/diy/ - Do It Yourself

SCAfag checking in. There was a recent issue of Compleat Anachronist on this precise topic. The tl;dr is that you can either sew/embroider on heavier fabrics (canvas/duck) or paint/stain lighter fabrics (silk/rayon). Keep in mind you want to leave some space at the edges to attach the flag to a pole in some manner.

>>179400
>>179373
>>179262
Paid $20 for an electric razor with guards of varying lengths.
Shave my head/beard down to 1/4" every couple of weeks.
Never pay for a haircut again. Look badass forever.

Mind you the first couple of times you do it you're going to miss spots and look like a complete goofball until you notice, but that's the same as learning any skill.

Don't forget to compare the ROI of buying the business to the ROI of other investment opportunities, and if you do decide to buy the business check it against industry averages for debt, equity, profitability, etc.

>>172221
SCAfag here. Loads of helmet designs in our communities. One of the more famous, that'll probably work better for you, is to put a bracket on your forehead that the mask swivels on, and a strap that runs around the back of the mask to hold it in place.

Pic related.

>>166861
Not a binding expert, but I'll pass on the one bit of trivia on this that I heard elsewhere on the internets; if the material you use is pulled too tight or is too narrow, it can cut off blood supply and cause necrosis of tissue, which is a bad scene all around.

Also, registering my disapproval of less boobs in the world, as I am a fan of them in general, but as long as you're safe and healthy, meh, whatever.

1) Fabric stores. They carry a wide variety.
2) Upholstery service stores. They focus on leathers and tougher fabrics.

>>166588
>>166589
Pic related. I tried duct-taping a bunch of these to a wooden pole, but it was all concussions and bleeding and lawsuits. What did I do wrong?

>>152708
Cold riveting is fine. He's not building a battleship, he's building gauntlets. It's unlikely his nails are even high enough carbon to work-harden, though possible, hence the annealing, I never looked up the stats. I'll do that now, actually.

According to wikipedia, wood nails are low-carbon, 0.1%, which means not carbony enough to work-harden appreciably. Masonry nails are 0.5-0.75%, which is just about to the sweet spot for forge work. So, OP, ignore my comments about annealing. You can heat the nail if you like, but I haven't found any need to myself. Many light blows, lots of control.

>>152980
>>152977
>Just start working on it, brah.
OP confirmed for my hero. That's the /diy/ spirit!

>>152546
I have done more than I can count. Hundreds to thousands.

a candle probably won't get a nail soft. you need it glowing cherry red and then cooling slowly to anneal, or dull red when you strike it for the heat to make it appreciably easier to form. Still, good job and keep it up.

gauntlets are a stone bitch, it's true. my rivet anvil is a railroad spike driven into a stump. you may find the aanvil horn is better for riveting small pieces than the main body.

Experienced recreation riveter here. Have done more rivets by hand than I can count, in copper and steel.
>>152241
Confirmed for kid. Cut the rivet short, peen it with a ball peen, works fine.
>>152242
100% correct, in my experience. It anneals the nails and makes them softer. However!
>>152233
>normal nails,
this might be your problem. You want roofing nails, whose heads are much much wider and won't pull through.
>It doesn't mushroom for shit
How experienced are you with riveting? Use many light blows rather than a few heavy ones; it gives you more control and you move just as much steel. I can peen over unsoftened nails with very little trouble. This describes it very well, though I don't bother with step 4, just cut and use the ball peen to mushroom it.
http://www.instructables.com/id/How-to-peen-a-rivet/

>>145065
A fire striker works by the flint (or any other hard rock) chipping off a tiny flake of steel. Iron rusts because iron reacts with oxygen. A small enough piece gives enough surface area that it reacts very quickly, hence the spark. It's just iron spontaneously combusting in an oxygen-rich atmosphere.

In order to _get_ that small flake, the iron has to be brittle enough to chip. Sort, annealed carbon steel will simply mush away or peel in large chunks when struck with flint. The reason you need high carbon steel is that carbon steels can be hardened through heat treatment, and a hard steel is exactly the same thing as a brittle steel that you can break flakes off of easily.

tl;dr: hardening your firesteel is absolutely necessary.

blacksmithfag checking in.

You want steel of 0.7% to 2% carbon content. The steel you linked to is sufficient. Avoid "mild steel," which has very little carbon in it. Hardware stores or construction suppliers in your area may sell "tool rod" or "drill rod," which is high-carbon rod used to make hand tools with.

Make sure you read up on heat treatment. Once it's shaped, normalize it by heating it up and letting it cool slowly, then get it up to a bright cherry, and dunk it in water and swish it around.

To sell your hobby things, I'd suggest ebay.com or etsy.com. Local stores might be useful, but only if you're in a large town.

