hivemind

I'm going to tell you that you can hunt around online, but many sites (Tandy's, for example) won't show you an entire picture of the spots, so there's no way to know how long the spikes are on the underside of them. Really, the places with the best hardware are often not even online, which makes it really difficult to shop sometimes. How big do you need? I have a HUGE bag of 1/4" nickel domed spots that I've been dipping into for years, I'm fine with putting a dozen into a small ziplock bag and mailing them to you if they're the size you're looking for. Let me know how long you need the spikes and I'll go measure the stuff I have. In fact, here's a pic of the spots I have and some split rivets.

I have an Osborne head knife that just sits in my tool box. I cut probably 80% of my leather with leather shears, and the other 20% with a utility knife. Maybe I'm just never doing anything that requires a head knife, but for me, the shears are the way to go.

These are leather?

Why couldn't you just stick a brass domed spot through the neck piece and use that to crimp around the string front and back? Edit: like these: http://www.datazap.net/sites/Hogwarts/auct...41206644636.jpg

I can totally believe his sling creaks too much. Some leather armor that I've made, particularly stuff with a lot of parts and floating joints (like lorica segmentata) creaks terribly. I'm guessing the creaking that guy's hearing is from the strap of the sling rubbing on and through the shoulder pad and/or buckle parts, rather than the parts attached to the sling swivels - they're securely sewn or riveted. It can be mitigated somewhat with regular applications of neatsfoot oil, but I've never made it go away entirely. I would think the easiest way to make a "creakless" sling would be to make it all one piece. Find out how long he wants it and make it non-adjustable to that length. You could also make the strap out of latigo, and use vege tan for just the shoulder pad part and tool that. I don't think that would creak at all. But if you make him a sling out of vegetable tanned leather that has parts that can rub together, yeah, it's gonna creak.

I do that as well. I also have a little bottle of accelerator - it's a spray-on liquid that almost instantly cures cyanocryalate (super) glue. Muy handy...

That's... different, with the spots.

Most of the stuff I sell, as opposed to make for myself, gets bought by local re-enactors and LARPers in my area. Over the last several years, there's been more and more people who have started to try their hand at making some leather goods, which has driven prices down a bit. However, I am the only maker with professional tools who makes quality goods on time. All the others are either guys with a rotary punch, a rivet setter and a utility knife (and nothing else), or guys who can't do anything on time or within budget. Recently, I've decided to triple my prices. If people want to buy amateur hour crap, let them. If they want to wait eight or ten months for a piece to save a few bucks, let them. If people want professional quality work, delivered on time, they call me. There's an old engineering adage: "You can have it fast, you can have it cheap, you can have it good. Pick two." I'm the guy they call when you want good and fast.

As a former Marine, I heartily approve.

With that information Hilly, I don't think your PC is really on it's last legs. Those CD ROM errors aren't showstoppers, and those errors are will probably go away with a driver update for the drive. Does it crash or shut down unexpectedly, or is the issue just general pokeyness? Also, go ahead and blow it out with the compressor - we do it quite often on PCs that are deployed at our industrial customers. We use their compressors right there on their production floor so we don't have to make the filth go all over our shop.

These things you're saying it's doing are not, to me, indicative of imminent failure - but let's make sure. Go to your Control Panel, and open up the Administrative Tools section. Double-click the Event Viewer, and then click on System on the left side. It'll help to maximize the window, there's a lot of data here. Now, click on the top of the right hand side where it says "type" to sort the results. We're not terribly interested in anything other than the errors. Scroll to where the errors are, and take a gander through them. We are particularly interested (really, ONLY interested) in System Errors and Disk Errors. You seeing any of those?

There is no need to move to Vista, and I don't blame you if you don't want to. I deploy probably 10-15 PCs at businesses every month, and I have NEVER deployed a Vista PC. Not a single one of our 200+ business customers plans to move to Vista. And why would they? Windows XP works great after all these years of patching, and Microsoft is going to continue to release security patches for XP until 2014: http://support.microsoft.com/lifecycle/?p1=3223 But like others said, move that data ASAP to an external drive, and pick up a new PC soon. If you can find one with XP (even the "downgrade" option), do it. When you're grabbing your files, remember to get things like your internet favorites and your email in addition to your pictures, music, etc. - and if you're the type of person who keeps a lot of stuff on your desktop rather than in My Documents, don't forget that stuff too!

