Modification Armour for knight and horse - arms WIP

Tin snips - as it is wire thread, you need something a bit more serious than scissors.

 

Hmmm...no. Depends how you it. I would not place my fingers where its prongs are.

 

Of course! He needs then in order to balance his enormously pointy sabatons.

Joke aside, it is a sign of his stand.

 

Gothic spurs, indeed. Right now I am testing whether there happen any discolouration between Mod Podge and copper.

Something like that (although this one is upside down):

MEDIEVAL - KNIGHT -ROWEL SPUR - 14-15th century !! RARE QUALITY !! | #468780108

 

Thank you so much! You know, there were and will be several breaks. So it is not that long. But if want to have an authentic suit of armor, you need tons of money...or put tons of work in it.

 

I decided to not use copper. Turned out my copper sheet is only 0.5 mm, and the thicker sheet get incredibly expensive. Also, I could not get the thick copper wire, which was supposed to form the long spur neck, to look neat.

Today I went to a hardware store and bought some 0.8 mm matte aluminium tubing. This will be stiff enough. At the end where it connects with the foot part, I think I can fix it a screw or a nail. For the rowel, I will try to hammer it flat and drill a whole for a rod to go through. The spur rowel will hopefully sit on that rod in the end.

Before the rowel will be mounted to the rest though, I will use some golden spray paint meant for cars and then put mod podge over the whole (the kind I use is the dishwasher safe kind for outdoor use. Great stuff, but needs a whole month to dry fully).

During this step, I will some more inbetween steps.

 

Sometimes things go a bit different than planned:







Everything went fine until I tried to adapt my fixing plates to the foot part. One broke off of each spur neck:



Then my husband came up with the brilliant idea to secure the necks with pop rivets (Thanks, hubby!):



Next step will now be to figure out the strap holders. These were not directly fixed to the foot part, but there were some extra dangling pieces. Then clean up the whole mess and giving it a nice coat of (almost) real gold...(don't tell Raph that it is just spray paint).

 

The spur compoments are cut and spray painted. They are drying in the sun:



To be honest, I find the golden colour a bit underwhelming. I am pretty sure I will remove this and try something else. It just looks absolutely awful.

Anyways, it now time to deal with our brave knight's upper half. But where to start? With the torso protection, or maybe it is better to do the arms first?

Please stay tuned...

 

I thought about gold leaving. But I read something about galvanization, putting in different dangerous liquids and heating. The result was not bad, but it is a bit too complicated.

I looked up liquid guilding and ordered this stuff: Lefranc & Bourgeois Gilding Liquid | 50,000+ Art Supplies | Your Art Superstore

 

Regarding the arms you are probably right. I think I will start with the lower arms...similar to the legs.

 

Okay, after having looked at several Gothic arms to get a feeling for the lines, I decided to start off these vambraces (lower arm armour):

vambrace

Sadly, it does not clearly say whether its Gothic or Italian. But IMO. the vambraces do not differ that vastly. That will change when we move up the arm...

The plates for the inner side of the vambrace:



I think I will do this in such a way that the articulation will happen through lames like at the knee. Only that wing of the elbow cop is pulled out and wrapped around the elbow. The result is pretty much full coverage of the elbow.

 

Soo...I received the golden colour.
.
Sadly, despite heavy shaking and stirring, the result is basically the same as with the golden spray. Veery blotchy.

Maybe I should try to give the surface some tooth...because I suspect no matter which colour I use, it needs something to stick to.

Luckily I kept a pile for scrap aluminium for testing purposes.

 

@feymaker: thank you so much! It really is not that tiny. I admit that I would never try to make this even dir a mini doll. You basically have to make the tools and particularly moulds in that size.

 

Guilding with a base coat seems to work much better.

 

That grey stuff works great. I just did not get too far, as my daughter needed help.

 

The spur guilding is going nicely.

What I am really struggling with are the Gothic elbows. These cone shapes are not easy to make. I tried it several times, but it did not goo too well. I think I will make a mould for it snd heat the aluminium. Then I hope that fast hammerwork will do,the trick...

 

I think I figured out how the elbows are shaped:



Now I have to figure out, how the arms are connected. I saw that they are put on all at once (except the shoulder parts/pauldrons). Sadly, I have not yet been able to find a picture of an original showing the construction. Almost always, the gauntlets cover most of the vambrace. And then the couter covers the rest, leaving only a marginal gap.

 

@Anita2006: Thank you so much! Yes, I will finish this. But right now I got astray a...tiny bit. I delved into another hobby of mine, which I need to finish before I can continue with this project.

Anyways, the spurs are treated with weatherproof outdoor Mod Podge, which needs to dry one full month. I also do not feel to great right now, so I rather want to take it slow. If I am not in the right mood, things tend to go wrong, and I make unneccessary mistakes. I would like to avoid that, so I take a break from metal pounding.

 

This project is still going on. Right now real life hit me heavily, so the upper half of the armor is on hold. Please take my apologies for letting you wait.

 

Please be assured I will continue to work on this. As my mum has passed away recently, my husband and I are superbusy cleaning her house and sorting everything out. This might still take some time. But when this is done and I had a bit of a rest, I will bang on some aluminium again.