Git ready fer the storm, Bubba!

Confederate Yankee tells people how to prepare for the next hurricane(and the next, etc.)

In the same vein as "If you live in a trailer park, or say "It was like this" frequently, you will be on the news after the tornado".

Various weapons BS in movies and tv

I'm not sure what got me thinking about this, but let's go.

Sounds
You're probably familiar with this mess. A gun comes out and all kinds of noises happen. Think of the opening of The Matrix; the cops burst in on the girl(Trinity?) and you hear the clack-clack of slides working and clicks of safeties going off or hammers being cocked. Problem is they're carrying Glocks; no safety or hammer to make noises and nobody is working a slide.

Or somebody draws a revolver and you hear click-clack, but the hammer's not cocked, and that would only make one click anyway. Or someone raises a rifle and you hear a virtual chorus of metal crickets chirping, even though both hands are on the thing.

And of course we can't pass by on the volume levels. Some people have a close-range shootout in an office, firing about, oh, 30 to 50 rounds, and afterward none of them have a problem hearing.

And they have those miraculous shotguns and rifles that can be fired without any recoil or muzzle rise or any effect. Must be either some new way to manipulate physics, or magic.

Swords
The big one here is beating swords on each other. There were some swords, late period, made for sword-against-sword use; they generally left the bottom third of the blade- the area used for parrying- blunt. Parrying with a sharp edge will mess it up, nick and chip it, so leave that section thick. But broadswords?

Think about two things. First, a sword is primarily an offensive weapon, and if you're using it to block blows you can't use it to attack. The age-old answer to this is a shield; carry it on one arm and your sword in the other hand, and you can defend and attack at the same time. Second, a decent sword was expensive; we're talking premium battle-rifle price here. Every time you strike two swords together one or both of them is taking damage, often damage that can't be repaired. Small nicks can be polished out, same for a small chip, but a big, deep nick is there permanently, and if very deep weakens the blade; in extreme cases it can cause it to crack or break at the next hard shock. So you tried hard not do do that.

But in Hollywood? You can beat them against each other and everything is nice and shiny afterward. Must be some really special metal. Or magic again.

The firearms crap? They don't care about accuracy for the most part, they just want to throw in noises for dramatic effect.

With swords/axes? It's lots easier to set up a scene where only one piece is involved, as opposed to a weapon in one hand and shield on the other arm; it takes time to learn to work both properly, so to an extent I understand the problem. But it still irritates me that, at least for some things, they can't take the time to work it out properly.

Note: yes, I know there were cultures, Japan for instance, that specifically worked sword-on-sword combat; I'm not talking about them. I will also note that, from what I understand, Japanese styles emphasized deflecting parries, so as to keep the damage to the blade minimal. If other information is available, I'd be glad of it.

I don't have a bird to crap on me, like Steve,

so I have to do it myself. Metaphorically, of course.

Part the First
After the events of yesterday, between stress and lack of sleep, I was pretty much shot by evening. So I cleaned some things up, cleaned myself up, took care of some on-line stuff, and decided that I would now lay myself on the couch and anoint the body & soul with some Scottish Holy Water.

Part the Second
So I shut down the pc, picked up my 32oz. 7-11 cup half full of iced tea, turned out the light, and headed for the living room. And as I turned to corner my left foot hit the stool(that I DO NOT remember putting RIGHT THERE). This was closely followed by my right ankle hitting it, followed by my balance going completely away and my falling into the darkness. By some miracle I managed a fairly good breakfall, taking most of the impact on forearms(NOT my elbows or face, thank you God). This included the cup, never leaving my hand, striking bottom first, and the various laws of motion and energy demonstrated themselves by the contents moving vertically out of the container and then distributing themselves in various places about the living room. I lay there for about five seconds, then uttered the standard comment for such times("Well, @)#$*&"), and got up. The next few minutes were spent picking up and throwing out ice cubes, spaced about in an undoubtedly mystical pattern I had no damn desire to decipher, mopping up the tea, and then getting a new glass of tea, and finally plunking myself down on the couch.

