Invisible Leg Armour

Also featuring my kitchen rug.

The park was still too sodden for practice this week, so instead we descended upon our local armourer's shop to work on armour and get advice and help make rivets in return for his expertise.

I've been meaning to finish my own leg armour for...an unspeakably long time...and now it's nearly done! The cuisses (upper bits) are made of Kydex, which is "a line of thermoplastic acrylic-polyvinyl chloride..." okay, it's really really bad for the environment, but it's rigid like metal, you can heat it up in your oven to shape it, and it's much easier to rework if needed than steel, without being as prone to dentage as aluminum. Also, it's very well-suited for making hidden armour, which is exactly what these are.

I started by making beautiful curved cuisses...with the wrong end facing up. There's a long side and a short side to the irregular trapezoid that is a cuisse pattern, and it turns out the long side is the width. Whoops. I broke one of my belts trying to cinch the pieces down into nice leg-like curves for that, too! Back into the oven they went, at a higher temperature (and with the smoke alarm unscrewed because I'm sitting right there watching, thanks anyway, you don't even go off when I burn the potatoes so what's your damage?) in an attempt to get the plastic more like half-frozen puff pastry and less like...uh...plastic.

Once floppified, I used tongs and oven mitts to drape the first piece over my towel-and-jeans-clad leg (350 degrees is hot enough to be quite toasty through jeans, so don't skip the towel) and squash it into an approximation of my thigh, with extra space for padding, too. Of course, it wants to spring back to its original form as it cools, so what I really needed was to get it a little more curved than my ultimate goal. This is the part where the belt comes in—sorry, no photos, I was busy cinching a 12-year-old belt around a wriggly mass of very hot plastic—to tighten the curve of the cuisse and hold it there until it's cooled enough to behave. Worked a treat, and then it was time to rinse and repeat with the second cuisse.

This photo has (almost) nothing to do with armouring, it's just a nice shot.

At the shop, we punched and drilled holes in the knee cops (did I talk about those yet? Mainly a great deal of bashing with a clever foot-powered bashing device to make them roughly knee-shaped, and then smaller more directed bashing around the edges with a hammer so they [hopefully] won't dig into my [flesh] knees when I move) and in the cuisses, cut leather hinges to hold the whole assembly together, and set rivets (I helpfully held all the bits balanced on a variety of anvils. My rivet peening skills leave a great deal to be desired, and copper is expensive).

I went with fixed straps to hold the legs on...my legs...since theoretically there won't be any fabric between them and my skin, and the bruises you get from a sword landing on top of a buckle are dramatic. So a few more holes drilled and punched (drill for plastic, punch for metal. It's easier, and nobody's ears end up bleeding) and leather straps cut, and a few more rivets placed (you can just see them peeking out on the inner sides of the cuisses in that top photo), and a lot of hopping around in the shop on one foot while I wriggled in and out of armour to check the strap length, and now I just need to pad the suckers! Delightful. I also need to scrounge up some cord to tie them to a belt (...which doesn't exist yet) to actually support them—the existing straps are there to keep the knee cops roughly centered on my knees, and to prevent the cuisses trying to rotate on my leg and expose tender bits to people's swords.

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