In the beginning of October I saw a commercial for the video game Battlefield 1 which is a shooter game set during WW1. While the game did not look too appealing, one shot in the commercial showed a soldier in a suit of armour with a machine gun, and that interested me. So I spent a few weeks researching WW1 armour and found that there was quite a bit of experimental armour made during WW1 and that there were not many reproductions commercially available.

So I decided to try building armour myself and went with the experimental American light armour, since it has a fairly simple shape. This was my first time trying to make plate armour and I was fairly limited with tools. I had a a normal hammer and a ball peen hammer, a pipe set up between to chairs to use as an anvil, an angle grinder, and a very shallow dishing bowl that I tried to grind into a plank of wood with the grinder. I was also limited to materials from Home Depot and Amazon. For this and other reasons, the armour certainly isn't perfect.

I used Bashford Dean's book Helmets and Body Armor in Modern Warfare description of the armour and the pictures it had to model the armour after, although even with the pictures and descriptions of the armour I could not tell exactly how everything was shaped, especially the hand and forearm plates. I made the armour out of 1.5mm mild steel (again, not accurate) and I used aluminum rivets to hold everything together (probably not accurate). The backplate is articulated with sliding rivets and the breastplate with leathers riveted on the inside (makes it surprisingly flexible). The arm pieces are connected via leathers on the inside and the spaulder tie to the shoulder straps.

I am open to any criticisms or suggestions if you have any.

Here are some pictures of the armour: http://imgur.com/a/69WqX

Things that I know are not accurate are the groin plate (I will probably go back at some point and make a better one since it wouldn't be too hard), the hands and forearms (I really just couldn't tell what they looked like from the pictures I could fine, but I got them as close as I could), and the shoulders and elbows are not dished enough (I couldn't get my dishing bowl as deep as I really needed it.

I like that VERY much. You did a fantastic job! Keep it up and you might get requests from folks for custom armor....McM

Keep on hammerin', buddy! The more I look at it, the more it reminds me of bounty hunter Boba Fett's armor from Star Wars. :lol: It's still cool though!.............McM

Ooh, a Dean Panoply! Glad to see WWI armor awareness is spreading!

You may already know of it, but if not, here's the link to a book on armor as written by the very man who designed the suit yours is based on, Bashford Dean. It includes the Dean Panoply as well as quite a bit of other WWI armor, both used and experimental.

http://archive.org/stream/helmetsbodyarmor00d...0/mode/2up

gotta say, for your first try, this looks really good. And if you don't want it anymore, put it completely overpriced on ebay. Some cosplayer is definitely going to buy it! (At least, that 's what I would do....)