At which time I looked at my left foot, with the blood seeping out from under the nail of my big toe, then at the skin scraped off my right ankle, then feeling the ache in my left hand from the impact it took. The shot glass was now filled with hydrogen peroxide and the leaking toe dipped in(all right, you figure out a better way), followed by my drinking directly from the bottle; not something I usually do, but it seemed called for here. Then, after about three shots and a few minutes, I dragged myself up to bed.

Part the Third
About 3a.m. a storm woke me up, so I hobbled down the stairs to pee, then decided to make sure all the windows were closed up on the windward side of the house; things had cooled off enough in the evening that I'd turned off the a/c and opened them up. So as I hobbled through the bedroom/office to the window, my left foot contacted- toe first, of course- the ammo can sitting beside the table.

"@(*^%% #*() &!%$#!!"

After making it back to bed, I went back to sleep. Or passed out, whichever.

Part the Fourth
Wherein I wake up this morning and get out of bed. My foot is as sore as you'd think, it turns out I also whacked my left knee on the floor and it doesn't want to bend, my left hand aches, and life is just so sunny I'd like to puke.

So I've been hobbling around all day like a refugee from somewhere nasty, and if I didn't have to meet someone this evening I'd flop in the house and commune with John Barleycorn again, but at greater length.

And how has YOUR morning been?

Another "don't know why" moment

I've heard of the place, and finally got around to actually going there: Jihad Watch.

Go there. It's got lots of stuff that needs to be seen.

Carnival of Cordite #17 is up

Over at Eric's Grumbles Before The Grave, check it out. Lots of good stuff.

This is a site I haven't seen before, I'll have to look it over. Subheading for blog:"Married, father, husband, Desert Storm veteran, security manager, sci-fi & Linux fan, geek, rational anarchist, classic liberal. Want to know what all that means? "

(yes, Kevin, I fixed it)

Sometimes, life just sucks

I had to put the cat down today. She'd been dragging for the last week or so, Monday took her to the vet and got some medication. And it was downhill from there. She hated taking the pills, and I couldn't get her to eat, and this morning she lost control of some functions...

Shit. This is the third time over the years I've had to do this, and it never gets any easier. I need to hit the range in the next couple of days.

A fine quote, and something on the weather

Over at Acidman's place, between posts about shooing cats away from bird nests, was this:
quote of the day
"No drug, not even alcohol, causes the fundamental ills of society. If we're looking for the source of our troubles, we shouldn't test people for drugs, we should test them for stupidity, ignorance, greed and love of power."
P.J. O'Rourke

On the weather, when I got up this morning the 'partly cloudy' predicted last night was solid overcast. The weather weenies said a 30% chance of scattered rain in this area.
About 30 minutes later on the radio it was a 20% chance.
About an hour later it started raining.
Now we've got a severe thunderstorm watch over the area for most of the day. And the 'official' forecast still says 20% chance of storms, as thunder rolls around outside and the county just northeast of here has flash flood warnings out.
But the 'experts' can tell us what the weather and climate will be doing over the next hundred years or so.
Uh huh.

Back in town

Went out of town for a couple of days to visit my folks, so no posts and no responses to various comments.
To catch things up;
Mr. Completely has the results for his postal match, so go read the scores and vote. Preferably for me, but vote anyway.

I spent some time helping my dad clean out the barn, and move some heavy stuff around, in return for which I got Mom's cooking. Very good trade, I will tell you.

My cat's a bit under the weather, so I'm going through the fun routine of feeding her pills and forcing her to eat. You can imagine what a joy that is, but hopefully she'll get better.

I've got a big pot of mint to plant. Good for tabouli, and tea, and various other things.

I now have a recoil absorber for the Benelli, I hope it works as promised(see "vote for me" above).

