An idea regarding the construction of leather armor.

hello there in today's video i would like to talk about hardened leather armor or queer bully and an idea i've had regarding it now queer bully is one of those lost technologies we can't say for certain how it was made and it seems like every armor maker has got their own technique for hardening leather some people bake wet leather over a form until it becomes hard like wood other people soak leather in hot water until it becomes slightly harder and stiffer or else boil it until it becomes brittle like plastic my favorite technique is to pour boiling water over it from a kettle this will harden only the outer layers of the leather but leave the inside soft preventing the leather from being too brittle i will then coat the leather and oil to give it a little bit of its flexibility back and then repeat the process until the desired hardness and toughness is achieved in this way the outside of the leather gets hard whereas the inside stays soft and tough the two compensating for each other's weaknesses sort of like laminating steel other people talk about treating the leather with wax or glue recently however i had an idea that in recreating leather armor we might be starting with the wrong material to begin with well what do you mean by that the vegetable tanning process remained basically the same for a thousand years how could the material be wrong one of my hobbies is tanning buckskins a while ago my family ordered a cow from the mennonite farmers and we asked the butcher to keep the skin at the time i was experimenting with walnut dyes and i had a great big pot of leftover walnut extract from the effect that this had on my hands and the taste it left in the cooking pot i surmised that this walnut extract must have tannins in it so knowing nothing more than that i decided to try some vegetable tanning not having a clue what i was doing the end result didn't turn out great i soaked the pieces in the solution for about a month reading up on vegetable tanning after the fact i learned that you're supposed to soak them for six months to a year what i ended up with was something that was sort of half tanned the outside of the hide is tanned leather but the core is still rawhide i also didn't soften the leather beyond giving it a coat of oil so it's very stiff and rigid now historically this sort of half tanned leather is what was used for shoe soles because its core is still dense rawhide it's a lot tougher than standard leather but because it's got the outside of leather it handles wet better than rawhide so it's occurred to me that maybe armor makers in the past used half tanned leather rather than full tan leather to make armor aside from being potentially tougher it would also be a lot cheaper because it's only soaked for a 12th of the time and it doesn't require the softening procedure the softening being the most time-consuming and laborious part of making leather let's do a test and see how it compares to my other leather armor the broadhead arrow penetrated almost to the hilt and went through the armor by about an inch and a half the bodkin arrow bounces off harmlessly and again the bodkin arrow bounces off harmlessly this time the arrow stuck in the leather without penetrating the broadhead arrow went through the leather by about an inch and a quarter now let's try the half-tanned leather the bodkin arrow bounces off and again and a third time this time it penetrated the leather but only by a hair the broadhead arrow stuck in the leather penetrating by about an inch and a half this time the broadhead arrow only penetrated by about a quarter of an inch and again more or less the same result this time the broadhead arrow went in a little bit over an inch so all in all it seems to have done more or less the same or slightly better against the broadheads and slightly worse against the bodkins if we look at the bodkin strikes we can clearly see that it's punched through the half-tanned leather whereas on the full tanned leather it's only left dense here and there it's interesting to me that the antler arrows from a previous test seem to have left bigger dents so overall i think that's pretty good for a piece of unheat-treated badly tanned leather and i would say that this idea warrants further thought and experimentation that's pretty much all i have to say for now i hope you found this interesting goodbye

Channel: Malcolm P.L.

Views: 16,680

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Id: N8OCXZ7vqkw

Length: 4min 56sec (296 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 16 2021