Hi folks,
so I've dropped a few hints over the last few months, but for my birthday back in March my brother started helping me make a metal breastplate as a present. When we were kids we had these huge dished metal sleds, and I'd noticed he was turning one of them into a shield:
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I jokingly brought up the idea of turning the other one into a USCM breastplate, and low and behold he did:
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Now we're still fine tuning a lot of it. His metal-smithing is more centered around Experimental Archaeology of the 12th-14th centuries, so some of my requests no doubt seemed counter intuitive to him, but we're making some good progress.
We opted to do the "steps" (which he calls Lames) as two pieces that would then be riveted to the breastplate (where the grenade straps would hide the join) and then blended with Bondo or SteelStik.
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Now this photo shows before I corrected the angles on the lames. It seems pretty common for folks the make the lames both follow the same shape (even Lee got it wrong in the Tech Manual), but really the bottom one is shaped quite differently:
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It's all academic of course since the belt hides this portion of the armour, but since I'm making a go of it I'm going to try to get the details kinda right. The raised area around the shoulder clip is another bit I need to tackle.
In the end I think it will take a good paint job, the correct neck trim and webbing (thanks Noble!) and the correct sized side release clips (thanks Chef!) to sell the breastplate. I've got faith that I can make this work, and it has been a dream of mine to have metal armour, so we'll see where this adventure leads!