The Kingdom of the Emerald Hills

Did medieval people have rubber, and can rubber be counted as a point or two of amtgard armor? My roommate just made a neat breastplate-like top armor piece out of an old car floor mat and a soldering iron and some shoe lace, apparently randomly and inspired by my own amt-creations. It seems about as durable as thick leather, and looks pretty cool, like several pieces of felt with rubber plates, and there's tiny little rounded spike-bumps on the leather in a smooth-grip pattern. I also note that medieval peoeple probably had some sort of resin or sap material that may or may not resemble rubber, and I should also note that allowing common/cheap/used materials makes it way easier to experimentally craft things at a more affordable price, since I spend as much on fabric for a shirt as I do on metal cutting tools, and I can keep using the tools. Cheap materials being allowed as long as they're heavily crafted and modified as armor or garb would go a long way towards the "free" part of amtgard, and probably be a big boost to crafting and A&S since it would allow people to try crafting garb/armor at a very low cost or for free with ambient scrap materials, which should bring in a lot of new attempts from associates of amtgarders as well as people who want to try it but don't want to spend $150 on fabric to fail to make a shirt 4 times and end up with an ugly tabard or something. I mean I got all my tools that work on every material in existence up to around 440 hardness for less than $100, including 2 drills and 2 circular cutters and some random other things....just bought a military shovel, I think from either budk.com or google shopping, it's like a regular folding shovel but it also has a pickaxe spike on the back of the shovel, I haven't dug out the torching pit...I still haven't really used my most expensive tool yet, and it should be the key to making metal armor and also everything else?

In southeast Asia, yes.



No. Without vulcanization, rubber is more of a coasting or a stretchy substance, like rubber cement.

If you want to use it as garb for a post-apocalyptic wasteland character or someone from M.A. Barker's Tekumel, power to you, but it's not armor, per se.

Uh....I'm not sure I agree with you about rubber being a coating, although rubber can have different thicknesses, and a thin coat of rubber would lack durability. Rubbers have different densities and strengths as well, in addition to different thicknesses, as well as other subtle chemical difference, especially if it is not a pure rubber but rather a composite material. I should note that literally every material has a non-zero stretch coefficient, although rubbers do tend to be "more elastic" than other materials, some rubbers are plasticy and hard and stretch very little. I think your post implied that a "rubber coating" would lack sufficient protection and durability to be considered armor? If that is your implication, then I disagree, that some rubber pieces may be strong enough and durable enough to offer realistic blade protection that is comparable to other materials, even including things like leather (animal skin) and thin woven metal in some cases, although metals are known for their strength and high rigidity...although I should note that one positive quality about metals is that they are elastic and not brittle, so that pure metals do tend to stretch, flex, and bend, rather than shatter or fragment when placed under a load. Note that this bending is hard to observe in many pieces of metal because it is very rigid typically, unless you have a very thin piece. Note that it stretches more in one direction than the other, but it is possible to stretch a very thin wire easily without breaking the wire from most pure metals.

I should note it may also meet the standards for quilted, since it is clearly more durable than 4 pieces of cotton poly sewn together, unless the standards are more literal than realistic?

Why would you want anything to do with rubber when authentic materials are readily available?

and cheaper to boot!

Where can I get free authentic materials? Most free scrap is plastic/rubber....although I am working on a free trampoline I got on craigslist with my metal cutters, although the problem with free metal is one piece of free galvie I got was around 20g, while the trampoline parts are around 10g....I ordered a shovel a while back on ebay, just checked the AD again and he did say the shipping time was around 14 days :(....I almost dropped the fire on the tanks when I was aboveground torching, which might have taken out the car and the house, and possibly me depending on how fast I was running after the hose ruptured near the valve from the flames and the fuel poured out while burning....didn't actually touch the torch to anything important, the torch still works, but my welding goggles have an approximately 2 degree field of view, so I'm tempted to just buy sunglasses....anyways a 3 foot deep hole in the dirt lined with cement (I'll hand mix cement mix with water in a bucket, then smear it on the dirt walls, then possibly hit it with the propane torch for a quick-dry....note to use torchable quick dry cement or concrete. Maybe a few coats.) well one nice thing about a 3 foot deep hole and lots of dirt is that if there is an explosion inside the hole, the blast, heat, and shockwave should be channeled up instead of in all directions. Also there shouldn't be much in the way of projectiles, at least nothing roof-penetrating. Not that I plan on detonating the thing, although if the torch does hit the tanks I should be able to exit the hole and avoid most of the blast without traveling very far from the source. Plus inside the hole is a more controlled environment, so I can put shelves for the tanks and keep them in a consistent place, maybe even with something between them and the fire area/table.

