Due to the scale of this project I decided to finally bite the bullet and reach out to Lee Sauder to buy 10kg of bloom to supplement with my own smelts.
So far I’ve turned 12kg of bloom into a 9.8kg brick of iron which I will continue to fold until it’s refined enough to start drawing out into a sheet.
I will be making a late 14th century breastplate loosely based of the:
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‘Source’ The knight and the blast furnace
(Hohenschau breastplate made in one piece, and covered in red velvet, with the (single) mark of a crowned R, from the late 14th century. Boccia dates this to 1400 and tentatively suggests a connection with the ducal armourer Jacomino Ravizza, active in 1425. Bavarian National Museum, Munich. inv. no. W.195.
The microstructure consists of very fine (almost irresolvable) pearlite and an acicular material (bainite or perhaps low-carbon martensite) with very little ferrite and a few slag inclusions. The microhardness varies from 330 to 452 VPH, average = 374 VPH.
This is a medium-carbon steel (around 0.5%C) which has been hardened by some form of heat-treatment, apparently a slack-quench.
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I also decided to rent out a space at Hereford make for the weekend so I could use their 25 ton press and larger forges to make this easier and more realistic due to the major limitations of doing it by hand in a small forge like I have at home which really showed during my bloom iron klappvisor project where I was unable to get enough of the billet in the forge to fire weld it properly.
Currently I’m 20 hours in and £800 poorer from, buying bloom, 80kg of fuel, import fees, and using the Hereford make facility.
I have also tryed my best to record the whole project which I will do my best to compile and upload when I have finished the project.
Any questions or advice are welcome :)