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History, Science, and Interesting Information - The Great Library / Re: The Great Plate Debate
« on: Today at 06:27:54 AM »
People often demonstrate quenching a blade in oil, pulling it out, watching it catch on fire, quenching it in oil again, and repeating until it stops igniting. https://yewtu.be/iQ4_mWnGn6E?t=411
Quenching plate armour is difficult because its large thin pieces with complex three-dimensional shapes which can easily distort. Armourers today usually fasten the parts temporarily together with wire. I remember that the PBS Nova on reproducing a Greenwich armour had some good clips https://www.pbs.org/video/secrets-shining-knight-preview-em5biq/
Europeans wrote basically nothing about iron production and ironworking before the 16th century. It was just another dirty manual trade like pottery or pig farming. Theophilius only touches on ironworking because he decided he wanted to write about how to make tools for working glass, ivory, and precious metals. And iron is unstable and often has villainous things done to it by conservators collectors and metal detectorists, whether that is assigning conscripts to scrub the palace armoury clean, or baking the sword they just dug up to stabilize it, or applying modern browning and bluing solutions. So its hard to be sure of lots of the details, especially because arms & armour studies never became institutionalized. Its a few curators, a few archaeologists, and a lot of people without academic jobs.
Quenching plate armour is difficult because its large thin pieces with complex three-dimensional shapes which can easily distort. Armourers today usually fasten the parts temporarily together with wire. I remember that the PBS Nova on reproducing a Greenwich armour had some good clips https://www.pbs.org/video/secrets-shining-knight-preview-em5biq/
Europeans wrote basically nothing about iron production and ironworking before the 16th century. It was just another dirty manual trade like pottery or pig farming. Theophilius only touches on ironworking because he decided he wanted to write about how to make tools for working glass, ivory, and precious metals. And iron is unstable and often has villainous things done to it by conservators collectors and metal detectorists, whether that is assigning conscripts to scrub the palace armoury clean, or baking the sword they just dug up to stabilize it, or applying modern browning and bluing solutions. So its hard to be sure of lots of the details, especially because arms & armour studies never became institutionalized. Its a few curators, a few archaeologists, and a lot of people without academic jobs.