Looking for suggestions of free "authentic" scrap, even though the first post claims rubber is authentic. I think your personal views on how medieval times really were are not very accurate, and one thing you can do to help might actually be reading ancient texts that were preserved, I would recommend "The Art of War" by Sun Tzu, written in 500 or 5000 BC approximately, and fully available on google books despite google books claiming it is not! (The google books version is a free preview, however it contains the full original text and is missing some dudes modern interpretation of it.) Other neat medieval books include King James (notoriously underread, even by people who claim to love christ yet cannot describe a thing about him as claimed by any consistent bible) and machieavelli's "The Prince". Those are the ones I can recall offhand, I'll also take suggestions here for authentic preserved medieval writings, which do not match hollywood medieval screenplays frequently. In addition to medieval writing suggestions, there are a lot of other preserved medieval artificats, including art, wood engravings, metal engravings, and other things that give a more accurate representation of what people had and were capable of doing in medieval times, without all the government propaganda and lies of today to prevent people from knowing how to build guns, which is surprisingly simple, especially with a pre-existing halfway decent mine.

Maybe we should add in a "hollywood looking" requirement to the armor rating system? Or alternatively, I was pondering the line that Arimithris wrote under the armor rating system, where you could use materials as other materials, however you could not "pass off" a material as another material. The specific example from memory was claiming tin foil was the same as tin sheet, which was not allowed. I think the popular interpretation of that rule, that no material that is not specificially mentioned may be used without penalty, is not an accurate interpretation but is only popular because most people have no way to compare "materials", for they know things only by the advertising names. Tinfoil is not as durable as tin sheet was the intent of that writing, and as such a weak material that looks like a strong material will not count as armor, however any material as strong as metal will count as metal regardless of how it looks is the original intent of that passage, yet it was misinterpreted due to incompentence and ability to rate armor, in an ironically predictable fasion.

Edit: Also I was just talking to my other roommate who's been painting on cardboard, I suggested to him to make some 3D art out of cardboard and some glue instead! I also thought using heavy duty cardboard and paint might be a good way to make garb quality fake armor, possibly even coating it with tin foil and using durable cardboard for up to 2 points potentially, for cardboard is probably worth a point, and making it look nice is probably worth one as well. Note this is for very thick, heavy, solid cardboard, and not the regular box cardboard, which is so thin it should probably count as cloth, unless stacked around 3-4 thick and/or reinforced with glue! That being said, cardboard armor garb, if well made, should totally count as garb every time pretty much no matter what, and if it's decent it should probably get 1 point of armor, since I think the first few points of armor should be pretty easy to get, the 3-4 range starts getting pretty tricky, and at 5-6 we're talking about almost bear resistant, maybe with a theoretical 7 being hard to kill while limp with a knife or bear, also most legal civil guns.

What Darkangel was getting at here, I believe, is that natural Rubbers, if not vulcanized, has the consistency of silly putty or play-do. The process of vulcanization of rubber wasn't invented until the later 1800s. Thus, rubber wasn't used as an armor because it wasn't in a form usable as such until fairly recently as historic time scales go.

As far as finding free materials for armor goes, you just have to really look for it. We have some world class scroungers here in OK. One fellow made a breastplate out of an old oil barrel he found. Another made chain mail out of a section of a chain conveyor belt. You might be able to get fairly decent sheets of aluminum and tin from signs that might be thrown away by ball fields or other places where advertisements would be found. Lastly, if you can find some couches that are being thrown away, you can salvage the upholstery fabric from them and make 4 layer cloth armor from it. You might even get 2 points out of it for thick materials.

_________________
Lord Malran Singollo
Duke of Dreadmoor
Patriarch, House Singollo
Lettusio-Rex, Dreadmoor Fey Jackalope
Member of the House of H.O.P.S.

Now I am curious about vulcanization, and is it a secret or well known process, is it patented or free for anyone to do, and does it resemble baking the putty, either at a low temperature or a high one, and maybe some airflow enhancements and consistency/speed techniques?

Vulcanization is actually a process where the raw rubber is heated and mixed with Sulfur or some other bonding chemical such as Selenium. Most vulcanized rubber contains around 30% sulfur and requires quite a bit of heat and time to fully vulcanize. It needs a setup somewhat like a forge for heating metal and a means of circulating the heat so that the vulcanization happens pretty much evenly, otherwise you get deformed or partially vulcanized pieces.

some links for more information.
a PDF file that's pretty in depth about the process
http://www.ias.ac.in/resonance/Apr1997/pdf/Apr1997p55-59.pdf

a link to the Hutchinson encyclopedia entry for vulcanization
http://encyclopedia.farlex.com/Rubber+vulcanization

_________________
Lord Malran Singollo
Duke of Dreadmoor
Patriarch, House Singollo
Lettusio-Rex, Dreadmoor Fey Jackalope
Member of the House of H.O.P.S.