Various practical addenda from Plataea 2022

Well, Plataea 2022 ended on Saturday and although there's a lot to be said, I'm limiting myself to some observations to bear in mind about all the stuff I brought out there:

-  A four-inch-wide (internal), eight-foot-long PVC pipe with caps held on by duct tape makes a very protective package for spears, but it's so heavy and awkward (particularly when you already have two suitcases and a rifle case with your bows and arrows in it), and expensive to ship, that I wound up leaving both it and all my spears spears with other reenactors who felt they'd have a use for them and less difficulty/expense transporting them.  I will not travel with spears in the future.  If I send any more to Greece, I'll send them well ahead of time by the cheapest service available and leave them with a trusted friend.

-  Under the (to my Pennsylvanian standards) quite aggressive heat and sun, the film of linseed oil-beeswax sealer I applied on top of the oil paint on my crescent shield softened and rubbed off.  Specifically, the area on top of the dark red ochre-painted part of the shield; the area on top of the white edge was somewhat more resistant (presumably because the film is transparent and the dark paint heated up in the sun faster).  The same mixture used as a paint binder on my new gorytos was also more resistant, but did soften after prolonged exposure, allowing thicker bits to be scraped off.  The rosin-beeswax glue attaching the leather facing of my new akinakes scabbard also softened.  By contrast, anything treated, bound or sealed with only linseed oil or rosin (the ochre paint on the shield, the spear handles, and the sinew wrappings of my arrows) were all fine.  So basically anything containing beeswax was in danger of melting.

-  The buff leather weapon belt performed admirably.  The chrome-tanned belt sagged and became uncomfortable.  I'm not sure whether this is because the holes I punched in the buff belt allowed it to be laced tighter or because it's a thicker leather, but I suspect both.  The belt being nice and snug was definitely helpful.

-  As I suspected, the smaller bow and commensurately smaller gorytos and arrows were much easier to carry.  The search for an accurately Classical-styled bow of less than 36 inches strung continues.

-  The 1/2-inch-thick wooden crescent shield is at least as heavy as larger wicker ones in the same style.  This, too, needs improvement.  I also threw together a round wicker mat with pelta-style grips and a suede facing, which at 16 inches in diameter (about the size of the smallest Scottish targes, and barely large enough to cover my arm from elbow to knuckles with fingers closed around the handgrip) is so light I barely notice I'm wearing it, but I'd have felt much, much better about it if it were crescent-shaped.

-  A 12-ounce ceramic bottle, while convenient to carry, is only around a quarter as much water as I need to drink over the course of a Greek midsummer day in the field.  Also, water left out becomes as hot as the surrounding air in just a few hours.  What I wound up doing was to take a two-liter plastic bottle of water and keep it overnight in the hotel minifridge where it half-froze, wrapped it in spare clothing and kept it in my tent in my suitcase.  That way I could still at least refill my ceramic bottle with slightly cool water by the end of the day.  A proper cooler with ice blocks would've been better.

-  Food must be kept elevated or it will be invaded by ants.  A table of some kind, a crate, a box, anything will help.

Waterproof hot glues

IMPORTANT NOTE (3/22/21):  Since publishing this article, I have learned that pine rosin fumes have been found to cause asthma.  The process described below should always be done outdoors.  If weather doesn't permit, then postpone it.

This year I've been trying to eliminate any period-inappropriate materials from my designs.  One that's stuck with me for a long time is rubber cement, which I've used to attach leather facings to wooden scabbards.  I use it primarily because in a real military campaign you couldn't reasonably expect to stash away your scabbard every time it rained, and rubber cement is waterproof, while for a long time the only alternative that came to mind was hide glue, which isn't.  (I understand traditional hide glue is less readily water-soluble than the modern kind that I've been using, which has urea added to keep it liquid at room temperature - traditional hide glue must be kept warm to work with it.)

Anyway, I've read years ago about making varnish from pine rosin by dissolving it in alcohol.  This can be used to protect sinew wrappings on arrows from softening and coming loose.  It recently occurred to me to ask if this varnish would be sufficiently sticky to use for scabbard facings before it dried.  I was in the process of making a new letter opener, and it seemed like the right opportunity to try it out.

