Larp Scale Armor

[Charke]

This is a leather scale-mail commission. Two fellow LARPers got their hands on a half shoulder of 8oz and 4oz. and basically handed it to me and said, "make something great, do whatever you want". I've never had a better commission. Free reign to go crazy, experiment and dig myself into a deep hole of work! While this armor was not hard to make, it ended up being a heck of a lot of work. I am happy with the results but I ran out of leather. I would have scaled the shoulders and made matching pauldrons to finish it. Still, if everyone told me to just "do what you want, we trust you to make something cool" it would all be so much more fun.

The scales are diamond shaped, 2 inches on each side, about 3 inches long. I ended up needing 250 just to cover the front and back. Each needed 2 rivets, so I had to punch 500 holes and put in 500 rivets. The highest cost of the project shifted from dye to rivets. Dying the scales two tone turned into an assembling line project and took forever. (I'm still not done?) I boiled the scales a fairly long time to make them fairly hard. Scalemail is very forgiving because of the soft backing. The overlaping scales create an intresting bit of a spring-board effect. I'm only worried about wear and tear, but that's normal. The finished product feels noticably heavier than the leather. I remind myself an entire Tandy Large bag of rivets is bolted onto the thing!

Image 1: This is the 3/4 complete suit.

Image 2: This is the inside of the armor, showing the rivets. One the outside the scales are mostly overlapped to hide them.

Image 3: This is Mike wearing the armor at a game.

Image 4: This is the armor stored. It's sitting on top of a leather Lorica of mine. Those shoulders aren't actually part of the armor.

Mark Charke

Edited April 3, 2011 by Charke

[Gequinn]

Man, that looks great! I hope to achieve a set or two of armor like that in the future. If you don't mind me asking, what game do you play? I'm in Amtgard myself.

[Charke]

I never hesitate to advertise my group. (We always need more people!) I belong to Inritius Alliance. We're one of the fledgling LARP groups near Vancouver BC Canada. While BC has a strong SCA presence, LARP seems to still be in it's infancy in this province. Across the country in Quebec, I hear the smallest LARP group has 200 members. We at about half that now. IA uses it's own system which is a derivitive of several elements from a number of European LARP systems.

You can find us at www.IALARP.com

I've heard of Amtgard but never played that system.

Thanks for the complements Gequinn and fair warning that scale armor takes a long time and it's very repetitive.

Mark Charke

[Patrice]

In Québec, we have the chance of holding THE biggest french-larp. It's called Bicolline. Each year, the third week of august, Bicolline having it's Grande Bataille de Bicolline (Bicolline great battle). It's now 7 days (sunday to sunday). We have some US friends that come every years. They are from Washington and New-York. This event welcomed between 1000-1500 people. More and more family are comming as they held activites for kids. We also play trollbal, it's like hockey mixed with basketball with rubber swords:http://trollball.org/

The website is in french, but here's the link: http://www.bicolline.org/ Even french and belgian come here as we have the best costumes and lots of space. Of course, we have no castle, but we havec a small village and lots activities.

Hope you enjoy.

[RWP]

that looks great! ive been itching to make a set like that!