>>144549
>First, that center wooden stick for grabbing the shield.
You could theoretically skip the center grip and strap it, as discussed, but you may as well build a heater shield (classic iron-shaped) instead, then.

>Also wich material I use for the wood?
Vikings typically used what they had available, which meant spruce, pine, and fir. Depending on how accurate you want to be, you could just buy a sheet of 1/2" or 3/4" plywood and cut the shape out.

Here's a couple of more thorough explanations; Regia Anglorum is a fantastic resource for anglo-viking recreation in general.
http://www.hurstwic.org/history/articles/manufacturing/text/viking_shields.htm
http://www.regia.org/shields.htm

>>144553
What you might want is puckboard. $20-40 for a 4X8 sheet of plastic, comes in a range of thicknesses. It's what they use on the inside wall on hockey rinks up here in Canuckistan. It's made of remelted scrap from other plastic work. You can get them from plastics manufacturers, or marked up 100% from retailers.

Also, you can get sheet steel pretty cheap if you buy it from steel wholesalers or manufacturers. Plastics and steels can generally be found in your town's industrial districts.

Flash the router with dd-wrt, turn the laptop into a read-only fileserver for diy guides, CC-licensed music, graffiti stencils, and other cool & legal things. Connect them and stick them with permission into a closet in some public space, or where a high-traffic area can access it, with no wireless security. Slap some signs up advertising the SSID and how to get the files. You are now contributing to the betterment of human society.

Punch a teeny hole in the top and use it to make charcloth with. Alternately, make charcloth and use your mint tin to hold it, some tow linen/hemp, and a firestriker.

>>143391
This. Also, if you make a hot knife, you can glue and carve packing styrofoam into pretty much any shape. There's some youtube guides on doing that for Warhammer terrains, same techniques should work for costumes. Careful of paint, though; it'll melt styro.

>>142885
The scraps have to be substantial enough to handle getting hit with a sword. Again, cuir boulli or 20ga mild steel.

>>142819
Have you tried building a vacuum chamber out of a shipping container?

Steel is cheap, leather is expensive, cuir boulli is easy. Buy thick (12+oz), vegetable-tanned leather (not latigo). Get water hot enough to not-quite-boil, dunk your cut, sewn, shaped piece of armour into it for 2-5 minutes (practice with scrap pieces). Let cool on the table or stuck on a form. It'll be hard as plastic. Coat with melted beeswax if you like.

While cardboard is not good armour, it IS good for prototyping armour. Get boxes and cut them out in the shapes you think you want for your cuir boulli, and see if they work right. Cardboard is much, much less expensive than leather. Ditto for brown wrapping paper and canvas and latigo leather. I use a lot of cardboard between the "finished calculations for what the sizes and angles OUGHT to be" and "cutting leather" stages. As a bonus, when you've got the cardboard just right, it becomes your pattern to mark the leather cuts with.

The project will take you weeks of solid work. I think my Wisby coat took 60 hours including all the planning and adjustments and math I had to do. A much simpler set of cuir boulli knees and splinted legs is going to take me about 15 hours from start to finish.

If you want more advice, you'll have to be more specific about what you're going to make.

>>142638
If you want to make stuff that looks authentic, you'll want to decide on a particular suit from history, or on a period and region. 12th century German is quite different than 12th century Chinese, or 15th century German.

There are a lot of good sources out there. Museums in Europe have a lot of stuff online now, and your local museum (assuming your city is >1M) should have at least one or two suits of armour for you to gawk at. The SCA to an extent, and live-steel combat societies, do a lot of research on period-accurate armour. The SCA makes changes for safety's sake, live-steel guys make fewer or none, and LARP groups make stuff out of bendy leather that looks good but definitely isn't accurate to any period design.

Having built my own coat-of-plates based on the design from the (14c) Wisby graves, I can tell you the following things; 20-18ga mild steel is as close as you're going to reasonably be able to get to authentic materials for coat-of-plates. It's not exact, but it's close. You're going to spend a couple hundred dollars on some 8oz latigo leather if you use that for backing, or less than that on less substantial canvas. You can use roofing nails to fake period-accurate iron rivets, or spend a lot of time with 1/8" mild steel rod, a bolt cutter, a post vise, and a ball pein hammer.

>>141934
I heard about that, and always thought it was clever as hell.

Also, B5, myhero.png.

>>141466
They're bloody marvelous is what they are, and you can buy old/cheap/busted files at pawn shops for a buck apiece or less. As tool steel, they're all around the 77-120 point carbon level, which is perfect for knives as well as tools.

>>141470
Is correct. See the sticky links to blacksmithing sites where they discuss annealing, heat treatment, normalization, etc.

I look forward to seeing your future posts about the stuff you make!