Glued Linen Armour- a simple test

[Matt Lukes]

Not to belabor the issue, but since it's central to what I thought was a fatal flaw, just what do you mean by 'thoroughly soaked and allowed to dry'? How long was your sample exposed to the 'rain'? I would expect you checked it before it dried to see if it had absorbed any water since certainly if the glue dries again, it'll be rigid once more- right?

Our test patches were 8" x 8" and left for a total of 10 hours in the 'rain' (which was a sprinkler head left on a medium drizzle). The patches were checked at 10 minute intervals for the first hour, then rechecked every hour for the remaining nine hours. The patches were completely soaked through by the rain (i.e. sopping wet to the core), and allowed to dry for an entire day out in the sun. The olive oil covered patch held up very well after a single application of oil. I even held the patch under a faucet of running water turned on high and very little penetrated, but this was a more unscientific test and the results were not documented thoroughly.

Right, well certainly 10 hours is certainly sufficient time, but if the samples were indeed soaked through, then the glue should have been a gel at that point with little to no adhesive quality left- even a minor flex of the 'armour' should have shown delamination, not to mention the whole thing being gooey and unpleasant to touch on the surface (plus a great medium for mould, fungus and bacteria- being near a body, it'd grow some fun stuff to be sure). Did yours not? Of course once it dries again it's just as it was before it got wet (providing it's not flexed anywhere the layers could come apart), it's the when wet period that seems the troublesome time.

This is the point I considered the idea pretty much a failure since if even short exposures to rain in a warm environment, which Greece surely is, the glued 'armour' becomes a soft, sticky growth medium for microorganisms; one cloudburst and a hoplite would have to let his armor dry before it was of any use again, no? Adding oil or any other waterproofer adds another layer of complexity and then one has to consider how that might be when worn- armor sufficiently coated with olive oil would also have been nasty to wear I should think.

It's supposed to rain here for the next week, and although it's rather cool removing the heat element, I'm now interested in trying my experiment again to see if there's something I did so differently as to have had such differing results.