#bazubands

So one of my projects for the winter break was to make a set of bazubands made for myself -- a middle eastern armor piece that provides all-in-one wrist/forearm/elbow protection, and the easiest way to get the coverage required for SCA fighting. (My garb is viking, but such are the exigencies of modern safety standards, that fighters usually wind up with a mix of armor types.)

Anyway, I packed up the necessary tools and materials and took them with me when I went to visit my parents, which is why the backdrop for these pictures isn't my usual workshop.

Found a pattern on google, cut it out of 10-12 oz veg tan, traced/carved/tooled it:

(You can see why this is the easiest way to get elbow protection, it's WAY less fiddly than trying to do articulated plates around the joint.)

Soaked the elbow cop again (because it was starting to dry out by the time I was done tooling), rounded it out and stitched it up:

Dyed it black, in my parents' backyard:

(And if you use Angelus dyes, that's how you keep from spilling it -- the box has little perforations so that it can hold the bottle safely upright.)

WAX THAT MOTHERFUCKER:

It doesn't show in that picture, but I have a metal bowl of wax (jeweler's casting wax) melting on the stovetop. I alternate between brushing it onto the leather, which looks like the picture above, and then putting the leather in the oven at ~200F, at 10-20 minute intervals, until the wax soaks in. Repeat until the leather is fully saturated and does not absorb more wax. (This often takes hours, so find something else to multitask with.)

But when you're done -- ta da!

Your project will be thoroughly waterproof, very strong and hard, with a low lustre. It's functionally ABS plastic at this point.

The next step was padding, so I got some sheepskin and and fitted it to the inside:

(idk why it's so fucking orange, but the alternative was kind of a mint-mucus green. I think the orange is growing on me though.)

Time to pattern the other, simpler piece of the bazuband, because they're hinged to enclose your full arm:

(I couldn't do this earlier, and therefore do both pieces concurrently, because I had no idea how much bulk the padding was going to add to my arm. I suppose you could wrap your arm in padding when you're measuring at the start.)

Slapped a quick design on it:

(And carved & tooled it too, though I neglected to get pictures of that.)

And then--

DISASTER, MY FRIENDS.

I put it in the oven, and it lost its gd mind.

WHAT.

Seriously, just -- words do not do this abomination justice. o_O

LOOK AT IT.

Coming so close on the heels of the Khorasan pouch, which had turned out absolutely perfect and has been more widely shared and lauded than anything else I've posted, this was a humbling experience. 🤣 Like, yes you're good, Gabriel, but you're not immune to fucking up.

So what happened here? Why did the same leather as the bazubands, undergoing the exact same steps and processes, turn out like THIS?

I'd have to repeat the experiment to 100% confirm my theory, but I'm pretty sure the critical difference is that I was speed-running this one, and I didn't wait for the dye to fully dry before I started waxing it. It wound up with, essentially, wet leather hermetically encased in wax, and since the water didn't have anywhere to go, it did weird things to the structure of the leather fibers when it started heating up. And because I don't often work with wax, I had somehow never run into this situation before, and thus already learned that lesson.

Ah well.

It wasn't a huge amount of leather, and it was only like two hours of work, so I'm not that fussed about it. (More embarrassed than anything else, at what feels like a very rookie mistake -- and conscious that it could have been SO MUCH WORSE if that had happened to the larger bazuband pieces, which had a lot more time and materials sunk into them.)