추신.  사전에 없는 새로 생긴 단어가 좀 있습니다. 그리고 약간의 오타도 있습니다.
또... 명사형 동사도 있으니... 영어에 자신있으시고 갑옷제작에 자신있으신 분 번역해보시길 바랍니다.


[[B]][[fsize=14]][[fback=#ff0000]][[fsize=14]]BASIC ARMOURING SKILLS:

Fluting   [[/font]][[/FONT]][[/font]][[/B]]

     Fluting is a very necessary basic skill.  You have to make some basic tools for this.  Unlike the deep flutes I have made in the past, I have found from examining real armour suits that flutes were not as deep as I thought.  I used to make 3/32" deep flutes as measures from crest to valley.  They should really be much more shallow.  A tack hammer is used to make the edge sharply defined and straight, without wobbles, along the line of the flute.  

     This metal working technique will allow lesser skilled armourers to produce finely detailed and fluted gothic style armour.  The skill is basic and the only thing separating a plain piece from a beautifully fluted detailed piece is the time you spend chiseling, sharpening, sanding, and polishing  more flute lines.  Sure, you can use a machine roller to put a line-like rolled dent in plate, but the effect of using such a roller doesn't look the same as hand formed fluting, which enhances the appearance of the armour without making it look like it machine tools were used on it.  Okay. Here we go:  

FLUTING 101:

     Make a 3/8" wide steel chisel a bit dull by rounding over the edge a tiny bit with a fine grinding wheel.  You just want to get the sharp edge off, not round over the entire edge.  Take off the corners a bit so that the profile of the edge is a crescent near the edges, and flat near the center.  This makes the edges soft and not sharp.  Polish the soft chisel edge until shiny.  Make a similar chisel from a 3/4" wide chisel, except that the profile should be a shallow crescent all the way from one side to the other.  

     Now get a block of lead, or the end grain of a softwood stump such as pine.  Take the plate piece that you have already shaped to near-final form by dishing, and draw the flute lines with a black, fine-tipped marker on the inside surface.  The plate may be 16 gauge, which takes a lot more hammering later on, or 18 gauge, which forms quickly but can crack if hammered to many times in one spot.  Make sure that the lines are symmetrical on both sides of the centerline if a mirror copy of the fluting pattern is to be made on each side of whatever piece you are working on (such as a breastplate).  If you want to get clever, make a paper pattern folded across the centerline and having holes in it every 1/2" along the flute lines and trace the dots onto the metal with the marker through the holes.  Then connect the dots on the metal with the marker by hand.

      Place the plate on the lead block or softwood, and take the new soft chisel and dent the steel along the flute lines, overlapping each strike 1/8" over the strike before it to make the impression a smooth line and so that the corners of the chisel to not show too badly on the underside of the plate.  

      
  
  
  
  

     Now take the 3/4" soft chisel and mount in a vise with the edge pointed upward.  Take the plate and lay it over the chisel inner side down, with the chisel resting in the impression of one of the flutes.    

     Now you need to make a polished tack hammer.  Take a square faced tack hammer and grind the corners round a tiny bit, and the make the edges rounded also by taking the edges off.  Sand and polish the hammer to a mirror finish.    I use a medium weight, mirror-polished tack hammer and about a zillion hammer blows along each side of the flute line. The tack hammer's head is only 3/8" wide, and all the edges of it were sanded over to a 1/32" radius and polished, although the hammer face still retains the overall square-like shape, with the corners round, but still present.

     With the plate resting on the inverted chisel, tap the tack hammer's heel (lower part of the striking face) on the flute just short of the chisel뭩 support point, which is directly UNDER the flute line. Keep the hammer striking in the area the chisel is supporting but  off of the crest line a short distance.  The technique with the hammer is described as a wrist rotation, not a movement of the entire arm.  You eye should not be on the hammer, instead, you should watch the metal where the hammer strikes, adjusting the position of your arm to move the blows in, out, right, or left.  As you strike the metal many times, a sharp line will form at the crest, and a valley will be made along one side of the flute line.  Slide the metal over about 1/2" on the chisel edge along the flute line and form a sharper edge at the crest of the flute again with many firm hammer taps.

  
  
  
  
  

     Continue until you have worked one entire side of the flute, then turn the steel plate around 180 degrees and work the other side of the flute line.  The heel edge of the tack hammer pushes the metal down on each side of the flute line, and at the same time the chisel underneath raises the crest line.  The face of the hammer defines the sharp edge of the crest line.  You will have to whack one side or the other at certain points to move the crest line if it is not straight, or does not follow  the overall line of the flute.  This way, you can adjust the position of the flute line a bit.

