Armor Smith, The Blog

Week 1, Day 1

Recently, Sue and I were talking, and considering how much we both enjoy the medieval faire (Went twice this year already and planning a third trip to the Pittsburgh faire in September), she suggested that as a winter project, we make Scale armor. I immediately said that I was too inept at doing things with my hands to be able to pull something like this off, but after a couple of days of encouragement, we went out to TheRingLord.com and ordered 5,000 stainless steel scales as our mutual Christmas present/winter project. The scales came yesterday, and we could hardly wait to start.

Weaving scale armor is a lot like making chainmail--in fact, the standard scale weave is very close to the standard chainmail 4-in-1 weave. The only major difference being that there's a scale in there too. Instead of standard chainmail kinds of rings where the ring is split needing a rivet or weld closure, we got splitrings--much like keyrings. They're more durable in the longrun, because you won't have to worry about scales popping off as easy, but there's a considerable learning curve attached to getting the rings to work, as we found out last night. Below are the results of our first night as armorsmiths.

(my scales are on the left and Sue's are on the right). As you can see, I'm a bit more retarded about scaling than my wife--she ended up spending a good half hour trying to help me fix the mess I made of my first pass. I got a little ring happy and started adding and tying scales to too many other scales, making my pattern go all wonky off center. Towards the end of the night though I was starting to understand it better, so hopefully tonight I'll be able to catch up to Sue's progress while she's at class. Overall, we worked for about 2.5 hours last night; and I managed to link 19 scales correctly. I think sue is somewhere around 24 or 32, I can't remember which. TheRingLord.com's scale calculator estimated I'd need something in the neighborhood of 3,260 some odd scales to finish my armor--for Sue, she'll need about half that because she's planning on making hers backless and connected with leather straps instead.

All that being said, the first night went well and I'm looking forward to day two. I'll try to keep regular updates on our progress here.