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1914 Leather Equipment :~
Ever since discovering , with Richie Elbourne and Royoboy’s help , that is was possible to make Scale 1908 webbing equipment , I have also wanted to make the alternative, the 1914 Leather Equipment .
It was issued to the New Armies , and some Territorials , and in the end became almost as widely worn as the webbing version.
Most of my detailed info has come from the wonderful Karkeeweb website, where you can discover more than you will ever need to know about British Army Equipment :~
Infantry Equipment, Pattern 1914
In the event , the 1914 pattern equipment was not just used for training, but went to the Front, and saw the War out.
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Making it in 1/6th posed two problems : a suitable source of leather; and much more difficult, the brass buckles . The buckle types are not available anywhere even in plastic .
For the 1908 and 1937 webbing buckles it is possible to get an etched brass fret made , designed and produced by Richie Elbourne… the results have proved spectacular.
The 1914 metalware is different : it uses traditional cast saddlery buckles, which are not flat , but 3-dimensional in a way impossible to reproduce with photetch.
After many years of pondering the problem , and considering painted pewter ( hopeless, the paint comes off instantly ), I bit the bullet and contacted Beechcraft , a lost wax casting business .
The response was favourable , so I sculpted and cast into pewter a complete set of buckles, which were then sent to Beechcraft for conversion into brass , by the modern version of the very ancient lost wax process.
The results were not cheap, but not prohibitively expensive either : a set works out at around £15.
The brass castings are also about 8% smaller than the originals, which is to be noted for future projects !
You have to polish the brass , and do a little filing here and there, and of course add pins if you want. I just got the double buckles cast , since all the single buckles can be made up from brass wire .
The leather is perfect , from my friend and colleague PAD 75, who gets it in Paris , thinned to a range of fractions of a millimetre.
I stain it using Fiebigs spirit-based leather dyes, in this case Light Brown, slightly thinned with surgical spirit.The brass rivets are the smallest type of ship-builder’s pins.
The hardest part is the cartridge boxes : I made a Sculpey former to stretch them round, then sewed them on the machine . It greatly helps to wetform the leather parts before sewing , and lightly glue in place to stop them shifting under the machine .
If you are careful , machine sewing thin leather is quite easy , and gives a much better effect than just glueing.
Getting it all to go together properly took much time and fine adjustment. Inevitably scale cast buckles tend to be a bit tighter than the real thing, and I had to skive a lot of leather tabs to get them through the buckles.
The Small and Large packs are painted shirting cotton.
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发表于 2011-5-2 05:19
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