Gauntlet reworking

Introduction

Gauntlets are one of the necessary changes from period armour we are required by the SCA for the sake of making sure our hands remain useful during mundane life. Well, that's not the whole truth: we have a choice of either basket hilts or gauntlets. I personally find that the majority of basket hilts are ugly, and the ones that aren’t detract from an early period kit. This leaves me with gauntlets.

They come in many shapes, sorts, and sizes. The most comfortable ones I have ever seen were three fingered gauntlets that looked like Ninja Turtle hands. At $800 in price, they are currently beyond my means, so I looked into other options.I shopped around and chose a pair of clamshells for $150. When they arrived, I found them to be poorly designed, and despite tons of measuring, they were big on me. I won’t blame the craftsman, as there's a chance I just measured wrong, but it would do to keep in mind, for future reference, to choose a design carefully, and measure painstakingly well a few times, just to be sure.

Problem

The main issue with these clamshells is that they don’t move very well with my hands because the straps are loose. I had borrowed Baroness Alda’s gauntlets and got the idea to sew my glove into them to make them move easier.

My two most recent fighting sessions then allowed me to see that there was a larger problem. The shifting of the main portion of the gauntlet leaves my pinky knuckle exposed, and has caused me a great deal of issues, including a couple breakages.

Solution

To fix this, I bought a pair of gloves a little bit larger than I would normally wear. This way, I would be able to sew the tips to the gauntlets and not make the gloves too small for me to use. The plan was to sew the middle, ring, and thumb to the gauntlets: this would allow the gauntlet to move with the glove, and hopefully give me a better grip on weapons.

Materials Needed

• Drill and small drill bit
• Sinew: Artificial sinew will do.
• Leather Needle: any larger needle should be fine.
• Gloves one size larger than normal: I prefer leather work gloves, but for this project I chose to use some more modern-looking gloves with padding in the knuckles for added protection.

Steps

It is very important that you measure where the holes need to be before starting to punch holes into an investment like any piece of armour. To do this, put your gauntlets on with the gloves and see where your fingers naturally fall throughout the range of motion of the gauntlet. Measure each hole individually.

To make the holes, I suggest a drill bit that just barely fits your needle. This will minimized the weakening effect of tearing through the material, and retain the strength of your armour. The other point is to keep them a bit away from the edge, for the same reason.

Once the holes are punched into the gauntlets, sew each finger to each hole individually. This way, if the sinew breaks, you only lose one of your grips instead of all of them. Do not remove the strapping that already exists: for the most part, extra strapping doesn’t hurt.

Conclusion

After finally getting all the repairs done on the gauntlets, I was able to test them out at Sangre's Pas D’Armes last weekend. They unfortunately didn’t hold up as well as I would have liked. This may have been due to my stitching or a result of loaning the gauntlets to people with larger hands. The stitching has already started to come undone. I will be looking into a better way to secure them in the near future and post an update on my findings. For now, it will just be a matter of restitching them. That slight disappointment aside, the tight stitching made a huge difference: the gauntlets moved with my hands and at no point did I take a shot to the pinky the way I had in November and December. Sewing your gloves into your gauntlets improves the way they move, or at least they did with these particular gauntlets.

 

I spoke with some of the more experienced fighters at the Pas, and they said that while the  improvements I have made to the gauntlets will help me some, in the long run I am better off shopping around for metal gauntlets that I can afford. They say they will ground out better on my weapon, which will prevent the damage from reaching my hands, and they will last longer than the leather ones. As if I needed an excuse to buy more armour... Merchant’s Row, here I come!