Leather Lorica Segmentata

[hivemind]

Finished a guy in my Dagorhir unit's armor tonight, with a little help from my apprentice finishing the edges.

[TimKleffner]

Hive

Nice work. What time period and country is the origin. Thanks for posting the pics

Happy tooling

Tim

[hivemind]

Lorica Segmentata is a Roman type of armor, worn from around 10 BC to 300 AD. There's very little evidence anywhere in history for any kind of leather armor; this would have been made from iron bands and plates then, but the construction is the same. The individual bands of the torso armor are held together by floating joints, so they can compress where they overlap. The guy wearing it can touch his toes, do side bends, etc. He has a full range of motion, less putting both his arms straight up over his head.

The drawback of this armor is that it has a very hard time stopping an upward thrust from a knife or short sword (the blade can slip right between the bands, as I demonstrated to Jimmy with the handle of a spoon ), but this particular suit is being worn for a foam-fighting game called Dagorhir, so no worries there.

[yan]

nice,

The shoulder protection are a little to big for my personnal taste.

for more info on the lorica:

http://www.scribd.com/doc/3961788/Lorica-Segmentata-Volume-I-A-Handbook-of-Articulated-Roman-Plate-Armour

[abn]

This type of work just blows my mind. I have difficulty assembling a proper wallet!

Nice job!

[Liz]

The blue color came out gorgeous. The lorica itself is very cool, they're always so pretty looking.

[hivemind]

The color is Fiebing's Light Blue dye on 12-13oz Tandy saddle skirting. The trick for me has always been to go with a color a lot lighter than I'm actually shooting for then really slop the dye on. This got about three coats, I basically keep putting on dye until it stops immediately absorbing into the leather.

[wildrose]

That is really beautiful work! I also love the color.

[Charke]

Well, I copied your armor. I'm not sure if I should feel bad about that or not but you very much inspired the creation of my leather Lorica Segmentata. Mine is also blue. I really like the color and my next LARP character was a water-elf so it fit very well. I have a metal suit at home and used it as a base. The number of plates is higher and the neck design is very different. The shoulders got very long as I encountered much trouble getting in to add rivets but I'm happy with the result. Also I went crazy and tooled it, which made the project take about 20x as long as it could have. Thanks for the inspiration.

Here's a facebook link to an image of the armor. I thought it wouldn't be appropriate to post images of my own armor in your thread. I'll throw it up on my own thread later once it's dry and I can put it on.

http://www.facebook....1f&id=695372463

Mark Charke

Edited June 30, 2010 by Charke

[gunter]

Hive,

WOW dude, nie work, you stunned me. I just love the entire concept !!!!! Could this be worn by vikings aswell ???

cheers,

G.

[hivemind]

Hell Mark, that's beautiful. I'm happy to have inspired such fine work as that. It's different when you get to make it for yourself, isn't it? You should put it up in the Show Off forum man.

Gunter: sadly, armor like that is 100% inappropriate for any kind of historical Viking persona. Vikings wore maille, maille, or maille, as far as I know. Lotsa choices there.