over form Millanese style taking the least time.  It also depended on the needs of the customer and how much detailing was required.  The longest ever spent was 3 1/2 months on a suit of 17th century currasier armour that was embossed head to toe (er kneecap) with Ivy.  The suit itself took about 3 weeks of that time, the detailing took the rest.  Oddly enough the second longest amount of time we spent on a suit was on a WoTC special order for the Gen Con where 3rd ed was released.  There was a model dressed up like Redgar who we made the armour for.  That one mostly just took a long time due to the massive number of concept sketches and the like we went through before having a design approved that would be physically possible to make and wear.</blockquote>

Verification