Normally my contribution to The Forgings has been to bring authentic pieces of armour, discuss them and allow people to personally inspect them. Handling authentic armour is one of the best ways to really get an understanding of how it works and how it is formed. You can see the pieces I brought to this Forging here: Items brought to the ULA meeting 2018 in Salt Lake City
this year Robert asked me to also provide a live demonstration of some metal movement. I had side tracked Sunday morning of the first Forging showing Gruber about a different way to think about gorgets. In a previous experiment I had shown a different way to think about greave forming. That is described here. In preparation for this demonstration I did some work back at my shop. This shows the patterns I used and how the pieces were initially formed to gain the necessary volume to achieve a reasonable shape after the pieces are curled to shape. As usual, this is just an example of how metal can be moved. Not THE way, or the best way.
These pieces were formed cold and by hand. No heat, and no power. This is obviously not the fastest way to do things, but it is something that is accessible to many starting armourers. The patterns for these pieces were (to lesser or greater extents) pulled from pieces in my collection. This shows the pieces formed "in the flat" before they are curled up to shape.
