Many thanks indeed for that Ian, greatly appreciated!

The construction of Frederick’s Battle Shield has hit a slight delay! I had already decided to make the back or inside part of the shield a darker brown leather to make it stand out against the light beige colour of the armour straps so the first job was to buy another small offcut of suitable leather from ebay. This has come already but in the meantime I’ve had to send off for another type of skiving knife to thin the leather down. The first one I tried just doesn’t work on this soft ‘suede’ type leather backing! Try as I might it just seems to fluff up the back of the leather instead of actually removing it. Watching the ‘how to’ clips on leather working on Youtube, it seems the other type of knife, the one that looks like a wide chisel is the way to go so I’m now awaiting one of those from China. In the meantime, I can carry on with the basic construction as you’ll see below.
By Frederick’s time, the old “Kite” shield as used by the Normans, Saxons and anybody indulging in the early Crusades had evolved into a smaller version known as a “Heater” shield. (Absolutely no idea why it’s called a Heater, probably means something completely different in Latin or Medieval French I expect!) Photo 1 shows the reverse side of the real thing together with the accompanying straps. The Heater is essentially a Kite with the top semi-circle cut off and the lower curves tightened up to reduce the overall height. Many of them were curved from left to right and many were simply flat. Frederick’s will be of the flat variety (unless it starts to warp under construction and then we’ll see!) In Photo 2 the basic shield shape has been drawn out onto the thin wooden strip to be used for the core of the shield. The full sized Heater ranges from about 20” to just over two feet wide and from 26 – 30” top to bottom. The original medieval shields were usually constructed from thin planks of Lime or Linden wood, the planks of about 6” width being glued together in layers at right angles to each other forming a sort of medieval plywood! Lime or Linden was preferred as it was very light compared to other woods and the tight grain would tend to spring back onto any penetrating ‘foreign body’ gripping against it and preventing overly deep penetration, ie, arrow and crossbow quarrel heads and even thrown spear tips. Harder woods like oak etc would split along the grain and allow the point of a weapon to pass right through. The overall shape varies slightly from design to design and I have opted for a pretty simple ‘formula’ version as follows:
The overall width is two feet, which, in 1/12th scale equates to 2” as shown on Diagram 3. From the top edge there is a perpendicular drop of 8” or 2/3” in this scale. From here the rest is fairly straightforward as long as you have a drawing compass – it took me ages to find mine again! It is shown on the left in Photo 2, not your conventional metal ‘pair of compasses’ with the attached pencil (which would work just as well) but an incredibly useful ‘non damaging’ plastic thingy I’ve had since art college. The clear round window at the top has a little dimple to mark the centre and you just loosen the yellow locking screw to move either of the two pencil holes into line. In the case of the shield, the dimple was held over one of the ends of the vertical lines (point x on the diagram) and the pencil point hole was slid across to the other ‘x’ and locked. With the pencil in place the whole thing rotates about the dimple and the pencil draws in a nice arc to the bottom of the shield. Repeat the process from the other x and there’s the shield drawn out. The next step was to cut out the wooden shape. The straight top was cut out with the Exacto razor saw whilst the curved arcs were cut out with the Rotacraft mini jigsaw, one of the three rotary tools in the Rotacraft Tool set and shown in Photo 4.
After a light sanding along the edges the wooden shield was used to provide an outline drawn in permanent ink onto a clear acetate sheet as shown in Photo 5. The acetate sheet is from a pack of OHP sheets (Over Head Projector sheets for those used to digital media!) This outline will be used in the following instalment when I create the Coat of Arms graphics for the front of the shield. Finally, in Photo 6 we have those Coats of Arms of Frederick’s Palatinate Fiefdom. These were acquired from one of the royalty free wiki sites. Unfortunately, the shape of that shield is subtly different! I had hoped to be able to ‘stretch’ the jpeg of the arms to fit the new shield design (hence the acetate outline to check the fit) but that proved impossible, the top half fitted ok but not without cutting the bottom lion in half! In the end it was necessary to completely disassemble the original jpeg and re-build it in sections using my Corel Print House program – as you’ll see in the next instalment!

Until then, Happy Modelling to you All!


Robin.

