Patterns- Legs, Knees, Shins and Toes

Here are the last few patterns I used for my legs, Greaves, Sabatons And Gorget.

The Legs are by Sinric, man i owe this guy big time!

The Chartes Greaves pattern is by Talbots Fine Accessories.

I had allot of trouble finding a good pattern for cased greaves, so this one i had to purchase.

I am very happy with the pattern, it came with very through instructions.

on the flip side though, i am becoming increasingly nervous about making these, as everyone on the Armour archive seem to have a very tough time making these. See my post for More info.

The Sabatons pattern is pretty straight forward. This pattern is by Mike Yancy.

NO! This is not a large pair of metal underoos. Its My gorget, or neck protection. Sickos!

This pattern is by Alan Bauldree.

The last and final pattern that i need is the mask!

I have the basic design mapped out ,as seen in my previous post. 

The only issue now is that I need to figure out how to conceal the sides of my face and forehead. 

But more on this later!

Arming my arms

A few weeks back, I traced the pattern for my arms which consists of a Vambrace, a couter (elbow cop) and Rerebrace connected together with a few Lames. I used Sinric's pattern from the Armour Archive. Although, I will have to make a few pattern adjustments for this to look like Dooms armour.

The first (and easiest) adjustment i made was to remove the "wing" from the couter. Doom instead has something called a Rondel. A rondel is a circular piece of metal used for protection, as part of a harness of plate armour, or attached to a helmet, breastplate, couter or on a gauntlet. I have circled his Rondels in the picture below:


The Photo below shows the pattern cut out of cardboard. The top right piece is the couter. Normally the top portion of the pattern would have a large wing or "fan" attached to it, but i removed that and just matched it to the other side. I will make a pattern for the Rondel and attach that later on.


My next major adjustment was to add another piece of metal to cover up my bicep. The pattern only has a rerebrace to cover up the back of my upper arm. All of the patterns i looked at never seemed to have anything covering this area so i hope that it is not a functionality issue. I just hate having such a large area exposed. The piece on the left in the photo below is my mock up. I will have to play around with it a little to make sure it fits comfortably.


Below is a photo of my first draft complete arm. Another thing i noticed as i put it on, was that the Vambrace was too long considering how large the Gauntlets are going to be. That will be the next adjustment i have to make. I have already marked off where i will need to cut it in black marker.




Not bad for a first draft and its great to see that it actually articulates! Thank you Sinric!


The Upper arm doesn't look too bad, but more on that later...

Unprogrssive progress

So I have been making a lot of progress lately, but unfortunately i have been using up all the free time i have to make the costume and not work on the blog. Kind of defeats the purpose of progress blog if i never update it huh? Who thought working 70 hours, building a suit of armor AND writing about it would be this hard? I will be posting "old Progress reports" for a little while to catch up! And to kick that off, here's the first one!

This feels like a trip down memory lane writing like this. So about a month back, after completing the dishing on the shoulder cop. I started making sure that the lames i designed were going to fit and look good. The Lames are the smaller strips of metal designed to articulate joints and pivot points. *Spoiler Alert* The lame i designed was more cosmetic than functional and thus Failed at being useful.


Not only did it not line up, but it also made the shoulder look too round. I didn't count on the metal curving as much as it did when i dished the cop (as i had never done it before).


When i taped the two pieces together and tried it out of my shoulder, the Lame started to cut into my bicep as i lifted up my arm. The lame was obviously not designed with the shape of the arm in mind.


But, before i tossed the whole thing i tried to salvage it. I started to flair the top adjoining edge of the Lame to fit more snugly into the cop. I lined up the Lame on the dishing stump and used the smaller edge of my smallest tear drop mallet to raise its edges.




But in the end, its was just too poorly designed. Oh well you live and you learn! At least i was able to reuse the metal for the fingers of the gauntlets! But more on that later!

Shoulders- Part 1- Pattern

So, since i could not find a suitable Pauldron pattern anywhere on the interwebz, i had to make my own. Unfortunately, this process ate up allot of my time. Not only do you have to focus on how the finished product is going to look, but also how it will function. The biggest concern was making sure i can still move my shoulder. I found a pretty simple design for attaching the pieces which still leaves me with some mobility without over complicating the design. Originally i wanted to have the three pieces Pivot, so that when i moved it moved with me. Unfortunately that required very precise design and that i did not have time for. So instead the design is very simple. The three pieces will be attached by a straight piece of leather that will allow some flexibility in my shoulder.
Shown above is the finished pattern which has two "lames" and a "cop". A lamé is a solid piece of sheet metal used as a component of a larger section of plate armor. Multiple lamés are riveted together or connected by leather straps to form an articulated piece of armor that provides flexible protection. The cop is the larger piece that will be rounded and shaped to fit comfortably over the majority of my shoulder.


I traced the pattern onto my sheet metal, trying to conserve as much space as possible. I figure, any scraps i have i will try to use for the fingers of the gloves.




Then i just started to cut away the pattern with the Aviation shears. At first i was a little nervous using just the shears, as most people said that they would not work. Fortunately, it was very easy, it just took a little elbow grease. The only real trick was making use of the three different flavors.
There is a green one which is for sharp right turns.
The red one for sharp left turns.
And the yellow one for the straight aways.
Once i got that down, it was no problem.





For the next few days, i chipped away at it little by little. I don't know if it was me or the cheap shears, but as the days went by it seemed to be much harder on my hands to cut the metal. But i am NOT going to use an electric tool to do this and i certainly cannot afford a Beverly shear. So for now, ill just call it a work out.



Finally, all of the pieces are cut out and they look great! What i like about the shears is that i can take my time and be very precise with each cut. I don't need to move at the pace of a rotating blade. The next step will be to trim all of the little steel slivers around the edges and then start DISHING!