Christmas Gauntlets

Currently pushing to just Finish my sets of gauntlets and codify lessons learned. Here are the first two pairs, with a third which should be finished this week.

Two pairs of gauntlets in boxes

I’m still working on a last pair, but a brief glance at my workbench suggests that I have been trimming a lot of “arming nails” to length: here’s a busy day of riveting!

I should have some new instructions on how to make the fingers up soon, followed by final assembly and then going back to how to emboss the gauntlet pieces. Hopefully (Crossing fingers) I’ll have the complete build instructions up by the end of the year.

Some brief lessons learned:

  • If you are using carbon steel, then 22 Gauge is a good thickness for everything but the knuckle plate
  • One of the reasons to use 22 ga is to not “overtighten” the leather rivets, which will cause the fingers to “curl” more than desired
  • Make sure that you have the right sewing equipment, because it takes a looooong time to sew the finger and thumb assemblies onto the foundational gloves – a size 3 glovers needle is the smallest that I can thread waxed linen thread into, and seems to be the most workable (overall) for this job
  • The length of the finger plates closest to the body are shorter than the middle plates, because the knuckle plate provides significant overlap coverage, and the articulation of this plat also provides some “cheat factor”
  • Use light colored thread, so that when you make a mistake it isn’t glaring
  • These take a lot of time to build. My current estimate is 80-100 hours per pair, with an hour of sewing per finger as part of the final assembly

Cheers!

Leave a Reply