As the title says, 7 weeks until I'm off of active duty. After the weekend, I've gotten everything from my vacation put away, saw Transformers, taught the dog to walk up stairs, and made progress on my newest armor. I got all the fabric cut for it and some of the initial sewing done. Now I'm attaching plates into the inside. I was thinking of sewing pockets forthe plates, but rivets just look SO much cooler. I also noticed that I have 2 different types of plates, well patterns for holes in the plates. This will take some drilling to correct or the rivets will have a weird pattern. I'm going to try and put the rest of the side panels together tonight and start the sewing on the front and back panels. Then tuesday finish those up and rig up a temporary suspension so I can fight wednesday at SCA practice. I really regret not bringing my red suit back from Iowa with me, since I would have been able to use that with some minor mods to fight for practice. I'm really trying to get away from borrowing SCA-spec armor from other people since nobody is my size and I hate being a mooch. I also contemplated adding metal reinforcement to my U-H suit over the kidneys, but decided not to since I might be selling it. Anyway, I've decided not to add padding directly into this new CoP and instead make a simple gambeson so I can upgrade the armor at a later date and not have to make one then, plus when I use this for Belegarth it wont be as hot or heavier than it already is. I've also been documenting the construction of this armor in photographs so I can release a series of blogs as a tutorial for making it. It was relatively cheap to make, comming in around $40 plus whatever my tools cost. I'm sure if I bought the metal in bulk it would be alot less, but I don't have the storage space for sheet metal in my apartment. I don't have any cool pictures to put on here today, sorry bout that.