And while I was gone I received two comments, surprisingly(yeah, right) from 'Anonymous'. One says 'F*** you', and the other is 'their innocent'. I'm too lazy to go back through the archives to find which posts these were added on to, but from the sparkling use of language and excellent spelling, I'll assume it's some, shall we say, 'liberal' type who objected to some political view I posted. I was thinking of some proper rebuttal, but I'll let them stand for themselves.

More later.

Know what happens when...

the bolt holding the blade on the lawn mower breaks? Yes, it stops cutting the grass, I mean what else happens?

In this case it simply fell to the ground instead of coming spinning out the back toward my ankle like a scene from a Stephen King novel. Very relieving, I assure you.

This started like so: Friend is selling house used to live in. Friend has been sick and hasn't been able to mow. I volunteered to go by after work today and run the mower over it. Front yard, ten minutes tops, no problem. Get the gate open and walk into the back and...

To put it in a politically correct manner, into his Rain Forest in the Making(RFM for short). The last time I saw anything that tall someone was using a combine to harvest it. And, due to various circumstances I won't go into, he'd left stuff in the yard here and there. Where you couldn't see it until you ran into it because of the RFM. Ah well, I said I would, so into the breech, etc.

It was about a third of the way through when the mower suddenly became quieter and stopped cutting. Being the observant sort I am this caught my attention and I killed the engine and pulled the mower back. And lying there in the last of the cut grass and matted clippings was the blade and the big washer and the lock washer. In the shaft was a half-empty hole, with the rest of the bolt still in it. Crap. After a couple of minutes of digging I found the broken-off portion, and by putting a socket on it and pushing hard into the shaft was able to get it to engage the rest of the bolt enough to back it out, a bit at a time. Broken-off portion too short to do any good of course.

So off to Ace Hardware, and I walked in the door three minutes before closing. Happily the bolt was a standard 3/8x24 thread so forty-something cents later I walked out with it, drove back, and put the blade back on. Then, on to further adventure.

It took about a half-hour to get the rest of the yard that I could, moving a few things, cutting tight around others and skipping some areas entirely. I kept pushing through the RFM, the grass, the bugs, for all I know the escaped marsupials hiding out from the zookeepers. I finally gave up after the following: the mower hit something and stalled, I backed it up and gave the starter a pull, and I could tell something was hung up on the blade. I tipped it up and found a pewter tankard. Not impaled, no, nothing so mundane. The handle of the bloody thing was looped around the blade. I have no idea how it managed that, as I had to take the damned blade back off to remove it. At which point I decided that was enough enviromental destruction(who needs a friggin' RFM in Oklahoma, for God's sake?) for one day, packed up my mower and tools and went home.

I called my friend this evening and advised him that if he ever let a yard get this bad again, don't call me 'cause I WON'T DO IT. Unless it's as a favor to his widow.

'Amnesty International' my ass

Found something interesting in this John Leo column:
"Rule 18. A different omission marred the reporting of Amnesty International's report charging torture in U.S. detainment camps. The group didn't just call Guantanamo a "gulag," an over-the-top remark that was universally reported. In a press release that most reporters ignored, the group also invited foreign governments to snatch certain visiting American officials off the streets and bring them to trial for crimes against humanity. The suggested snatchees, should they travel abroad, were President Bush, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, former CIA Director George Tenet, and other unnamed civilian and military officials. Amnesty International said that "all states have a responsibility to investigate and prosecute people responsible for these crimes," just as the British pounced on Augusto Pinochet in London in 1998. The snatching recommendation wasn't new, but the Amnesty press release is a useful reminder of the dangers of signing on to the International Criminal Court."

First, Amnesty International has given up any claim to being impartial or fair-minded, and should be either held up to ridicule or ignored completely. Second, any politician who says we should sign onto the ICC should be immediately tarred and feathered; I'll leave the 'ridden out of town on a rail' up to local option.

