[Grayson C.]

If I were to add one of these rainguards to my albion ritter would it be totally out of place? I can't help but thinking of how neat this would look.

[Chad Arnow]

[Dan Dickinson]

I was looking through my copy of SAOC and come accross something that I never noticed before. One of the type XVIa's (featured in myArmoury's XVI article as XVIa.2) http://www.myArmoury.com/feature_spotxvi.html
had both styles of rainguard......I wonder why that was done?

http://www.myArmoury.com/view.html?features/pic_spotxvi12.jpg

[Sean Flynt]

I've finished my own rain guard / chappe project! This isn't a very good photo. In person, the stitching is almost invisible. The flap of grip wrap sewn to the chappe look a bit too plain to me. Maybe I'll add something to that--a slim border? It's very thin leather, so I doubt it would take the "star treatment".

See more info about the whole project here: http://www.myArmoury.com/talk/viewtopic.php?p=137293#137293

Thanks for the help, folks!

[Max W.]

Greetings,

thanks to the wonderful information and the traced-through originals in this thread i finally did my first attempt in leatherworking.
The sword is recognizably an Albion Talhoffer, and the design is very roughly based on Talhoffer's drawings:



As you can see the cross leathers are quite short in the drawings, and i freely interpreted the hatching on the right piece as decorative lines.




Here it's still drying and unfinished. The leather is veg tanned swedish cowhide, approximately 2,5 mm thick.

I soaked and hardened it with water & baking soda for about 20 minutes, then tooled and sewed it.
Unfortunately due to the bending as i sewed it the tooling kept disappearing again and again, the imprint was very unwilling to last.
As it is my first attempt i don't know if i didn't punch it hard enough, or soaked it too much...or if the leather itself is the reason.

However, the repeated tooling and somewhat coarse stitching lead to this rugged and almost used look which is not unpleasant to me since i bought this sword to be a user for test cutting and verifying fencing techniques. So the used look is quite fitting.

And while drying, the too bright leather darkened and adapted itself almost perfectly to the Talhoffer's grip
and developed a wonderful irregular colouring.

The last thing i had to make was stuffing the thread endings inside it, since it is sewn from the backside,
and then finally went over the sewing and some rough spots with a bit of black shoe polish.


Now here's how it looks now, i feel like it ads a whole lot of character to the otherwise plain sword:





An utilitarian sword of a minor fencing student, thats what it is and thats what it happened to look now so fittingly. I'm very pleased.

Have a nice weekend,
Max

[Julien M]

[Max W.]

After some digging i was able to find the source of Mathieu's pictures on that site from the netherlands:

http://cms.dordrecht.nl/dordt?waxtrapp=iksboDsHaKnPvBYJNaC

I was mainly interested in the age of those cross leathers which seems to be 14/15th century according to the text. Here's a rough babelfish translation:

[Brian L Brown]

To do with the purpose of not the making of, but I ran across this video by accident on youtube. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-8QBr4dTAR0&am...r_embedded