If you've ever touched a sawn-off stump of a pine tree, you know that pine resin is incredibly sticky and impossible to wash off with normal soap and water; you need highly-concentrated alcohol (70+ percent hand sanitizer gel works well for this purpose) or some other nasty organic solvent like acetone (nail polish remover).  Resin consists largely of rosin, the solid component, and turpentine, a natural solvent that keeps the resin liquid.  Turpentine takes a long time to evaporate out of fresh pine resin, so resin is processed commercially by heating in a still.  Those who aren't trying to collect the turpentine just cook it off in an open pot.

I ordered some rosin from Creekwood Naturals for experimentation.  This product arrives as a coarse, sandy powder.  It becomes sticky when wet, but it seems to be waterproof.

My first experiments went thusly:  I dissolved some rosin in rubbing alcohol and let it evaporate to a thick, syrupy consistency that could be painted onto a scrap of sanded poplar plank.  For comparison, I also smeared some fresh pine resin on the wood, alongside rubber cement.  On top of all three adhesives I pressed a tiny swatch of chamois, then let the substances dry.

The fresh resin took the longest to dry.  After several days, all three swatches peeled off easily.  The resin was still slightly sticky under the leather; the rosin brittle; the rubber cement, well, rubbery.

I'd heard that beeswax is often used in rosin-based pitch glues to reduce the rosin's brittleness, so my next test used a mix of alcohol-rosin varnish reduced to a syrup and a bit of Sno Seal, which is emulsified beeswax used to waterproof shoes.  This did not work out at all.  The mix took forever to dry, and wasn't sticky enough.

Giving up on emulsions, I decided to try a hot glue.  I shaved some beeswax into a metal bowl and, working by eye, added about two to three times its volume in rosin, then slowly melted the bowl's contents with a heat gun.  At first, the beeswax melted while the rosin turned into a sticky mess, but with prolonged heating and stirring with a brass rod, the mixture became uniform.  (It also released fumes that stung my eyes, and when hot enough, began to smoke.)  Then I smeared a little onto the poplar and quickly stuck the chamois swatch onto it.

I repeat:  Wow!  Once cool, the glue bonded the chamois to the wood with immense strength.  When I tried to peel it, the leather itself ripped up before the glue failed.  I can dent the glue with my nail, but it's not sticky, and even though it's mostly rosin, it more resembles very hard, dark beeswax.

It seemed perfect, but now was time for the real test.

Earlier, I'd ordered a piece of pitch glue to try to glue the wooden halves of a scabbard core together.  It was tricky.  I warmed the glue, pinched off thin bits and laid them on the edges of one half, then melted them with the heat gun and quickly pressed the halves together.  Then I had to heat each edge in turn and press it more tightly, and scrape off or press down the lumps of glue sticking out of the seam.  I also had to shoot the heat gun into the scabbard, then stick the blade in to force any inward-protruding lumps aside and keep a good fit.

When it came time to apply the facing, I melted the entire bowl of rosin-beeswax mix, let it cool to a consistency sort of like room-temperature corn syrup, and smeared it as evenly as possible on the core with the brass rod in one-inch stages.  I melted it again with the heat gun, then pressed on the leather.  When each half of the facing had been applied, I heated the whole face evenly and pressed it against a flat surface to try to smooth out the lumps of glue that had built up underneath.  The result was still somewhat lumpy.  Finally, I stitched up the facing with linen thread in a double-running stitch, and trimmed off the excess.

My heavy reliance on a heat gun does call into question the practicality of this kind of glue in period.  Trying to do the same thing over open flames might well be difficult, as may trying this method on a larger, more complex scabbard such as one for an akinakes.  Nonetheless, when the time comes, this will be what I try.

I have no doubt that this glue will prove waterproof.  Even if it becomes slightly sticky in the rain, the idea of it bleeding through the leather is inconceivable to me.  To my mind, the real test will be whether it softens after a few hours in the hot sun, for which purpose I'll have to wait for the right weather.