Hi Robin.
Looking really great. Love the artwork for the shield.
look forward to seeing more.
Ian

Many thanks for those kind comments to Ian and Paul! The combination of a graphics program and the inkjet waterslide decal sheets is a very useful tool - it can be used to create virtually any form of individual markings for models, especially nose art type designs. The only down side with cheapie inkjet printers is that you can't produce white numerals or lettering on a clear background as you get with commercial decals - other than that it's really handy!
I've made one fairly major change to the materials used on the model of Frederick - when I sent off to China for the "Antique Silver" leaf I assumed the antique part meant it would be a duller form of the silver and therefore closer to the steel effect I was after. In actual fact the antique effect is composed of tiny scratches and cracks built into the sheets of leaf. This would be great for any other application but I'm finding that the blue grey enamel wash is tending to collect in those scratches which gives the effect of very cracked steel! Anyway, a few weeks ago I sent off back to China for a pack of standard silver leaf and this arrived a few days ago, so from now on the armour will be first gilded with the standard silver before getting its enamel wash. Fortunately the helm is small enough to get away with the original antique finish!
On we go then!

In Photo 12 you can see the long awaited Skiving Knife all the way from China! Unlike the first type which was a ‘pull towards’ cutter with a replaceable razor type blade, this one is a much more substantial tool more akin to a chisel or paint scraper. It is seen here resting on the dark leather strip used to produce the back of the shield lining and the wooden skiving jig I knocked up from off cuts of pine board. The leather is seen ‘suede’ side up as it is when locked into the jig. The skiving knife arrived with a pretty good sharp edge on it already but there was a small protrusion of metal on the end of the blade (probably from the manufacturing process) which I first ground off before my first attempts.
The jig is seen more fully in Photo 13, the intention was to first clamp the end in the screw clamp bar in the foreground and then stretch the leather strip under the top clamp in the background. At first, this worked well but as I skived away the first inch of the leather I discovered the top clamp was pretty much superfluous – the skived portion of the leather strip becomes very stretchy compared to the rest of the thicker leather (I suppose that should have been fairly obvious when I think about it now), which means it bows up when trying to skive any further back. What I ended up doing was to stretch the strip out by gripping the end with my left thumb and using the top clamp as a grip for my fingers. After skiving an inch of leather the end clamp is loosened, the leather slid down through the clamp until the unskived portion is near the start line and then tighten up the clamp again.
The actual skiving technique is to hold the tool almost flat over the end of the jig and then to push the blade down into the leather with a sliding motion to the right. It’s a very time consuming task – I couldn’t slice the leather down to the required thickness in one go, about three quarters of the suede can come off in the first slice but from them on it’s a case of paper thin slices one after the other (and not pressing into the leather too hard or you cut right through it (the voice of experience!)
The final thin sheet of leather is seen beside the wooden base in Photo 14. As you might notice in this photo and in Photo 15 which shows the leather glued to the wood, there is a slight blemish on the left hand side – this was the result of coming a little too close to the surface layer but shouldn’t be noticeable when the shield is complete. The skiving knife is razor sharp but needs to be re-ground quite often during the cutting process. I used a small sheet of very worn P400 glass paper to simply smooth the blade over from both sides to re-sharpen every now and again. I cut the leather to the size of the wood before gluing it down, in hindsight I should have cut the leather slightly oversized and then trimmed it back once stuck down – never mind!
With the back face of the shield lined the next task is to form the leather covering which would have been the front face of the shield in real life where it was passed around the sides of the shield and glued / tacked to the back face. For this I went back to the light beige leather, which is providing all of Frederick’s armour straps. You can see the thin strip cut off the length of the beige leather clamped into the jig in Photo 16 (along with a better impression of the skiving knife). Finally in Photo 17, the skiving process itself is seen in close up. The trimmed part is about an inch across and this is as far as it is practical to go before loosening the clamp and dropping the skived section down into the jaws to begin the next inch.
In the next instalment, adding the leather edging, working out how to make tiny scale nails and building up the arm protective padding (with more nails!)

Until then, Happy modelling to you All!


Robin.

