How to make armor out of waxed leather scales.

3 - Wax the Scales

Dangers:

Wax will flash into flame if it gets too hot, just like most oils or fats. Yes, this really means that you can get in to light on fire without a spark or flame.

Molten wax is hot, keep your fingers out.

Precautions:

Have an ABC fire extinguisher handy.

Have a lid for your pot/pan handy. If you can cover your pan of flaming wax, it will run out of air and go out.

Double boil. Put your pan with the wax into a bigger pan of water. The combination means that your wax can't get above 212F as long as there is water in your bigger pan. Additionaly, you probably want to seperate the metal of the two pans from each other, maybe a piece of wood or something. This would force the heat to go through the water, since the water will turn to gas when it tries to get hotter then 212F, you have an upper limit to your wax temperature. This is a bit of a safety trade-off, adding the second pan can make things a little more tippy.

Use the lowest setting your stove can produce.

Turn off the heat when you aren't watching the stove. The wax will stay a mostly usable temperature for 15 minutes while you grab some coffee or whatever.

Cover the world in tin foil. This may catch some of the wax before it lands on the stove or counter top. This may prevent your significant other from stabbing you with a bread knife. (Personally, this has worked Wonders for me! I have Never been stabbed with a bread knife by my girlfriend and I've done this twice!)

Wax On

This process is little more then soaking each scale in the molten wax for a minute or two. Notice the amount of bubbles coming up, that's mostly ideal.

Below is what it looks like when your wax is too hot. It looks more like you are frying then soaking. There was no difference that I could determine between soaking at the lower temperature and at this temperature. Since the lower temperature works fine, why bother with the higher temperature and increase the risk of a fire

After a minute or two, the trickle of bubbles will mostly stop. (Remember, we're using the lower temperature, where the bubbles trickle out.) Grab your tongs, chopsticks or whatever and take each scale out and let the excess wax drip back in the pan. Lay them down on a sheet of tin foil. They'll look a little wet.

But they'll dry off in a few minutes.

Do em all. It took about four hours to wax all the scales in this box.

4 - Drill the Holes

Telephone books are great for drilling on. Especially if they're last years.

Then Lacing -->