The effect of gunshots

As far as someone flying backwards, through a window, etc., it's crap. Always has been.

What brought this to mind is an episode of 'Mythbusters'. They took a pig carcass, hung it up on a balanced mount, and shot it with various firearms to see if it would be thrown back. Nope. Not with a .308, not with a burst from an MP5, at the end either a 12-guage slug or 00 buckshot transferred enough energy to make it fall off the mount, but that's all; it did NOT go flying backward, not a bit.

Peter Capstick, in various of his books and articles, explored the idea of 'knockdown power', finding it to be crap. Bullets just don't work that way. A bullet penetrates, so the energy is used in pushing it through the target and(in the case of soft tissue) damaging the tissue. If you took the energy tied up in a .357 Mag bullet and put it into a steel plate, say, a foot square, striking a man it would be able to knock him backwards, but that's a whole 'nother thing. Capstick said that in his experience he'd never seen any animal of a size greater than 40lbs actually knocked over/back by any cartridge, including big express-rifle stuff.

I think that if you were talking about a shotgun hitting somebody at close(a few feet) range, that might be able to physically shove the target back, but that might be equally from the press of expanding powder gas as well as the shot. And it would probably have to be shot; a slug would penetrate, shot would be more likely to transfer its full energy to the target.

This is one of the reasons I don't really like L. Sprague deCamp. He's an author. I originally didn't like him because he 'edited' a lot of the Robert E. Howard 'Conan' stories, and his 'editing' often involved rewriting the damn thing. Then, he wrote some short stories collected in a book called 'Rivers of Time', about a guy running safaris back in time. In the first story the character Rivers is laying down the law, saying that if you want to go back and hunt dinosaurs the only rifle you'll be allowed to carry is a .600 Nitro Express, because it's the only gun that can knock a dinosaur down. Which is followed, in at least one of the stories, by description of a dinosaur being knocked off it's feet by the impact of a shot. Besides messing up the stories for anyone who does know anything about guns, it spread bad information(done by a guy who's supposed to be serious about science).

Oh well. Now I can just wait for the next 'investigative report' from some idiot journalist who doesn't bother to find out that 'assault rifles' aren't any more powerful than anything else. Oh well.

Let the peasants decide? NEVER!

Smallest Minority has a piece on the attitudes of a lot of the bureaucrats and EU 'elites' towards the public voting on the EU constitution. Some very revealing comments, including:
"Referenda are in fact pure gambling. There is no guarantee of a positive outcome, unfortunately".
Got that? If you vote as they want, it's a 'positive' outcome, if you disagree it's a bad thing. Never mind that what the people decide is what's supposed to count, it's what the government thinks that's important.

A few years ago we had a measure shoved through in OK that flat infuriated the politicians and suckups. A petition was started calling for a special election, the measure in question stating that taxes could not be raised unless there was a vote by the people, or a supermajority in the House and Senate. You'd have thought it called for disembowelling a politician at every third full moon from the screaming. "We can't run the government this way! We can't take every tax increase to the people! This will make things fall apart!", etc. And the more signatures the petition got, the louder the screaming and the worse the predictions got. The measure passed, overwhelmingly, and what happened?

Nothing big. State government continued, with the change that the politicians couldn't raise taxes any time they felt like it; they had to either get a vote from the public, or get far more than a simple majority to do so. People showed they were willing to vote for an increase if convinced that it was necessary, but they had to be convinced. Some politician still has a fit on a regular basis, something along the lines of "because that Measure is in effect, we cannot do our jobs properly" because they can't simply raise taxes to pay for whatever.

What got me was the attitude that "since we were elected, we shouldn't have to ask the PEOPLE if we can do something". And it seemed to be worse with politicians who had been in for multiple terms. Sooner or later this tends to catch up to them, it just takes too long or doesn't happen often enough. A district in eastern OK had a U.S. Representative named Mike Synar years ago, who basically began ignoring what the folks back home thought and doing what the Democrat National Committee wanted. His last election he lost in the primary to a guy who's big expense was handing out cards that basically said "I'm NOT Mike Synar". And he lost big. And when he lost? He immediately moved permanently to D.C. Surprise, surprise.

