Antler armor test.

In which I test a small panel of antler armor.It's a bit of a shame that the test panel is as small as it is. But as I mentioned, white tailed deer antler is not ideally shaped for making armor, and as I only have access to a couple a year it seems a shame to waste more than necessary when there are so many nice things that can be made out of antler.

[@timporsch2669]

A nice thing about lammelar is that in reality, any one plate probably only has to withstand and defend against one lethal blow or maybe turn one attack into a survivable wound. After that the plate in question can be replaced, if that is even necessary.

[@MalcolmPL]

Agreed.

[@earthknight60]

That's also one of its disadvantages. The attacking force may wind up being concentrated on only one plate, which may not be strong enough to withstand the impact. Also, more gaps for weapons to exploit and covering those gaps means a large increase in weight.

[@conlinbryant5037]

With the availability of antler sheds being somewhat limited, I can see an armour like this being pretty good for neck protection maybe for the weapon carrying arm.

[@MalcolmPL]

An antler gorget. I like that idea.

[@bricknolty5478]

An antler gorget flowing down into a pauldron and vambrace on your fighting arm would look so cool!

[@JohnDoe-ek9ng]

That problem may have been mitigated in more northerly latitudes by the prevelance of large migratory herds of caribou. No proof here just good honest speculation on my part, so take it as you will.

[@JohnDoe-ek9ng]

And yea that sounds Ballin my dude, imo we need more organic armors of this style in modern fantasy. So fucking tired of watching actors traipse around head to toe in shittily made leather scale.

[@KartarNighthawk]

Since watching this for the first time, I've come across an article that tested a variety of organic armours, including ramhorn and rawhide, the latter both boiled and unaltered. Their results bear out yours from both this test, and the rawhide scale one quite well; after numerous tests, they kept getting more or less the same results you did here. Horn scales in particular proved virtually immune to arrows, deflecting or trapping everything they fired at it. I've also come across some Southeast Asian armours that combine bronze chainmail and slats cut from water buffalo horns to create a bronze and horn take on Islamic style plate and mail armour.

[@MalcolmPL]

I’ve seen that article, but you’re conflating antler and horn which are very different structurally, Antler is like very dense bone whereas horn is like really thick toenails.

[@KartarNighthawk]

@@MalcolmPL Fair. They're not the same substance, but do seem to offer similar levels of protection, which was the part that caught my attention.

[@calencrawford2195]

@@MalcolmPL True, but both act in similar ways despite their differences.

[@Winkle-Dinkle]

Arrows always sound so satisfying when they’ve hit a target. It has a nice reverberation.

[@Visigoth_]

*You can soak bone/antler in water and then form it with heat and pressure, clamp it in a jig/form and let it dryout*

[@MalcolmPL]

Makes it more brittle.

[@gozer87]

Seems the amount of time and work involved in getting the antler limits its useful Ness as an armor material, except where you find big herds of animals with antlers. I definitely can see it as prestige or hero armor , given how well it seems to work and how much labor would go into making it.

[@MalcolmPL]

The thing is though, that everything takes a lot of work. For example, tanning a deerskin takes twenty hours, not counting the soaking time. It takes at least three deerskins to make a shirt. I think it’s more to do with the available materials.

[@guaposneeze]

It's interesting that battleship armor is basically the same pattern as deer antler. Hardened face on the outside, softer material behind it. Nature and Krupp seem to have been thinking along the same lines. Which makes me wonder if there is some use for that inner material slice as part of an armor for humans, rather than just a fuller to be discarded.

[@MalcolmPL]

I don't know. In terms of general craftsmanship the spongy core isn't useful for very much.

[@lastexit1340]

Fascinating video. I'm not sure about white-tailed deer antlers, but they say Keratin probably one of the strongest natural substances on earth. I can't imagine the amount of work it would take but if someone were to make something out of just those outer layers it would probably be incredibly hard to get much of anything through.

[@karolcebulski4472]

Great work mate. Fascinating stuff, good to see someone making work around more rare armor types and native warfare. Got yourself new subscriber. Keep on doing what you do.

[@MalcolmPL]

Cheers, someone has to do it, so it might as well be me.

[@Sutorenja]

I have never seen an example of it but I have READ about the Huns using armour made of horse hoof. I wonder if one could make armour out of cows hoofs too. Maybe not a full suit, but something like a greek boar-tusk helmet.

[@MalcolmPL]

I’ve got some hoof kicking around, I’ll see about another panel.

[@LaceandSteelchannel]

Sections of horse hoof also work

[@crose1466]

This gives me ideas for world building

[@russmitchellmovement]

Thank you sir. Love to see your work.

[@bholdr----0]

I really dig and appreciate experimental archeology! Great video, great channel. (You have a new fan!) Cheers!

[@KartarNighthawk]

One Islamic guide on armour construction suggests reinforcing leather/hide lamellar with strips of ivory (elephant or hippo in this case) for both decorative purposes, and to toughen the armour up. Between that and the fact that some of the walrus tusk Inuit armours you mention had to face iron speartips long before the white boys showed up, I guess I'm not that surprised by the efficacy of this armour. Great to actually see it in action, though.

