dog of ulthar
Member
I've been (very slowly) trying to get an Abhorsen (if you don't know the Abhorsen trilogy, it's about fighting the undead with magic bells) costume together - not a particular Abhorsen, and based vaguely on the descriptions from the books rather than the cover art. Because I'm at college right now and not able to make stuff, I have instead been thinking way to hard about making stuff. Specifically, I was thinking about the armor, which (if I remember correctly) is described as a coat of interlocking (I could be wrong, they might have just been overlapping) scales, and somehow that led to me discovering Chinese mountain scale. There isn't much historical information about it; evidence only survives in statues and paintings, but it supposedly looked something like this:
The reigning theory of how it was made is, I think, this guy's, in which it goes together something like this:
And people have tried this, and it looks really cool:
That guy's in the SCA, so he had to make it in steel, but I'm not - and the Abhorsen's armor is supposed to be ceramic anyway, not metal.
So, theoretically, would it be possible - and, importantly, feasible - to make scales for this out of some sort of thin plastic? What kind? Would it be worth it to get the scales laser-cut? Most importantly, how would one shape them? Could I make a thing out of wood or something in the right shape, put a scale on it, and then hit it with a heat gun? Am I making any sense? I've never made armor out of anything other than craft foam, so I'm interested in any and all theories, and I think someone really ought to try this. Because it just looks so cool.
The reigning theory of how it was made is, I think, this guy's, in which it goes together something like this:
And people have tried this, and it looks really cool:
That guy's in the SCA, so he had to make it in steel, but I'm not - and the Abhorsen's armor is supposed to be ceramic anyway, not metal.
So, theoretically, would it be possible - and, importantly, feasible - to make scales for this out of some sort of thin plastic? What kind? Would it be worth it to get the scales laser-cut? Most importantly, how would one shape them? Could I make a thing out of wood or something in the right shape, put a scale on it, and then hit it with a heat gun? Am I making any sense? I've never made armor out of anything other than craft foam, so I'm interested in any and all theories, and I think someone really ought to try this. Because it just looks so cool.