Rambling a bit here, but the point stays that more and more politicians don't want the people to 'bother' them while they're at work. Never mind that they're supposed to be doing the people's business, and the people are SUPPOSED to have a say in it. It's a real problem here as well as in Europe, and we'd better stay on it. Or else.

I give you the Kimber Compact

That's what they called it when I bought it; now I think the comparable model is the Pro Carry. Shorter barrel & grip frame than the full-size, with the factory magazine it carries seven .45's; with Chip McCormick mags it carries eight, seven in the mag & one in the chamber.

This one is the aluminum frame, picked over steel because it weighs loaded what the steel frame version weighs empty, and since it was picked as a carry gun weight mattered. I don't know who originated the idea, but instead of a barrel bushing in the front of the slide, the barrel is cone-shaped at the end, fitting directly to the slide. It came with an extended thumb safety, beavertail grip safety, and low-profile Novak sights. The barrel is supposed to be match-grade, and it has a match-grade trigger. Those features were also considerations in choosing it.

This was only the second 1911-pattern pistol I'd ever fired. The first one, a full-size, had impressed me enough to want the style, and in .45acp; if I ever had to use it for real, I wanted something that would do the job of stopping the fight. Preferably by sight, in the extreme by having sufficient power to make the bad guy either stop fighting or run.

So how's it shoot? Very well. I've never had a problem that could be blamed on the firearm. It has always gone bang when you pull the trigger, and I suspect it's capable of greater accuracy than I am. The trigger is all I could expect, a touch of creep(hard to notice unless you're looking for it) with a clean break at around 3 lbs, I think.

I repeat, no problem that I could blame on the firearm. It has digested all factory ammo I've tried, ball, truncated cone and hollow points, without a burp. The only ammo it hasn't worked with was semi-wadcutters, and that's a common problem in 1911's that haven't had the barrel throated to handle them; since it was designed as a self-defense pistol I don't consider that a problem I'll worry about.

The only other problem I had was when I put in a Cominolli Frame Saver, a recoil-spring guide with buffers that mount on it. I'd read that aluminum-frame pistols like this could get the frame beat up over time where the slide hits it, and I read that this system was good, so I got one. And promptly started having fails-to-feed. It turned out that the buffers, under pressure, expanded out enough to rub slightly on the bottom of the barrel and the slide, and that added just enough friction to slow the slide enough to cause the problem. So I trimmed the buffers down to flush with the edges
of the guide, and no more problem.

The one other thing I'll mention is the recoil spring. In a pistol of this design the spring takes a battering, especially when shooting full-power ammo, so (at least at the time I bought it) Kimber recommended you replace it about every 1500-2000 rounds. I've done it about every 1500; Kimber sells it as a set of recoil, hammer and firing pin springs so you can replace all at the same time. I've measured the firing pin and hammer springs and found them to have taken no 'set', so I think Kimber does it that way just to be on the safe side.

My opinion is pretty much covered by this: I still carry it. There are times I have to go with something smaller, but when situation/clothes allow, this is what goes on my belt or in my vehicle. I've mostly used either Hornady XTP 185gr. HP or Speer Gold Dot 158gr. HP ammo, for normal self-defense I think they'll do the job if needed.

