[Robin Smith]

America uses Imperial because the UN and EU went metric. If you want us to go metric make Imperial the UN standard, and America will be on the metric in a week.

[Randall Moffett]

People only think Britain went metric. They still use miles, inches, feet and all sorts of things here. The interesting thing is to see what is used more common, by who and where. I have a friend when I told him my son was born I gave his weight in kilos and he said yeah so how much did he really weigh. He is not old, my age born and raised here in the south. We go to the health centre to get my son weighed, kilos. It is a mad world we live in.

I enjoyed the testing. Do not worry if people cannot be happy with your testing always.... they usually are the ones who are unhappy about most everything anyways . You do your best and thats that. If you do any more please post it. I thought it was very interesting. Those poor defenseless plastic bottles....

RPM

[Jean Thibodeau]

As Randall said I also enjoyed the test and they do give an idea of the limitations of leather armour.

One thing I wonder about is the use of a padded garment below the leather ( gambison ) would reduce the effects of cuts to a degree. Chopping cuts I believe maybe to a degree ? With drawcuts and a very sharp blade the padding should do little.

Oh, and also not historically proven that these were ever used, a form of " Ring maille " ( for lack of a better word and a word that sort of grates on the nerves of some here ! ) might spoil a cut and limit the effect of drawcuts. ( but might be a little rough on the test blades: I would use an expendable blade for those types of test ).

Anyway a reasonably close pattern of rings or just rivets would almost assure that one or more would get in the way of a drawcut.

Probably much less useful against thrusts ? The cost of leather and the weight and the soso effectiveness sort of would make me prefer any decent quality maille as protection I think.

Oh, there have been other Topics threads dealing with the same question here before so a search for those would save us from repeating ourselves too much: I sort of summarized my conclusions based on what I remember from those previous Topic thread by the way.

[Kenton Spaulding]

[Colin F.]