Ukrainian armorer makes fantasy armor gauntlet - video

[JHCC]

I've been following the YouTube channel "World of Armor" from a Ukrainian armorer who makes replicas of museum pieces, fantasy armor, and harness for full-contact armored combat (such as the Battle of Nations). Although his usual channel has narration in Ukrainian with English subtitles, he just added a new YT channel called "Art of Armor" where he provides narration in English. Here is the first video from that channel, showing the making of a gauntlet from one of the characters in "The Witcher"; some of his shaping techniques are really interesting, and I'm looking forward to adapting them to some of my own hollow work.

(NB: I'm posting this in the "Cold Worked" section of the forum even though the smith uses a mix of hot and cold working, as this seems to be the primary area for armor.)

[Glenn]

His custom tooling is very interesting.

[JHCC]

His editing is fun, too.

[JHCC]

Note: the smith says that he is using "30hgsa" steel. A little websearching tells me that this is a Russian GOST steel standard, the composition of which is:

  C: 0.28-0.34%, Si: 0.90-1.20%, Mn: 0.80-1.10%, Cr: 0.80-1.10%, P: >0.025%, S: >0.025%, Ni: >0.3%

This looks pretty similar (to this non-metallurgist, anyway) to AISI-SAE 4130, whose composition is:

  C: 0.28-0.33%, Si: 0.15-0.35%, Mn: 0.7-0.9%, Cr: 0.8-1.1%, P: ≤0.035%, S: ≤0.04% (NB: 4130 also has Mb: 0.15-0.25%)

[Frosty]

I like this guy. Normally, almost always in fact I hate speeded up video, it's typically just filler and shows stupid things like BAD technique with disk grinders or glared out by direct arc flash. 

This video on the other hand uses speeded up video to good effect, showing how the tooling is used and in a time frame that's easy to absorb tool and effect. 

His editing is fun, enhancing it's educational value by eliminating mundane processes that normally bore "students" into not paying attention to things they  need to.

Thanks for the link John, I think I'll follow along too.

Frosty The Lucky.

[Scott NC]

  For what's it's worth I enjoyed it too.  I had no idea what goes into making armour.  Thanks.

[JHCC]

On his main channel, he also has videos about making grappling hooks for clearing landmines and heavy rebar staples for building log barricades, just in case your country gets invaded by a neighboring superpower.

[JW513]

I love this videos. Thanks for reminding me to watch them more often.

[ThomasPowers]

Armour making usually involves THOUSANDS of hammer strikes using fairly light hammers; speeding it up and the "jumps" helps a lot in my opinion---as does working hot!