I handload a lot of my practice ammo, mostly cast 230gr. ball with 3.9 gr. of Hodgden Clays powder; it's an accurate load that's worked well for me(NOTE: this is a load I use in MY pistol; that's no guarantee it'll be wonderful in yours; check the manuals), lighter recoil than the carry loads so it's easier on my hands in practice. I think I could go to 4.0 or 4.1, it'd still be well within the safe range listed in my Lyman manual, and I've had an occasional fail-to-feed from the slide not coming back quite enough and that would solve that. Again, this is something with the load, not the pistol. I haven't changed the load partly because it shoots so nicely, and on the(rare) occasions it's happened, I've used it as a clearing drill- better at the range in practice than for real.
Lee will make custom bullet molds, what I'd like to do some day is take their 230gr. truncated cone and shorten it enough to cut the weight to 200 and have them cut a mold to throw that bullet. It'd be accurate, a good weight, and if you had to I'd have no problem using that bullet as a defense load.

The finish is getting pretty worn, so one of these days I'll have to either send it to somebody or refinish it myself. Kevin at Smallest Minority once mentioned this Moly Resin finish that can be put on with a airbrush and cured in the oven; it looks good, so I may have to get a bottle. And if I have the bottle, there's a couple of other things I could try it on...

I wonder how it'd work as a blade finish?

Additional
This was brought to mind by something I read over at Mad Ogre, and that's customer service. My only experience with Kimber customer service was an e-mail I sent them with a question- which they didn't answer, which kind of pissed me off; how hard is it to answer the damn question? But from what I've read at Ogre's place there are a lot of people who have had problems with Kimber in repairs. Some of them bad enough that Ogre says he'll never buy one, especially since Springfield makes a fine series of 1911's and has a very good rep for taking care of the customers. It may be that they've cleaned up past problems, but I personally do not know either way; it's something to keep in mind and check out for yourself.

Carnival of Cordite #16 is up

Over at Gullyborg.

Gullyborg's place is a good one even without the Carnival, so while you're there check it out.

Ok, I HAVE to put this up

From over at Free Market Fairy Tales:

Incidentally, I ended up stood behind a typical Pleb Precinct shopper in Tescos at the weekend. The tracksuit-clad slapper had a complaint – and so did the rest of the queue as her three brats Shiraz, Carsophagus and Chanel No 5 laid waste to the check-out displays.
She was brandishing one of those disposable barbecues and complaining loudly to the poor check-out girl that … wait for it … there were no burgers inside as pictured on the packaging. "Just effing coal."
To be fair, the girl explained the situation as tactfully as possible, offering the screaming harridan a full refund if she wasn't happy. It was then that she noticed the detail of the receipt.
"But you bought three of these," she told the Bardsley in front of her. "Have you brought the other two back as well?"
"No," said the tattooed troll. "They're in the freezer at home."

Further on why I don't trust the U.N.

The situations in Darfur and in Zimbabwe have some things in common; the U.N. wants to blow hot air and do nothing, and the people being starved/raped/murdered have no effective way of fighting. Note the excerpt:

"There hasnÂ’t been any revolution so far because the potential rebels cannot get guns. No one is willing to arm the dissatisfied majority, and over two thirds of the population lives in poverty. . . . The government seems determined to starve its enemies to death, secure in the knowledge that the victims are unarmed, and the government forces have lots of guns."

And here's another place where the U.N. and the EUrocrats come in. Remember the treaty to end the 'trafficking' in small arms they're pushing? Two things about it; one, they consider any firearms 'small arms' that should be banned frompossessionn by mere peasants and two, they very specifically don't want anyone to be able to rebel against an oppressive government. They want everything to be controlled by the governments and by the U.N. controlling the governments; there's no room in there for a bunch of uppity commoners to do something themselves.

Make no mistake, a civil war is just about the most nasty kind of an essentially nasty business, but there are worse things. Like the Mugabe government planning on starving people into submission, and killing them if that won't seem to work. Like the people in Darfur being systematically murdered and raped and starved and taken as slaves. Actual in-chains do-as-you're-told-or-die SLAVES. While the U.N. blathers and wastes and steals and rapes.