Hi Billy. System Restore shouldn't have deleted your music or pictures, so my guess is that they're in a different profile now somehow. Go to My Computer > C: > Documents and Settings and start looking through the folders in there, particularly in the [user name] > My Documents folders and see if you can find that stuff. If that doesn't find them, try Start > Search and have it look in C: for: *.jpg That's a wildcard search that will find all the pictures on your computer. Just look for names that look familiar, note where they are, then go there and move them to where you want them. The sound issue, first, make sure you don't have the mute box checked in the volume settings. Go into your Control Panel and open up the Sounds and Audio Devices section, and make sure the mute box is unchecked. If it is, take a look in your Device Manager. To get there, right-click on My Computer and choose Properties at the bottom. Go to the Hardware tab, and click the Device Manager button. What you're looking for in there is anything with a question mark or an exclamation point on it. That indicates a system device (like your sound card) that Windows thinks is malfunctioning, doesn't have drivers for, or is otherwise misconfigured or misinstalled. If you find something like that, the first thing to try is to just right-click on it and Update Driver. If that fails to help, try right-clicking on it and Uninstall, then restart your computer and see if it installs automatically (and correctly) this time. If neither of those two options does it, you probably don't have the correct driver software for it. This is where I can't tell you exactly where to go. ALl I can tell you is to try and find out what kind of device it is exactly, then use Google to find a driver for it. Often the component or computer manufacturer's site will have these for you, particularly if your computer is from a large company like Dell, Gateway or IBM. Let us know if any of that fixes you, or if you need more help.

That's a seat this ex-Marine approves of. Semper Fi!

Leather lorica segmentata is probably the easiest form of leather torso armor to make, bar none. It's just 3" straps and floating joints, and straps and buckles. Honestly, dead simple. The worst part is slicking all the edges. Here's some pics of some I did a few years ago:

Have you considered using airsoft guns for molds? Many of them are correct in all dimensions to the real thing, and you could pick up a broken gas pistol on many airsoft forums for a song ($20-$30).

With those long sections, they're kinda similar to bazubands.

We're here - or at least I am. But there's a lot of stuff here, and the SCA/LARP market is very specific, and this board can be quite overwhelming at first. Hell, I've been here months and it's still overwhelming sometimes. I still sometimes see stuff here and say "What the hell are those?" only to find out they're stuff I'd never even thought about - like chaps. Never even crossed my mind that people actually wore those still... If people are looking for patterns/techniques/inspiration specific to medieval-type leatherwork, I'm still not sure this is the best place, simply due to the massive amount of information here. It's very easy to get sidetracked. On the other hand, I don't know of any others...

For thick leather I also try and clamp the hide to the cutting table.

Simple and serviceable. Nothing wrong with that! I too sometimes play around with mixing Fiebing's Oxblood with other colors of dyes. I particularly like it with black, it makes a really nice dark purpley-maroon color.

If your PC's hard disk drive is filling up, and you can't ever seem to get enough space freed up, try downloading a trial of a program called Tree Size Pro: http://www.jam-software.com/treesize/ It will show you visual representations of the sizes of your files and directories, which lets you quickly pick out huge areas that could be deleted. We use it all the time at work, in fact, I have an old version of it (3.0 I think) on my keychain. For an example, we recently had a customer that kept getting low disk space warning on her PC. It had an 80 GB hard drive - not huge, but more than adequate fr anyone but a music or movies pack-rat. With Tree Size Pro, we very quickly (within a minute) saw that she had 55 GB of Photoshop temp files built up inside her user profile. Deleted all those, and she was all set. It's a good program, give it a shot.

Typically, a refurbished laptop was sent to a customer, and they returned it right away due to wrong model, wrong options, etc. They're more like "open box specials" than something that was broken and then fixed. There is a chance that you're getting one that was broken and fixed though, and that's fine as well. Whatever part wasn't working will have been replaced and tested, and it should be fine. Remember that with computer parts, they generally either work, or they don't - they don't wear down slowly over time. The only exception to this would be the very few moving parts: hard disk drive, optical drive, keyboard, fans. And all of those parts are modular and easily replaceable. If there's a warranty still available on the laptop, that's a good indicator of what kind of shape it's in. Go for it.

I've recently bought some caribou furs from them. Great stuff, fast shipping, I couldn't be happier.

Sure. Substitute 1.25" diameter rattan sticks for pipe and leave off the insulation, and you've got the SCA.

But it's not for decoration, it's for whacking people with! http://www.kingdomsofnovitas.com