HOT METAL |
| HOT METAL The methods described here are those developed over thirty years of research and testing and used on a daily basis in the production of armour at Blankenshield armoury. The object here is to show how individual plates are taken from flat sheet to finished piece while making that piece as strong, hard rigid, and safe to wear as possible. This is done using entirely hand techniques. Unfortunately there is a lot of misinformation about making armour being distributed and some portion of this essay must address this. We begin with two very old sayings. The blacksmiths have said for centuries that a blacksmith will go to hell for pounding cold metal. On the other hand the armour smiths have a very old saying that blacksmiths should never make armour. The basic issue is heat. The metal for armour is heated only in processes relating to the flat sheet. Once the sheet is cut up it is never ever heated again. Never ever! Ok there are two exceptions. Some finished armour was coated in olive oil and bees wax and held over a fire till it caught fire and burned off. This produced a black finish. The other exception was the welding along the crown of almost all helmets from bascinets on. The majority of collections used to label these welded helmets as pounded in one piece but lately have been more accurately calling them welded over a stake. The crested helmets were designed with this welding technique in mind. In the older bascinet design, there was heating of the spots to hammer weld the seam along the back or the front that softened the whole helmet by annealing. Annealing is the death of hardness and is never done with armour despite much misinformation to the contrary. The result is that the helmet had to be thicker to be as strong as the body armour that did not have to be annealed. The crested helmets could allow the crest to be heated one spot at a time and the crown remain relatively unaffected by the heating. Subsequently in history the helmets are thinner and lighter with the same protective ability. Many sophisticated crested helmets are actually only riveted along the crest to avoid any heat at all. A crescentic hollowed out strip called a wala was between the two layers in some cases and many tiny rivets countersunk and filed flush held the three components together. Invisible from three feet away. So fundamentally never ever heat armour components to shape or anneal them. So back to the flat sheets of steel. In our investigations of actual old armour we found armour components as thin as twenty two gauge. The thinner the metal however the more flawed and almost pebbly the finish. There is also a tower of London pamphlet that discusses a study of a thin armour plate cut and the cross section examined microscopically. Evidently the thinner plates were case hardened in a crude method which had very limited penetration. When Blankenshield was producing our ultralight series based on these thin pieces we used a method as close as possible to the old one. The steel sheets were painted in heavy lacquer and the finish burned off. The fire being simply manipulated to prevent oxidation. The red hot sheets being then fast quenched and the hard sheets worked from there. Extremely hard components result. However this is not at all necessary with heavier gauges like eighteen and sixteen. Simple work hardening techniques suffice to produce a plate sufficiently hard to resist anything a sword lance or horse can do. So, for the beginner especially, don’t bother with any forge or heating techniques at all. They are not only unnecessary but frequently counter productive. Armour for body and limbs is adequately served by eighteen gauge. The helmet crown can be fourteen gauge and the rest of the helmet sixteen. |
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