Instapundit says some SpecOps trainers and a bunch of AK-47's would work wonders, and I agree. And if we do it(I wish we would) we'd better be ready for the screaming from the offended elites. We'd be 'assisting civil war' and 'undercutting the U.N.' and 'trafficking in small arms' and 'racists helping people of color kill each other', and so on. These 'elites' would rather the slavery continue, and the starvation and murder and so on, rather than see a bunch of peasants armed and standing up for themselves.

It would be profoundly messy, no question, but what's the alternative? Trust the U.N. and E.U. to do something? Stop dreaming. Barring a miracle, make that a series of miracles, Africa is going to continue down the path it's walking until it's either completely trashed, or until something happens to change the governments in most of the countries there. Maybe, just maybe, a lot of armedcitizenss with a bit of guidance and an ideal of a free society could do the trick.

And, quite frankly, if it didn't work out as we hope, how would they be worse off?

Tried the Benelli out with different slugs

Since it looked like it would be a while before I could get to a 50-yard range, I finally took it and the collection of slugs to the indoor range where I do most of my handgunning. Their rifle side has 30 yards, so I settled for that. Other reason I had wanted a different range for this was there's no real bench, so it's not as steady as I'd like for ammo testing.

I had Winchester, Brenneke, Remington, Federal, and some Remington Managed Recoil. The Managed Recoil stuff hit about two inches lower than the others, otherwise the results were almost identical with all; two shots touching- some overlapping- with the third a little off. That consistently with all of them I blame the one to the side on me; the Nova is a short, light, handy scattergun, which means that with these loads it hits hard on both ends.
My shoulder was a bit sore when I got home.

By some miracle I wound up with a little money left over from last month, so last night I went to Brownell's and ordered the recoil reducer setup for this shotgun. I read a review of the gun once where a guy said that the setup should be standard with this piece; may well be right, but since it isn't, I've got one on the way.

The last time my dad qualified before retirement, one of the stages had a total of either 50 or 100 rounds(don't remember which) of mixed buck and slugs at different ranges. Their shotgun was a Remington 870, and most of them were getting a slip-on recoil pad and adding it on over the factory pad; most of them still had sore shoulders for a week after that stage. If there'd been a way for them to add something on to theirs, someone could have made some money that day.

Armor

Old style, that is, leather and horn and metal and cloth, with not a thread of kevlar to be seen. I got interested in the subject back when I was playing in the Society for Creative Anachronism. At it's best it's a group of interesting people researching and spending weekends living somewhat like the middle ages were like(at it's worst, it's pretty bad, but let's skip that for now).

Yes, at one time I, among other things, made armor and made weapons like swords and spears out of rattan and used them(formally 'heavy weapons combat'; more commonly 'hitting people with sticks'). And, since I had then- and still have- a serious regard for the idea of keeping my body in a fairly undamaged condition, that meant learning something about armor.

There were many kinds, basically broken down into types:
Chain mail, linked metal rings
Scale, overlapping pieces of leather or horn or metal(like the scales on a lizard)
Plate, actual pieces of sheet iron or steel shaped to fit various parts of the body. No, not those, dammit.
Quilted, pieces of heavy canvas with wool or something similar in between and stitched together.

Over time I used all of these but plate and quilted; I wasn't interested enough in hitting people with sticks to spend the time to learn and make plate, and it wasn't in my time period anyway, and quilted just didn't seem like enough to me. Though I did come damn close to a plate breast and back at one time. A friend and I took a bunch of the steel straps(about 1/2" wide) used to hold bundles of brick and such and wove them together, then stuck some foam on the back for padding; some more pieces, riveted together at the ends and fanned out in the middle/foam-backed also/ made the shoulder pieces, and I will tell you that was tough. You couldn't get a real- as in sharp- sword through it with a cut, and unless someone caught a seam exactly right penetration in a thrust was very limited. Big drawback to this was stiffness, it had no give at all when you moved.