[@MalcolmPL]

I hadn’t heard that. It sounds like a boned corset.

[@KartarNighthawk]

@@MalcolmPL The instructions recommend using fish glue to bind four layers of camel skin together to make the basic cuirass. Then, when talking about decorating the cuirass, the author suggests the ivory, since unlike gold or silver it's both pretty and functional, with the strips reinforcing the plates they're bonded to. Camel skin averages 3-6mm thick, so four layers would get you 12-24mm of armour before you bind on the ivory. Which sounds pretty solid, especially if worn over a hauberk.

[@Dr.Gehrig]

Awesome. Great testing. Thank you.

[@wyattw9727]

If you want some information to cross reference from Eurasia to see if it has practical application (such as material thickness) I can definitely recommend the book by Timothy Dawson "Armour Never Wearies: Scale and Lamellar Armour in the West, from the the Bronze Age to the 19th Century". It's a small and thin book but contains some information on organic lamellar along with metal, scale as well. Also I wouldn't call the arrow breaking the center plate a failure of the armor at all. A lot of lamellar, even metal, was actually pretty shit in construction (like .5mm poor iron in some cheaper examples) and the point of it is less to be an invulnerable bulwark but something that breaks apart and stops a lethal hit. What's a true failure is, going by the assessment of Alan Williams, if something penetrates 40 centimeters after penetrating the armor itself, the armor has totally failed and the subject is dead. Even a penetration of 10cm can be considered a partial success if the normal penetration without armor would be 20, 30, or more (etc).

[@MalcolmPL]

The name rings a bell. I'll see if I can find it.

[@QuentinStephens]

I am currently reading this book and so far it would benefit from a second edition with pictures local to the text.

[@MakeItPrimitive]

Cool video and interesting results! Another reason why pre-metal civilizations might not have used the middle slice is that they wouldn't have had access to a saw. I haven't worked with this material a lot yet, but I reckon that it would be hard to get more than two flat pieces out of an antler if you have to split it instead of sawing it?

[@MalcolmPL]

It could be sawed, first by scraping a shallow cut with a flint flake, then adding sand and sawing with a thin wooden blade. That’s how you would cut sections from the antler in the first place, as it can’t be split against the grain. I just don’t know how thin a cut you can get with this method, two slices might be all you could get anyway. It might be worth some experimentation.

[@MakeItPrimitive]

@@MalcolmPL You're right, of course. Even though this is just be the linear version of a core drill with a hollow piece of wood, it somehow hadn't occurred to me that one could do this. And I have a big bone waiting to be put to some use lying around, I think it would present a good opportunity to try out this method. :-)

[@michaelwilson733]

Or it could be softened by soaking in water and heating it you could also flatten otherwise unusable parts

[@heathenwizard]

Really fascinating stuff! I’m surprised by how well the antler stood up to the spear. I imagine whale bone - which is much denser to allow the animal to dive - would perform even better than the antler.

[@MalcolmPL]

I hadn't thought of that. I wonder...

[@junichiroyamashita]

Had the natives the ability to hunt whales?

[@MalcolmPL]

Yes. Inuit still hunt whales using traditional techniques.

[@dynamicworlds1]

Rather late finding your content, but moose antlers seem like a great source of material for this kind of armor where available thanks to the large flatish area. Shoulder blades likewise seem a good resource. Iirc, in Eurasia, while far less common than just metal from the eras I'm more familiar with, lamellar of horn and leather were used as well. The leather could be boiled to harden it or cut into strips to serve as backing for an entire row of lamellae to be sown through. With how the horn breaks by shattering and so often damages the tip of the weapon used, leather backing could enable even thinner plates to be effective as a blunted weapon would have a harder time going through even medium stiffness leather. I don't know if any of this was actually done in the Americas, but hopefully that might be helpful in some way.

[@MalcolmPL]

Moose is probably less useful than one might think. They often weigh twenty pounds each, and I don't know how feasible it would be to split them into thinner slices with historical tools.

[@knutzzl]

The oldest known helmet was made of boar tusk

[@MalcolmPL]

By quite a margin too.

[@owentaylor8700]

How many antlers would it take to produce a full vest? It seems like it would need a lot of deer to make a number of these

[@MalcolmPL]

White tailed deer it would take a dozen, I estimate, maybe more. Caribou, maybe only four.

[@mr.p9008]

& how about mammoth, or other great scale animals or whale bone, the further u go back in time, the more of those existed .. as today assumptions tell us, they where eaten, so I guess their bones got to good use as well ,.. .)

[@MalcolmPL]

Mammoth tusks weigh like eighty pounds. So I guess it would depend on how efficiently you could cut it. Whereas a single whale skeleton could easily armor a small village. No picture can accurately convey how big those things are up close.

[@rokasbalciunas8058]

Moose antler has the widest flat area for making armour, I guess.

[@MalcolmPL]

I thought of that, it would be difficult to cut slices from even with modern technology. Far more so with stone tools. The only way it would work is if you were to grind it down to the desired thickness, but then you're wasting more than half your material.