Hi there Kev! It’s great to see you back again, I noticed that you hadn’t been around and was beginning to think something had happened!
Many thanks indeed for those kind words and for the explanation of ‘Heater’ (why didn’t I look it up on Wiki!!) I haven’t done much for the past two weeks as I’ve realised another ‘slight’ disadvantage of an attic workroom. Not only does it need a skylight for light and ventilation (which I took care of, although in this present 'heatwave'its a little oppressive up here!) but there’s another, even more fundamental problem – if you’ve completely knackered your lower back, you can’t climb the ruddy loft ladder to get up there! (or back down which is even harder and more painful!) I don’t know what I’ve done to it, I had a slipped disc many years ago and occasionally I’ve had a ‘sore back’, which was always gone again within 48 hours. This one’s a real doozy! Although the actual back pain has subsided a bit (apart from when I’m sitting at the computer like now) the pain has moved sideways into my right hip and the anti-inflammatory and codeines aren’t working as well as they did. Now waiting for a physio appointment!
Anyhow, I finally managed to get up to the attic a couple of days ago after reading your comments on my old boss’ computer (at ground level!) about the polishing and nail techniques. Fortunately the nails for the shield are purely cosmetic as you’ll see below but your description got me wondering about another part of the construction I still had to work out – how to fix the tin armour sections together – your suggestion about the nails and polishing worked out brilliantly! I haven’t got the ‘pro’ polishing bits and bobs that you mentioned but I do have a selection of wire brushes and polishing ‘mops’ for the little rotary tool and the two together produced a ‘polished steel’ effect so close to the silver leaf and wash on the plastic parts that I may not even need to blue-grey wash the polished metal. In fact it looks so good I’m now thinking of scratch building the two tassets and replacing the plastic ones. As for the fixing of the plates together, I’m now filing down the brass pins as I was going to do anyway to create the scale rivet heads, but I’m now heating the pins as well, cutting them off just inside the plates and actually scale riveting them together just like the originals! A brilliant idea mate and many thanks for that! I’ll put in an extra post when I can to show the difference between the original steel effect tuna tin and the polished metal alternative.
Onwards!
In Photo 18 we have the completed skived length of the beige leather, from this will be cut the thin strips which will be used to line the edges and rear ‘turn-overs’ which will give the shield the effect of being covered in leather across the front face. Photo 19 shows the first of those strips cut to width and placed over the edge on the top of the shield. This one, because it was a basic straight run was first glued to the leather part of the shield backing and then the edge section was glued and bent over the wood, as shown in Photo 20, keeping it in place until the super glue had taken hold. The other two strips however were first glued to the wood edge and once dry, the rest was then bent around the shield and glued down onto the dark brown leather as illustrated in Photos 21 and 22. I had expected to have had to slit the overlap to allow it to fit around the curves but in actual fact the skived down leather was supple enough to follow the arc of the shield without any further adjustments. The leather was glued to the wooden sections with super glue gel and to the dark leather backing with standard ‘watery’ super glue. The next section to be added after the nails around the edge was the padded ‘cushion’ to protect the forearm from the concussion effects of impacts on the shield face and for this I ‘borrowed’ another ebay item I bought for Mum a few months ago to help with her new shoes. This is a spray can of chemical leather softener pictured in Photo 23.