The best armor I used for SCA fighting was leather scale. A tunic of light leather, loose enough to wear a padded gambeson under it, with leather scales about 2x3.5" laced on. I soaked the scales in wax to stiffen them, and this stuff was a treat. It would move with you fairly well, and you could take a hit hard enough to actually make you stumble sideways and not get hurt. I made a piece for my left(forward) leg with the same construction, and used it until I gave up fighting. Last time I saw the guy who bought it, he'd taken the scales off("It was too heavy and hot for this climate" he said. Idiot)

Mail is interesting stuff. Most was/is made in a pattern called '4-through-1', meaning exactly that; every link not on an edge has four others linked through it. It's marvelously flexible, and could be made with the ends of the rings overlapped and riveted(the best) or just butted together(cheaper). Usually worn with a padded tunic(gambeson) under it, it beat the hell out of nothing, and did a fairly good job of stopping cuts, but something like an arrow with a narrow point could punch right through, and a spear could do the same if hard-driven.

Plate armor is a lot like the weapons of the period, in that it wasn't as heavy as people tend to think. Tournament armor was one thing; you weren't expected to move around a whole lot in it, so it could be made seriously heavy. Some late-period breastplates were nearly 1/2" thick, you got on your horse and then put it on. Actual fighting armor was another thing. About ten years ago I saw a show on the History Channel(I believe) on plate, some researchers went through some private and museum collections and used a small ultrasound probe to measure the thickness of pieces, and it was very consistent; breastplates averaged about 2 millimeters, leg and arm pieces about 1mm, helmets about 3mm. More vital areas had heavier metal, less vital lighter pieces. If I remember right a suit of full plate- again, actual battle armor- weighed about 60 lbs, well-distributed over the body so it could be moved in. A mail hauberk(the jacket) and pants and a good helmet would weigh about the same, but it was not as well distributed; the weight was mostly borne by the shoulders and hips.

Of course armoring came to a crashing halt(literally in some cases) with the introduction of firearms. Somewhere in one of the British museums is a beautiful set of plate with a hole about .65 caliber in the chest to illustrate why. A crossbow with a good angle could put a bolt through it, and a longbow could do the same(points made for war were often either four-sided with a blunt point, or actually shaped like a chisel), but once they figured out how to make firearms in quantity armor was through. Until that odd stuff called Kevlar and Spectra came around, and ceramic plates that'll stop an armor-piercing bullet.

We're still using helmets, too, though of different stuff the patterns often look familiar. Last helmet I had was a modified spangenhelm(sp?). This was a pointed top(sometimes a downward stroke, if a little off-angle, would glance off it), sides and back extended down to cover the sides and back of the head and neck, and a visor in the front to cover down to a little below chin-level. I made it with a hinged visor; easier to get on and off, and if I ever got really hurt I wanted it to be as easy as possible to get the damn thing off. The guy who bought my scale also bought it, and aside from putting a horsetail on top, it stayed the same. If I can find it, I'll try to take a picture of the pattern I used to make it and post it. Lots of riveting there.

I'm getting tired of writing these words,

but I don't know why I didn't mention this before.

Over at Babalu Blog, Val put together some t-shirts to raise money for the Cuba Nostalgia Convention. Shirts here; lots of other information about the convention above.

I know, I know, this is waaaay late. I get to going 'round & 'round and I forget things. It gets any worse, I'm going to be making crop circles.

Anyway, my check for a shirt is going out today. I know just the people to wear it around, too; same one's who're pissed off by my Nation of Riflemen shirt.

Heh, heh heh.

Interesting thing during the press conference

Had the radio on during the press conference this morning, and someone- I didn't catch who- asked the President if he thought the recent increase in killings in Iraq meant the 'insurgency' is gaining strength. But he didn't say 'insurgents' at first. It went something like "-the terr- uh, insurgents-".

Interesting. Started to call the terrorists terrorists, then caught himself and changed it to 'insurgents'.

I guess it's not politically correct to call Islamist mass-murderers terrorists. Which tells me a lot.