Solo [Sultros Blades] Shielded Chain

[Eanos]

50 Fall, 513 AV

It had occurred to Eanos many times that the construction of the castle was possibly the closest thing to Sultros outside of Isurian territory. It was unusual, at least as far as he knew for humans to live effectively underground. Once it had been necessary for many in order to survive the aftermath of a gods attempt to destroy the world. There was some irony then that this city, the city which marked in rememberance the destruction of the god who had fought to save the world was the one where the humans chose to remain underground when the rest of the race had returned to the surface preserved for them.

However, despite all this the city was mostly populated by humans and most of them still clung to the cycle of Synas appearance over the city. Eanos however did not for he built his life instead around the projects that he worked upon and most often it was simply easier for him to work during the periods of darkness when the others who worked also in the forge had gone home, leaving him free run to do as he pleased with all of the facilities allowed.

He was fairly sure however that it didn’t please his neighbours for the castle also held all of the residences of the people and they were mostly on the same level as his forge, which inevitably meant some must be disturbed to some extent by the sound of his work. So far he had had no outright complaints but he had considered that the people who lived here also included his customers so it made no business sense to create a bad reputation for no reason. In personal terms he wasn’t concerned one way or another, but even for him common sense ruled at least some of the time.

During the night the door to the shop was closed and the walls were as thick as could be expected since they had the weight of the upper floors to carry, but on balance he had decided long ago to do something more. After some thought he had decided to screen the interior door between the forge and the shop. To this end he had chosen chainmail for the screen, but not a solid screen, just a chain of links so that they could be moved aside easily to allow passage and so that it could be tied away when not in use. Of course this alone would be of little use in stopping the sound of hammer on metal, so each chain would carry a shield which would be tasked in stopping sound. It would not be a complete barrier to sound but it did not need to be and he hoped that it would be effective enough bearing in mind the outer door to mute the sound enough to do what he wanted.

The forge had been busy during the early part of the season and he’d not found the time to create the chain, needing as he did to make it from wire, and that wire he needed to create as well. Now though it seemed that there was a quiet period and so he onsidered it the perfect time to start.

[Eanos]

Much of his chain production had been relatively small scale for his work had been mostly to do with weapons. Because he had spent some considerable time experimenting with the means of producing it he now had a much better understanding of the challenges involved.

The production of it did not stretch his abilities in terms of smithing for it was quite simple to make, at least with the right tools, but those tools were not quite so easily available for a small operation like his, especially once steel or iron was involved. He could make the chain he needed from any metal, but it would be ridiculous to even think of making them from precious metals as he would need a significant amount. To make them from steel or iron was also sightly ridiculous, though a little less so, not so much because of the cost but rather more because there was no need for the inherent strengths of those metals and the relative difficulty of forging them into wire.

The obvious solution was to make them from a copper alloy such as brass which would be perfectly suited to the task and so long as he used a suitable chain construction technique then strength would not be an issue either. Creating tasking for the chain would prove much more of a challenge and it was something that he had not as yet decided upon exactly what he wanted. A barrier against sound was the obvious choice and as a novice in the craft of shielding he was limited by what he could do. Aside from the issues of overgiving that he would need to work very carefully around on this project and balance it carefully against any other djed work that he might wish to do, there was the as yet unresolved question as to whether he would be able to do what he had in the back of his mind to do.

Thinking though was not going to get him anywhere on this project for he lacked the surety that theory or experience might give and there was going to be one easy way to find out. Either way he would be able to complete the project, just in his mind he knew that there were good ways and better ways to achieve that end.

The starting point was to create the wire and for this he needed to make some changes to the setup in the forge. Too much of the way everything was setup was the result of human design and that needed to change. It would create some issues for the sharing of the forge with Hadyn and any apprentices that he had, but it was time that they worked around his smithing style and not the other way round.

With that in mind he cleared the forge of coals, which it was due for already to be fair and reinstalled the anvil that it had held before, the one which already carried a shield against heat. It was an appropriate time to ensure that the shield was still strong and so he closed his eyes for the short while it took him to be able to see and manipulate djed, fortunately his experience with Auristics meant that this was quicker to achieve than his expertise in shielding would have allowed. But still, the process for conversion was a little different so he took his time and allowed it to proceed at it’s own pace. A little part of him ebbed away, weakening him in a subtle fashion as he converted the djed and fed it into the shield so that it strengthened a little. He didn’t feed it much as it was still relatively new and there was a strict level beyond which he did not yet have the experience to go beyond, and he needed to create a new shield of the same type.

[Eanos]

With the anvil set into the lower right hand corner of the forge, he would be able to work with metal directly in the forge and hammer on the anvil whilst his left arm protected him somewhat from the heat of the forge.

Now he needed the reduction plates into which the brass would feed to be mounted on the side of the forge too. He quickly made up a simple bracket which would hold it upright on the side with legs which extended down on either side of the forge sides to hold it secure. He tested the fit and made sure that it would slide along the side enough to either be next to the coals or the anvil so that he could change how much heat was acting directly upon the metal which was being transformed into wire.

He examined the setup closely and both imagined and tested working on it to ensure that nothing got in the way. If he was careful then he should be able to take the raw ingot of brass with his left hand and mould it into a narrow enough cylinder to feed into the largest of the reduction cones and then with the pliers pull it out of the other side as a thick brass wire. In theory it should work, but only practice would make that happen.