[@dynamicworlds1]

Would it be possible to break thick lamellar sections first and then cut them in half through the spongy pulp to double the quantity and lessen the weight? This would minimize the amount of time trying to cut through the harder exterior. My only experience with antler is the absolute pain in the butt trying to saw through deer antler tips to make buttons, so I really have no idea how viable working with moose antlers would be, though it occurred to me too. What's obvious isn't always correct, though

[@user-bl7ik5mn9w]

Would bone from a skull be feasible? or would it be too rounded or just brittle to be effective

[@asa-punkatsouthvinland7145]

Another reason I think bone armor didn't catch on is because living bone is like s hard sponge which can flex a bit & compress while dead bone calcifies and becomes hard & brittle shattering easily.

[@MalcolmPL]

There are a lot of factors.

[@asa-punkatsouthvinland7145]

@@MalcolmPL certainly, I'm just saying that is one I was thinking of. I often see tests on youtube using dead bone & it's just not the same as live bonr at all. Forged in Fire definitely is guilty of this. That being said I really have been enjoying your vids & this armor test was surprising! It's more impressive defense than I would have assumed, although I didn't expect it to be bad

[@MyCommentsRMaturelol]

interesting, seems more resistant to cutting and stabbing than smashing

[@Adrimanonator]

0:58 i like your hands

[@MalcolmPL]

I’m rather attached to them myself.

[@QuentinStephens]

Can the interior of the antler be hardened? If so, how about cutting the antlers into discs and making scale armour? BTW sliced boar tusks were used to make helmets in the Stone and Bronze Ages in the Mediterranean.

[@MalcolmPL]

Hardening materials makes them more brittle. So it wouldn't help here. As to scale, cutting antler with stone tools is extremely time consuming, so you would want to make the armour with as few cuts as possible.

[@Luziferrum]

Another question is: Can you split the antler/bone or do you need a saw? I guess by the time folks had access to a decent metal saw, bone armour was obsolete. The walrus got me thinking, though. Walrus males fight over females and thus have evolved their tusks but also very thick skin. Do you know if anyone turned those hides into armour? I only know of elk hide clamons.

[@MalcolmPL]

You can split antler, but I don't know if it's possible with any degree of precision. When I've tried, the pieces tended to shear off at weird angles. Sawing partway through on all sides and then splitting might work to guide the splits in the intended direction. In terms of pre-metal saws, you start the cut by scraping with a flint flake, then when it gets too deep for the flake you put sand in the groove and saw with a thin wooden blade. It's a heck of a lot slower than a hack saw, but it works. A third method is to drill a line of holes, and then cut through the remaining material. Re, walrus hide. Here are some examples. An armor made from walrus hide over a wooden frame. www.pinterest.ca/pin/631770653973040803/ An armor from walrus hide alone. artmuseum.princeton.edu/collections/objects/35721

[@HAYAOLEONE]

I suppose we simply used scapula, pelvis, jaw and skull pieces before saws making regular boards. But mostly skins (coated or not) in all their variants. Interesting video though. Antler is tough. Green bamboo is kinda tough and make me think of bones sometimes. Not lightweight in tubes but very OK in 1/2 or 1/3 section of a tube 'tiles'. Easy to split. The part connecting the tubular sections also has a perpendicular 'wall' made of something like strong cardboard. Not super tough (brittle) but giving support for 3D building. I suppose well dried (thick/lower parts above the ground) bamboo pieces would be pretty good but it means working with small pieces / cutting them.. I think one of the military guys in the movie 'Apocalypto' has a piece of bamboo armor on his shoulders but I may remember wrong. Looks half realistic half fantasy. I wonder if bamboo was traded in ancient times and how far it would have travelled. It grows really easily, do good in moisture and won't swell like crazy in water/get destroyed by salt water really quick. Very interesting plant.

[@MalcolmPL]

The issue is that a stone blade is narrowest at the edge, unlike a modern saw which is narrowest at the spine. This means that the cut quickly becomes too tight for the blade. You could start a cut with a flint knife, sure, but you couldn’t get all the way.

[@torianholt2752]

Rhino hide armor was highly prized in ancient China, considered superior to bronze or iron lamellar.

[@blaf55]

damm this is cool

[@MalcolmPL]

Cheers.

[@blaf55]

@@MalcolmPL does glass armor exist ?

[@MalcolmPL]

@@blaf55 Not that I've heard of.

[@gentlyvillainous]

What about a mooses antler scoop? Thats a huge amount of antler that could easily be made into a chest piece or helmet side.

[@MalcolmPL]

Theoretically, but moose antlers are about an inch thick and weigh twenty pounds each. The size would also mean that you also wouldn't be able to split the antlers into thinner sheets using historical tools. It's feasible, but they're not so ideal as they might appear.

[@Zane-It]

You could boil the antler and flatten it out against a board with rope

[@MalcolmPL]

Doing so makes the antler more brittle. It might not be a deal breaker though. Worth experimenting.

[@Zane-It]

@@MalcolmPL I'm glad I'm able to help

[@fearfull.198]

Moose antler armor

[@MalcolmPL]

I wonder.