As for the letter opener itself:  The blade is another full-tang dagger blade from Atlanta Cutlery, with maple scales and steel pins.  I did reshape the tang to be a little more like a classic Luristan dagger, but while it affects a Near Eastern Iron Age look and I'm using it as a test bed for period materials, I don't believe this object bears sufficient resemblance to any Achaemenid-period dagger to warrant actually using it at reenactments.  (I would, however, love to be proven wrong.)

As an aside, I've bought four Windlass Steelcraft blades this year, and their geometry seems to have worsened compared to my previous purchases, with slightly thinner spines and much thicker, squared edges that will take forever to sharpen.

The scabbard, with its central ridge, straight lines down the edges (here interpreted as facing seams), and rounded tip without a chape, is modeled after those shown in Neo-Assyrian art such as the Lion Hunt of Ashurbanipal and at the Palace of Sargon II.  Its core is made from American commercial poplar (tulipwood), probably yellow poplar, which is simply the low-end hardwood we usually get in my part of the country.

Painted suede is a conditional go

About a year and a half ago, Todd Feinman at RAT told me about a period leather finish that could be made from one part melted beeswax and two parts linseed oil.  The oil polymerizes so that the mixture isn't sticky when cured, and the beeswax keeps the mixture flexible.

Regular readers will recall that I've long been troubled by the question of how to reproduce the crenelated decorations frequently seen on Greek depictions of the gorytos.  You could stitch on dyed leather or cloth, but that always struck me as needlessly laborious, and very difficult unless the case's main seam were opened up, so I've concentrated on finding a paint that will do the trick.  It's my understanding that the gorytos and other such gear were made from soft, sueded leather cured with fat or oil, similar to braintan, so any paint would need to be water-resistant (as braintan-type leather soaks up water like a sponge and is hard to seal) and flexible so as not to flake off.  It recently occurred to me that the beeswax-oil sealer might make a good paint binder for that purpose.

I tried it out by mixing a little melted sealer and red ochre (I didn't take measurements, but the amount of ochre wasn't enough to thicken the binder significantly), and when it cooled, rubbing it into a scrap of buckskin, scraping off the excess, and rubbing what was left in again.  A few days later, when it felt dry, I cut the scrap in half and rubbed a top coat of unpigmented sealer onto one of the pieces.  I also tried "priming" another scrap with sealer before painting it and adding a top coat, and rubbing/scraping/rubbing plain red ochre oil paint onto a third piece, which was also then given a top coat.

Yesterday I put all four pieces into a sink full of water and let them soak for an hour and a half.  The result was impressive:  None of the paint on any of the four pieces ran, smeared, or softened in water.  They had apparently sealed in all the pigment in a good-as-waterproof manner.  I even scraped the paints with my fingernail and none came off.  The plain oil paint worked just as well when rubbed and scraped instead of merely brushed on, but it cured much stiffer than the beeswax-oil paint, so between the two, I think the beeswax is preferable.  The additional top coat was not needed, though I suspect it would make the paint job more durable in the long run.  Because German buckskin is so pale, only a little paint is needed.

This technique comes with a number of caveats:

1.  I know of no evidence whatsoever that the Persians or anybody else actually used a paint like this in antiquity.  The materials would've been available, but I have no reason to think that anyone combined them and used them in this manner, other than that it would've been a great way of making those crenelated bowcase decorations.

2.  I used hardware-store boiled linseed oil.  This version has some sort of chemical additives that cause it to cure faster than the kind that would've been available in our period, which (if used as a paint binder) would've been functionally equivalent to the purer linseed oil still sold in art stores for making traditional oil paint.  In other words, if you use the more period-correct oil, you'll need to allow much more time for it to "dry."  On the other hand, it's doubtlessly less toxic.

3.  Many leatherworkers believe that linseed oil's chemical properties degrade leather fibers over time.  However, I think the paint only soaks in shallowly, so I don't think it'll prove much of a problem.

4.  The rubbing and scraping technique is useful only for producing large, simple designs.  It may be possible to apply finer oil paint designs on leather that's been glued to a hard surface and primed with drying oil; if so, that technique might be appropriate for scabbard facings glued to a wood core.