Before he restocked and relit the forge fire he considered anew the need to create a shield for the reduction plate. The anvil with its shield should provide some degree of protection against the heat of the fire and after some consideration he decided that there was no point in creating the shield if it wasn’t necessary, especially considering the risks of using djed for no reason. If in the process it became obvious that the plate was getting too hot then he could always create a shield then.

Satisfied with his logic he put the coal and coke back into the forge as he prepared to light it, spoke a prayer. ”Izurdin, Lord. Bless this fire and the work that it produces. Let the heat be a testament to your power and let it flow well. I give you thanks Lord for the blessings that you have already bestowed and offer you gratitude for that.”

With tools prepared, so that all he needed or might need were to hand he took a bar of brass from the stores and slipped it into the forge to heat. This was routine work, the changing of form from bar to cylinder and then to much narrower cylinder. The main difference to the way that a human smith might do it was that Eanos did not bother much with hammers as the power of Inzentor which lay in his left arm allowed him to shape the metal directly with his fingers. If he ensured that it was the right heat to begin with it wasn’t overly hard work and had the added benefit over hammering that the brass didn’t work harden and so he saved time by skipping that step too.

[Eanos]

After some time the forge had reached working temperature and he was able to make a start with the creation of wire from the brass bar. Particles of brass flicked off the bar and burnt green in the heat as he ran his fingers over the slightly molten exterior and wiped off the dust and soot of the flames and then using the anvil he hammered it out with both hammer and fist. The soft metal was quickly reshaped into a cylinder and then he worked to make it thinner.

The thinner and even he could make it at this stage, the better the end result would be and the less the number of breakages which he would suffer in the making of it. He worked at it, not making any attempt to hurry the work for he would need a considerable amount of wire to complete the project in hand. Haste was one thing, attempting to hurry the task quite another for the two were not mutually compatible at all.

With the first of the bars reduced down to a thin cylinder he heated it once more by holding it above the flames in his fingers which meant that it would not pick up too much contamination from the forge and then fed it into the largest diameter die of the plate. It required him to mould the end into a narrow cone with his fingers so that enough stuck through to grab with the pliers and start to pull even as he pushed against it from the forge side.

Once it started to move then it pulled through much easier and he almost immediately regretted attempting this on his own for it would be much simpler with an apprentice to pull the metal through and roll it roughly so that it was ready for the next stage. For once he was working during the daylight hours and so it was an oversight easily corrected. A few words of explanation sufficed and with another pair of hands to be pulling the wire through he was able to get it started. Quickly though he swapped over for his additional strength was better suited to the pulling whilst the apprentice with tongs unrolled enough of the thicker cylinder to ensure that the end caught the heat of the forge whilst the rest fed in smoothly across the top of the anvil.

With some experimentation Eanos and his apprentice soon found the right rhythm of working and once the brass was fed through once it was then fed through again and again until it had reduced to the diameter that Eanos wanted of it. This also gave him a good feel for how much wire he could expect from each of the bars compared to how much he would need to make the chain. With this in mind he brought enough additional brass from the store and with his assistant standing by for when he was needed for the wire pulling part of the process he continued to make wire until he judged that he enough.

[Eanos]

With the newly forged brass wire now coiled and ready for use it needed to be made into rings and for this Eanos needed to decide for once and for all the size of the rings to be used. He used a shorter piece of the wire from one of the first bars where they had still been working on technique and the wire had snapped during the last pull through on the reduction process, and experimented with various mandrels to create some rings which he coud then practice on.

The wire itself drove the selection process in the end for too small a ring and he’d not be able to weave other rings through it and the more rings he wanted to weave the larger it needed to be. But too large a ring and it lost structural strength and would bend too easily if put under pressure. Brass was too weak to take much pulling on the chain if it were just a single row of links which meant at least doubling up of the links even if he did not use a pattern. Doubling up allowed the use of larger rings but at the price of having more rings in use which meant more wire and it counted against the space advantage of larger rings.

Because of the amount of work involved he decided that it would be advantageous to proceed on the basis of testing as he proceeded, so before he even started with the process of making chain he was back at the forge and hammering out an iron pole to hang it from. With the pole forged, filed, shaped and roughly polished, for there was no point in making something which did not reflect well on the shop, no matter how unlikely it was that the average customer might ever notice it, he proceeded to make the fittings to hang it, again to the same standard and mounted it above the door into the forge.

With his choices made, it was simple enough to proceed for the brass was easily formed into rings by wrapping it around an iron mandrel that again he forged the same as he had the curtain rod, using the heat protected anvil in the forge which stayed cool despite the hot coals next to it. The finish on the mandrel was important in order to be able to slide the completed rings off after and not just because it was professional to do so. There were some changes between this and the much larger curtain rod though. One end had a large flat bar end to it which could be held in a vice and there was a slit chiselled down it’s length with a brass wire hammered down so that it was inset into it which would allow the rings to be cut off.

With the mandrel clamped in the vice he wrapped the wire round but then slipped them off to heat in the forge to anneal them before putting them back on and cutting them free with a chisel.

[Taylani]

XP Award!

Eanos:

XP Award:

• +3 planning
• +1 auristics
• +2 shielding
• +3 blacksmithing

Lore:

• Humans do not live effectively underground.
• Time for other apprentices to work around Eanos smithing style.
• .

Notes: These are comments.

Comments :

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TAYLANI