Glued Linen Armour- a simple test

[rocktupac]

<snip> How bizarre. I find it hard to believe that simply varying the quality of the cloth could produce such disparate results. FWIW I used 16 layers of fairly expensive tablecloth linen. I'll have to dig up the type of thread and weave. What glue did you use?

We used a number of different qualities and manufacture methods of linen: ranging from tight weave to loose, smaller thread to thicker, and completely machine processed linen (but none were bleached) to completely handmade linen (i.e. harvested by hand, spun into thread by hand, and woven into linen cloth by hand). All linen types were rather expensive, but the last named was by far the most expensive. The number of layers we used in each patch varied greatly as well: most were of 10, 15, and 20 layers. We made a different patch based on weave orientation or laminated vs. quilted, and in each of the layer thicknesses. The patch that was made from the ultra authentic linen wound up being 11 layers thick, but this was based on our assumption that a 1 cm thick piece of armor (however many layers it would require to reach this thickness) would be sufficient enough to stop any impact from an arrow likely to have been encountered on an ancient battlefield. Overall there were around 15 or so patches. The glues we used were rabbit glue, flaxseed glue, and modern PVA glue; each was used in a number of different ways in the various patches based on first round tests with a smaller number of test patches. (Also, the size of each test patch was 18 inches by 18 inches.)