Firstly though, as mentioned earlier, the ‘nails’ in the rear face of the shield are non-functional, simply there to give the impression of the leather parts having been fixed ‘the old way’! To fabricate the nails I went back to one of my favourite materials – stretched plastic sprue. To form the nail I just drilled a hole through the leather and wood layers (from the reverse side in that order), first making a hole in the leather using the sewing needle/wooden handle tool to avoid ‘tearing’ the leather with the drill bit. The length of stretched sprue was then threaded down through the shield as shown in Photo 24. The end of the sprue was then carefully brought near to a candle flame until the end melted into a bowl shape forming the nail head as illustrated in Photo 25. One thing to be aware of with this method, you have to approach the actual centre of the flame in order to get the bowl end to form straight – approaching the flame from above or below the centre results in the bowl forming ‘cock-eyed’ or slanting (although the distances are miniscule, one side of the bowl is closer to the flame than the other causing it to bend out of shape!) With the nail head properly formed (any mistakes are simply cut off and another attempt made) a tiny drop of super glue was applied to the nail just below the head as seen in Photo 26 and the sprue is then pulled down until all that shows is the nail head. After a few seconds, the excess sprue is sliced off flush with the wooden front face with a safety razor blade (Photo 27).
With all the nails positioned around the leather edging of the shield, it was time to think about the padded arm protection which was designed to cushion the force of blows against the front of the shield transferring into the shield arm (and breaking the bones thereof!) I ended up using two methods to construct this piece – both using the same materials with the eventual better method being the complete opposite of the first! Method 1 is illustrated in Diagram 28. A hollow ‘mould’ formed from scrap plywood (part of the fret from a DelPrado partwork ship kit, possibly the old Victory but more likely the Bounty) is used to provide a box into which the softened leather strip is forced by the piece of ply, which was cut out of the same box. The actual parts are shown in Photo 29. The procedure is under way in Photo 30. The leather has been softened by spraying the aerosol into an old plastic bottle lid and then painting it onto the leather by brush. This is the rear face of the leather but I also painted the front face where it appeared through the box mould. The result of the first attempt is shown in Photo 31. As you can see, the leather did form into the cushion (sort of) but the face of the leather was marred, by applying the softener directly to it. The skiving used to produce this attempt wasn’t wasted however, this piece will be sliced up later to provide some of the many straps for Frederick’s armour. After the first attempt I decided to completely reverse the moulding procedure as illustrated in Diagram 32. This method had two distinct advantages over the first system – unlike the earlier try I wasn’t going to apply the leather softener to the more delicate outer face of the leather and, secondly, instead of having multiple clamps to hold both the softened leather and the rectangular wooden block in place, this time I would need only one large clamp to hold the main cut-out block pressed down over the smaller one, the work top itself providing the flat surface everything was pressed down onto. This is shown in Photo 33 with the far better defined cushion shape shown against the first try in Photo 34. As you can see, it is a much cleaner and deeper formed shape. The excess leather was then trimmed back to provide a narrow border around the cushion and a strip of un-skived leather was super glued inside as shown in Photo 35. Once dried, a series of super glue drops was applied as seen here to fix the cushion to the back of the shield as seen in Photo 36. This shot shows the padded cushion glued in place with the stretched sprue nails arranged around the outer edges of the shield. The six brass pins around the outside of the padding mark the positions of the rivets for the leather straps to come later.
In the next instalment (aging body permitting) – adding the straps to the back and the coat of arms decal to the front.