     After about a thousand hammer blows, the flute should be raised slightly above the surrounding metal, with the curvatures of the valleys on each side of the crest having an even shape and depth and surface curvature.  Examine at the of the flute along its entire length and ensure that there are no shallow points and that the depth of the valleys on either side of the flute are even in depth.  The flute has a faceted, dimpled look.   It takes about 1 minute per inch of flute, so it's slow going. The flutes themselves are not supposed to be high ridges surrounded by deep valleys. Instead, the edges of the flutes are sharp but they are fairly shallow.  The heel of the tack hammer pushes the metal down on either side of the flute. Moving your hammer blows closer to the top edge of the flute moves the edge away from the hammer, allowing you to adjust the actual location of the flute line a bit, to correct for errors made in the chiseling. If you move the hammer away from the flute edge, more of the face of the tack hammer comes into play. The result is that the face of the hammer helps remove the deeper hammer marks ridges and dings, and also pushed the metal deeper, making the valley deeper (or raising the flute higher, depending on how you want to describe it).

     Now take an 80-grit rotary sander and carefully sand along the sides of each flute.  Do not accidentally round over the sharp crest of the flute or you will have to re-sharpen it with a tack hammer, taking the risk of making the metal so thin at the crest that a crack occurs.  Remove all hammer marks, then do a final sanding job with a finer grit and then polish the armour using your preferred method.  Take care never to round over the flute crests.

      
  
[[B]][[fsize=14]][[fsize=14]][[fback=#ff0000]] BASIC ARMOURING SKILLS:

Upsetting [[/FONT]][[/font]][[/font]][[/B]]

  
  
      The question came up in a recent e-mail message asking how to do the stepped ridges in the rear neck and fan of a Roman Gallic helmet.  Below is a quick explanation on how you can to this with hand tools.

     For making ridges in steel, I have a roller jenny (edge rolling machine) with a 6" deep throat that can have various wheels attached to it for things like grooves for rolling edges and sharp edges wheels for upsetting sheet metal. Upsetting is the process you want to use. It creates a three dimensional step in the metal. Making the metal edges with a roller machine tool has to be done BEFORE you weld the fan on if you want to use the roller tool. If you are using welded-piece construction and you have already welded the parts together, all is not lost. If you have any skill with fluting armour using a chisel and tack hammer, you can create the steps by hand by making "half a flute" in a sense.

     Now, your going to need a lead block. Go find yourself several pounds of lead and mold it into a block or brick shape. The nice thing about lead is that you can remold in 20 minutes after you pound on it for weeks and it assumes a screwed up and unusual shape. Take the fluting chisel mentioned on my website, the one with the corners and edge polished over so it won't CUT metal, and put the helmet neck extension part over the lead block. From the inside, chisel the lines where the steps go just deep enough to make an impression on the outside of the metal. Take care that every chisel mark overlaps the previous one by 30% or you will get a shitty line forming.

  
  
  
  
     After that is done, take the chisel and put it in a vise, sticking straight up. I hope the chisel you picked out is at least 8" long, or you will have to make a second dulled chisel from steel bar stock that does stick above the vise 8" tall. This is so the vise won't get in the way of the helmet when doing the next step. This chisel works best if it is wider and has a shallow curve, to give you more edge surface to work over and prevent the corners from digging into the sheet metal.  With the chisel resting in the impression of one of your lines, from the inside of the helmet, you will now use the heel edge polished tack hammer to slowing sink the metal on one side of the flute line. Working along the edge slowly with hundred of hammer blows just hard enough to move the metal as you go, the flute line will become defined. This is a slow process, and the more you practice, the straighter your line will be and the move even the depth of the valley alongside the flute line.

  
  
  
  
     Now, after this first pass, there may be some areas that are uneven in depth or out of alignment with the line. Go fix these now with more tack hammer blows. Next, You may notice that we do not have a step, but rather a line impression with one side having a valley you just made, and the other side having the line raised above the surface level of the metal, though you WANT it to be flat and level with the metal surface, hence an upset, not a flute. So, you have to flatten that side of the line back outwards. You do this with another tool from the INSIDE of the helmet, with the helmet outside resting on a smooth, flat portion of your anvil. You need a form or tool that has a flat surface on the tip and a sharp edge to follow the line you made, sort of like a square tack hammer with the edges still on the face of it. A piece of square rod cut cleanly and polished on the end without dulling the corners will do. What you are going to do is use the tip of this rod segment as a chisel of sorts to push the metal from the inside until it is flush and level with the highest ridgeline of the line your chiseled. That way, when viewed from the outside, you will see a line edge that drops into the valley of your step.

  
  
  
  

     Now the valley is not shaped correctly yet. It is a sloping curve, and you want to define it more like a step. If you support the helmet from the inside with a cylindrical form such as the end of a horizontally mounted 5" diameter pipe section, you can use that square rod to press into the valley curve to make it more sharp and form a line in the root of the valley. Work along the line with make hammer blows using your square "shaping" rod. Overlap your blows and keep the line straight... blah blah blah...

  
  
  
  
     Sand and polish all the hammer marks from the outside surface using a sander that can get inside the step without rounding over the step's edge and wrecking it. You may round the top edge of the step very slightly to get rid of the sharp line you made using the tack hammer, but don't get carried away and wipe out the step overmuch. There you have it.