Building a Medieval Gauntlet

Step 2 Making the finger armor plates

Cut your sheet metal into small bands that will form your finger/ knuckle armor. These can be done all at once or as needed. Try a few sizes and find one that fits your gloves / hand. It's also a matter of preference between simplicity and mobility. The smaller and more numerous your strips the more flexible your glove is, but it will take more time to do. I made mine 1.5cm - 2cm wide, and about 3cm -4cm long. Varying in size based on where on the finger they were going. I had 4 pieces per finger (1 nail, and 3 knuckles) except for the middle finger which had 5 pieces.

As I said before your best bet is to cut a simple rectangle, and bend it over your glove to see about how big it will be once it's in place and properly shaped.

Feel free to get creative with the plates, if you want to do engravings on them, paint them, or even put gold sparkles on them, it's up to you, just make sure they still fit on the glove, and you can still bend your fingers.

Be aware, I was building this with tin, and it has a nasty habit of forming razor sharp edges. I highly recommend dulling these edges somehow. I used a combination of sanding them + applying a clear coat of latex paint to the edges to avoid Edward scissor hand style gloves.

Once the plates are finished, (or as you finish each plate, depending on how impatient you are with assembly) drill two symmetric holes in the plates near the back edge. The back edge is the edge closest to your knuckle. The front edge being your finger tip. put two holes about finger width apart into the glove symmetrically on the center line of the plate. So draw a line or imagine a line down the center of the plate from front to back edge and then put the holes on either side of that line. Don't have to be exact, but it helps later on.

I was sticking each plate onto the glove as soon as it was ready ( as you can tell by the spent rivet shafts), because I couldn't wait to see how it turned out, but building your plates all at once will help with uniformity. I recommend doing one practice finger for sizing purposes out of paper, or cardboard, and then using it as a template for your metal plates.

I made my plates get slightly larger as they approached the knuckle, this is up to you, but I recommend doing it this way.

If you happen to have some kind of I don't know...35 Watt Epilog Zing Laser Cut / Engraver , you might be very tempted to adorn these little plates with some sweet artwork. Or Just precisely cut out to millimeter precision your plating pieces and their respective mounting holes. Just a thought, if any of you should have such a magnificent device.