Valkenburg/Castleford style caliga step by step

[Martin Moser]

You say 2-3mm, I need to measure what I've used, but what weight is that? Also, I used two layers of 8oz leather glued together to make the outsole. Did you use something else? The insole was made from a single layer of 8oz leather with another layer of 6oz over that. My leather weights are guesses as I have no information as to what the Romans used.

No, actually in the post I referred to I said
>I also used thicker leather as advised by Carol vanDriel-Murray and by my
>own recent observations of an original, about double the thickness of the
>leather I used for the caligae described above, i.e. around 4mm.

meaning that I used too thin leather for my reconstruction documented here. I'll eventually do those again, but then not with the "invented" pattern from Stepping Through Time, but with the original one from Castleford then (a Caligae order and a pair of Calcei will come first, though :-) ) )

According to the table at http://www.buckskinleather.com/ref.htm
around 4mm would be 9 - 11 ounces.
For the outsole I used "Bends" (or Croupon in German leather terminology), tanned and pressed to provide hard sole leather. This comes in a thickness of 4-7 mm (10+ ounces) from the tanner I buy from, the one I used was about 4.5mm in thickness. I am using only single layer outsoles as the finds I know about do not show multilayer outsoles for caligae.
As I said above, for caligae leather weights all I have is my personal observation of one caliga here in Munich and what Carol van Driel-Murray said in personal (email) conversation and both point to about 4mm/10 ounces. I am now writing to Jutta Goepfrich, who published the Mainz leather finds and still works at the German Leather Museum. I'll post here what she has to say about this ....