Making a Hauberk

The maille took hours of opening and closing rings. I started by making two large squares for the front and back. The made a neck hole of equal width and wove it together. I then split the front and back too allow for increased mobility and attached two cylinders for sleeves. The last step was to edge it in brass.

For the gambeson I began with a simple quilted material and made it into the shape of a jacket with the sleeves separate.

I then created eyelets so that the sleeves could be removed and reattached as pleased

For the buckles I cut strips of veg tan leather and riveted then to the gambeson adding a backing for strength.

For the majority of my life I have worked to combine my two favorite fields of science and history. Though these fields may seem completely separate, the concrete form of historic items, like artifacts and buildings, are filled with countless innovations and marvels of physics and engineering - some of which I have done my best to recreate myself. While working on these projects, I have also learned the how to perform research and the value of prime sources and verification. With Hollywood flooding the media with misinformation about history, prime sources are essential to a person of my interest. While these sources can supply me with much information, other sources such as experimental archaeology and modern science have filled in the blanks of much of what I need. Knowledge of engineering, architecture, and metallurgy have also allowed me to make improvements upon things and allowed me to understand aspects that I would not otherwise recognize.

When I first became interested in the two fields, I treated them as entirely separate entities. For a long time, I saw science and history as two of the most starkly different fields I knew. It wasn’t until my interest in recreating historical artifacts that I began to see just how much they were linked. As with all projects, I began with research that would grow to become quite extensive. Patience became my greatest ally for research, history became my map for development, and science became my toolkit with which to build. With the knowledge of these three seemingly unrelated things, I would do things I never thought I would and grow to extensively know about things which I previous did not know existed.  I would often surprise myself with the depth to which I would reach and the remarkable complexity of things I would have otherwise considered primitive and outdated.  Though years have passed and I still have infinitely more to learn, my experience has given me a respect for the past, an appreciation for the present, and a glimpse into the future.

Other maille projects

Gambeson and Mallie Hauberk

Making a Heater Shield

To begin my shield, I started with an oak board that I cut into slats and laid out so that the grain faced opposite directions.

To get the classic curved shape, I built a steam box to make the pieces pliable.

I had to make a jig and tried to line them up to do as many as I could in one heat.
 After that I lay all the boards out as they were supposed to be. Historically the boards would have been connected with a kind of glue. However, due to this shield being functional I used epoxy resin and added a layer of fiberglass mesh between the layers. After which I used two sheets of cloth on the face and back.

I cut leather handles and attached then using bolts. The rolled up piece is a strip of rawhide

To attach the rawhide to the shield, I drilled holes all along the edge and sewed it in using artificial sinew.