Through a Baelin-Pass Filter

[Baelin Holt]

I’ve wanted a place to keep a record of armoring and other (perhaps loosely) Miz related research/reading. A scrapbook seems like the perfect place!

Not all facts, videos, tutorials, and studies posted here will be directly relevant to the world of Miz, but I will use them as reference for shaping how I think things will work here. Also, I’m not limiting myself to only these things. Anything that gets me in the mood for writing here in Miz will be shared. I have a playlist that I listen to whenever I write Baelin, expect to see things like that.

Expect to see lots of changes to past posts. For example, if I have a post here about making a shield and months later I stumble upon a great tutorial, then you better expect I’m going back to my original post and changing it. This is me trying to keep as succinct a scrapbook as I can while still maintaining accuracy. I’ll have a line at the bottom of each post with the date of the most recent update, if that helps.

What you can expect to not see are notes about my personal life. If you need some sort of context, I’ll offer that I’m a grad student in mechanical engineering. But the rest is rather personal.

Feel free to comment, though I would prefer comments that add to the discussion over ones saying that I’m wasting my time or that there’s no way a topic is relevant to Miz.

As per my own rules, updated: 12/27/14

[Baelin Holt]

Armoring Techniques

There are some techniques that I’ve found are pretty widely used in medieval armoring, such as raising and planishing. Keep in mind that I’ve never physically done any of these things myself, so I have no first-hand knowledge.

Raising
Here’s a quick tutorial to explain just what raising is supposed to do, on Age of Armor by William Hurt. It discusses how you’re taking a sheet and bending it into a curve. If you think of doing this with tinfoil without ripping it, you realize you get wrinkles. Raising is the process of making it curve and then compressing the wrinkles. It also warns of how the metal can be thinned if this is done incorrectly.

Points that I got from the tutorial (I may have an incorrect understanding in some points).

• Use a raising hammer. It will take significantly longer without.
• If you put the metal sheet in contact with a round stake right at the apex of that stake, then you should hit it just offset from the apex. At the apex and you thin the metal, too far offset and you bend the metal too much and will eventually get “wrinkling.” I suspect this means that when you bend it too far the metal at the apex is pulled out and, if done too much, will eventually thin the center.
• Start at the center of what you want raised, go around in circular passes, and radiate outwards.
• Use “medium force” hits.
• Hitting too hard can cause thinning at the apex for the same reason as hitting too far offset (bends the metal too much, causing thinning behind the hit).

Here’s a good video to see what raising actually looks like. The music is a bit weird, I watch it on mute.

Raising is typically done on some kind of stake. In the video, you can see how he starts on a stake that doesn’t have much of a curve to it, and then when he’s worked his way farther out he switched to a steel ball. Later, the stake switches to a T looking thing with slightly curved ends. Then he switches to a big hemisphere. Different stakes are ideal at different times and as of now I can’t offer a good guide for which stake is best for what, just guesses.

You also see that he works on the bellows between passes. So you can gather that you periodically put the metal in the forge to heat it up, but not to the point that it is glowing red. And he keeps on having to bring it back to the bellows, so it’s not a thing you want to do while the metal is cold. Since it’s hot, you can see that he holds the metal with some kind of tongs, and has a glove on that hand. His hammering hand is not gloved.

His hammer is pretty small (can’t tell if it’s a raising hammer or if he’s compromising), and he doesn’t really move his arm above the elbow while he’s hammering. Instead of heavy hits, it looks like it’s more just lots of repetitive hits while the metal is hot to mold it into a shape. Looks pretty tedious and I imagine your arm would be tired at the end of it.

A thing to note is how long it takes. While it seemed like it was going quickly towards the beginning, once he got about halfway out on its radius it seemed to take much longer to make visible progress. This is a helmet, which is one of the more extreme things to raise (being such a deep vessel), but it’s still a really freaking long time period. There’s also lots of different people working on this same helmet, which is definitely a thing I need to consider more with posting.

Planishing
A tutorial from the same guy as before. Planishing is a very tedious and time consuming process where lots and lots of light hits are used to smooth out the surface after raising. Make it all nice and shiny. Some points from the tutorial:

• Use a flat faced hammer (called a planishing hammer).
• Polish the face of the planishing hammer so that you do add any additional blemishes or dirt/particles into the armor. Plus, the metal will be shinier, which can be used to tell where you’ve passed by.
• Hit the metal where it’s contacting the ball stake (no offset).
• Hit only just hard enough to even out dings.
• If you hit too hard, the metal will thin and you might lose the shape you formed while raising.
• He suggests closing your eyes and running your hand over it to find spots you may have missed.

12/27/14