Plastic Gauntlets

[dennis guy grace]

Lyonel here again.  

At 12:07 PM 10/14/96 -0500, Gnith wrote:

>I've been making plastic armor from ABS for a while & even tried making
>36-piece plastic finger gauntlets this weekend. (They came out looking like
>big, ridiculous Darth Vader hands and the plastic is just plain too thick to
>do really well-tuned fingers, but it was a fun project and will probably
>translate easily into mittens.) 

Well, this will probably generate a number of disagreements, but I strongly
recommend that you NOT use lightweight materials such as plastic, leather,
or aluminum for your gauntlets.  I know it's not against the rules, but I
wish it were.  As with your helmet, part of the protection afforded by
gauntlets rests in their ability to absorb momentum--i.e., their mass.  With
gauntlets, to a certain degree, mass is good.

I got into a huge argument over this with Viscount Sir Aveloc the Young,
currently residing in An Tir a few years back.  He claimed to have been
using his leather gauntlets for X number of years without injury and
suggested that my conjectures were insulting.  Not long after that, he got
his hands broken in an Artemisian coronet list.  Now he uses steel.

Yours in eService

Sir Lyonel Oliver Grace
_______________________
Dennis G. Grace
Postmodern Medievalist
Assistant Instructor
Division of Rhetoric and Composition
University of Texas at Austin

For every wight that lovede chivalrye
And wolde, his thankes, han a passant name,
Hath preyed that he myghte been of that game.
                --Jeff Chaucer's Knight