Until then, Happy Modelling to you All (and thanks again to Modelmania!)


Robin.

This is fantastic work Robin, really interesting build to follow

Steve

Many thanks to Paul, Stevie, Dave, Kev and Ian for all their great comments and all gratefully received! The back is getting better every day, helped no doubt by saying a fond farewell to my 20 yr old mattress and a new firm foam one! (No more broken spring protruding from the underside!) My normal complaint is an ongoing IBS condition, strangely that vanishes whenever any other injury crops up, mind over matter I expect. Still, anything's better that that constant pain and at least now I can go up and down the loft ladder without cringing!

Carrying on from the last posting, with the rear sections of the shield shown before now completed, the next task was to fit the front face of the shield up with its flat surface for the heraldic decal to adhere to. This was accomplished by gluing the wooden front to a sheet of thin plasticard as shown in Photo 37. Having learnt my lesson with the rear leather covering, this time I allowed plenty of overlap as you can see in the photo (apart from the flat top edge which was butted up to the edge of the plasticard). I’m pretty sure I used lots of super glue ‘drops’ applied to the plasticard surface after the outline of the shield had been pencilled in and then clamped the wooden base down tight leaving it overnight for good measure. The next day I trimmed the plasticard back to the edge of the shield with good sharp craft knives followed by a light sanding to bring the plastic back flush with the beige leather edging. This was followed by two good thick coats of Humbrol White Acrylic, painted halfway over the leather from the wooden side to simulate the (probably lead based) white base coat which was painted over the front face leather covering on the original shields of the period (it also served to blend the plasticard into the leather as well!)
Whilst that was drying I went on to making the tan leather straps for the hand grip and shoulder straps. This was formed from my largest and oldest piece of leather, a bit I’ve had for years and is about A3 in size (or was at one time!) This is the much stiffer ‘briefcase’ type hide leather and was far easier to skive (although at the same time much easier to ‘over-skive’ and cut right through by mistake as well!) The skived strips are shown in Photo 38, in actual fact the strips are thinner and longer than they appear here, I squashed up the photo to make it fit the available space on this page! The two longer strips at the back form the shoulder strap and the two foreground ones make up both the ‘X’ shaped hand grip and the upper arm strap. The construction of the hand grip is illustrated in Photo 39. One part is already in place, secured in position by two larger brass nails suitably blackened chemically and the second half of the ‘X’ is in the process of being fitted on. This strap uses the same nail to secure both the hand grip and one half of the shoulder strap, a process that is repeated for the other half whilst fitting the upper arm strap later. The shield is held in position on the scrap foam pieces by the same brass nails which are also seen protruding from the plasticard face in Photo 42. I will probably be making up Frederick’s sword scabbard belt from the same tan leather in the future.
In Photos 40 and 41, we have a close up of the finished hand-grip with and without the hand, whilst in Photo 43, the entire arm is shown fitted into both the leather straps. This arm has since been glued onto the shoulder joint on the plastic torso and the final position of the shield relative to the body worked out. With the rear face of the shield completed, the final task before working with the decal was to create a set of six rivet heads marking where the rear fixings come through the wooden thickness of the shield. Again, stretched sprue was used as shown in Photo 44, a thicker sprue this time with the end heated a little longer to produce the ‘bell’ shape as seen here. Once I had made six good ones (not as easy as the flatter nail heads) they were sliced off the sprues, partly sanded smooth on the underside, again not easy as they are so small there’s nothing much to push them over the sandpaper with! They were then super-glued down over the previously snipped off and ground down nails last seen in Photo 42, as shown in Photo 45.
Now came the hard part – creating the inkjet waterslide decals designed earlier. The first printing is shown in Photo 46. Unfortunately there was a problem with this first one – if you look closely at the white diamonds you can see there are two distinct ‘shades’ of white. The duller ones are from the original jpeg off the web, the true white ones were the ones I had to colour fill after re-sizing the artwork sections to fit the new shield dimensions. The problem was, the difference was almost impossible to see on the brighter computer screen and I didn’t realise the fact until after I had printed the design off onto the inkjet decal paper! Once I knew it was there I had to go back to the Corel file and colour fill the remaining diamonds with ‘true’ white to create the final version seen printed off in Photo 47. Now the decal paper instructions tell you to spray varnish the printed decal with two to three coats of lacquer. Unfortunately I didn’t have any spray lacquer so I gave it a single brush applied coat of Humbrol Clear instead. The next evening I trimmed the decal back to the edges and dipped it into the Humbrol DecalFix, this was where the problems started with the decal immediately rolling up at the edges. I eventually managed to get the design to slide off the backing paper and onto the shield face but even then it proved reluctant to stay where I wanted it – all, I think, down to the brush applied varnish being thicker than it should have been, the spray lacquer would have been a far thinner coat just like the commercial kit decals have in fact. As you can see in Photo 48, it did eventually settle down and the worst of the creases seen in this pic did flatten out a little more with some help from a razor blade and more DecalFix. I wasn’t too worried about the creases however – Frederick is in the middle of a hard fought melee and his shield was not going to be ‘factory fresh’ – if some of the battle damage obscured the worst of the creases who was I to argue!!.
The majority of armed men throughout history have always been right handed, in fact ‘lefties’ have often been regarded as suspiciously unorthodox (hence the Latin for left being “Sinister” (Right handed being “Dexter” which is where Dexterous comes from!) The damage to Frederick’s shield therefore would hit the face from top right to lower left as seen in the final Photo 49. To achieve the damage I first very carefully scribed down into the decal and plasticard beneath with the rotary tool using a cutting disk. You have to be very careful with that however as it’s very easy to end up with a graceful curve instead of a straight cut. With the initial cut performed, the thin slit was enlarged into a deeper ‘gouge’ using the diamond dust triangular rat tail file, following the slit until I had gone down into the wooden layer beneath the plastic. This produced a quite pleasing effect with the white plasticard giving the appearance of an axe or sword blade having cut down through the painted heraldic design, the white undercoat below and finally into the wooden base. As for that wooden shaft protruding from the top of the shield – that’s for the next instalment!

Until then, Happy Modelling to you All!


Robin.

Very nicely done with the quarrels shot from the devils machine as long bow archers call them Robin. We did some tests with different weights of longbows to see how much they would penetrate different woods. The average 130lb longbow would go up to 4-6 ln in oak and all the way through beach and linden wood 2ln these were tested on wood 15mm thick with a short bodkin head at 25mts

