Muscled thorax fastenings

[Matthew Amt]

Most of my plannishing I do on an old chisel which fits into the hardy hole in my anvil. The head is all mushroomed, and I polished it. Would an auto body repair kit be any help? Usually includes several interesting hammers and 2 or 3 "dollies", rounded metal shapes meant to be held inside the plate being shaped or worked. Check Harbor Freight Tools, they have the el-cheapo Chinese sets for like 20 bucks. You can even have those dollies welded to a steel bar to make a stake for whatever use.

Of course, the fewer hammer lumps you make, the less plannishing there is! I find that the hemispherical bronze bearing in the foreground of this next photo makes much nicer work than my ballpeen hammer:

http://www.larp.com/hoplite/hrnhlm1.jpg

Results:

http://www.larp.com/hoplite/hrnhlm2.jpg

You can see that the left-hand helmet half has more lumps, since I did most of the work with the ballpeen, whereas the one on the right is smoother. But given enough plannishing, this is how they both came out, before final polishing:

http://www.larp.com/hoplite/hrnhlm4.jpg

Of course, the whole point of shining up metal is to keep it that way! Definitely plan on spending an evening with the Brasso before any event, to clean off all the fingerprints and bring it back to looking like gold. THAT's what armor should look like! (Of course, that's also reason enough to go with the linothorax...)

Khaire,

Matthew