Rgd Martyn

Many thanks to both Martyn and Kev for those very useful snippets! To reply in reverse order, you’re right on about the scratch building Kev, the entire shield was built using existing odds and ends from my stock of ‘spares’ with the exception of the dark brown leather to line the back which cost a total of £1.99. One of the best things about this forum is the exchange of really useful information between members – when I was looking for the leather offcuts on ebay I simply entered “leather offcuts” – it never occurred to me that there would be various ‘species’ of leather to look through! I think the offcuts I’ve got are from the leather upholstery industry, therefore mostly cow hide. I then did a search for goatskin leather after your advice and you are spot on – although the supply is much more limited than the cowhide (I found one supplier of small offcuts) the majority of pieces are apparently designed for leather book covering, (with price tags to match as well!) But whereas the leather I bought was about 2 – 3mm in thickness, most of that being the suede, which has to be removed in the skiving process, the goatskin leather is on average 0.5 – 1mm thick. Much less work to thin it down – definitely something I’ll be looking out for on any future projects so grateful thanks for that!
Thanks too to Martyn for those insights into the power of the longbow (and to think my own bow is only 45lb draw!!) It’s surprising that the bodkin will penetrate around 2” of Lime or Linden. I can only suppose that the multiple layers of thin Linden wood glued together at right angles as in the heater shield modelled here, like a form of plywood, must increase the gripping power of the tight grain to the point where it will actually bring the arrow/bolt to a stop. I was intrigued enough to do some deeper research and came up with a very interesting site where a curator of a medieval armoury collection conducted trials using a 75lb longbow at a distance of 10yds to give the same penetrative effect of a 100lb longbow at maximum range. He used a selection of four common medieval points: a needle nosed bodkin (nasty looking thing like a skewer), a short bodkin (like the ones I modelled here), a standard broadhead barbed hunting point (Robin Hood lookalike) and an anti-horse barbed point (like a whaling harpoon point but smaller!) The different armours were set up in front of a slab of ballistic putty to simulate the soft body inside to record the blunt force trauma aspect of the strike. The results were as follows:

Padded Jerkin: Fatal wounds with all points (the needle nose probably killed the one standing behind as well!)
Coat of Plates: Fatal with the needle, short bodkin went through deep enough to cause a fatal wound, both broadheads were deflected but could have slid between the plates at the right angle.
Butted Mail: This is the cheapest kind of mail, widely used in re-enactments today. Actually worse than wearing no armour at all! Both bodkins went straight through and although the broadheads were slowed by the impact they both cut through the rings, breaking them off and taking them deep into the wound causing an almost certainly fatal infection.
Average quality Riveted Mail: Needle straight through again, short bodkin slowed right down but penetrated deep enough to cause probably fatal organ damage. Broadhead was stopped but again, deep tissue and organ damage probably fatal, Horse stopper was also stopped – tissue damage possibly survivable.
Best Quality Riveted Mail: Needle slowed but deep penetration and fatal wound, short bodkin – slowed right down, medium penetration and wound 50/50 survivable. Broadheads – stopped and probably survivable.
Plate armour: Needle nose penetrated to half its length, 50/50 chance of fatal wound, short bodkin partial penetration and a whacking great dent! Survivable with sufficient padding behind. Both Broadheads – not a chance! Deflected away with no trauma to the soft tissue.

So there we have it – the Bodkins could pretty well penetrate any fully armoured opponents and the broadheads were just as deadly to the average foot soldier wearing lower quality protection (or arrow fodder as they were probably called!)

Anyhow, just to show I haven’t been entirely idle here’s a quick comparison of the polished armour effect as suggested by Kev earlier. From left to right we have the original kit plastic Tassets previously gilded with the antique silver leaf with the new scratch built tuna tin replacements (note the little raised rims on both examples, I managed to simulate the new ones using the very tips of my best long nosed flat pliers in tiny little ‘nips’ until the rim was formed). To their right is the right hand Pauldron still in its tuna tin ‘steel’ finish with the copper rim whilst on the far right is the left hand Pauldron showing the wire brushed and felt disk polished ‘shining steel’ effect. The copper rim has been silver leafed and blue-grey washed and the individual plates have been joined together with the filed down brass pins. That rim actually parted from the tin during the polishing process and was an absolute nightmare to get back on (in the end I made a new one out of more copper wire!) What I’m going to do now is to try and bring the right hand one up to the same finish BUT, if the copper comes off again I’m going to attempt to make a new rim using the pliers to actually bend one into the bottom plate. IF (and a big IF) it turns out well, I’ll break off the other copper rim, re-polish the bottom of the plate to remove any traces of super glue and wash and bend a rim into that one too. If the second rim doesn’t come off I’ll silver leaf and wash that one to match the first. Results to follow!
In the meantime, I’m under way on the right arm now together with Frederick’s Battle Sword.

Until then Happy Modelling to you All!


Robin.