Unraveling the linothorax mystery (2013) | Hacker News Reader

Unraveling the linothorax mystery (2013)

jhupress.wordpress.com

79 points_Microft42 comments

This is cool and all, love ancient armor, curious about the chemical similarity to cour bouilli (which actually seems to suck in comparison), I'm amused that SCA heavies cheap out with armor made of carpeting which sounds more accurate than ever, but

> While all of this mayhem (both scientifically controlled and free-form) convinced us that our linothorax was ancient-battlefield-ready, we still felt compelled to try a real-life scenario, so Scott donned the armor and Greg shot him.

Fuck! Don't shoot your fucking grad students! Buy a dummy, dress the dummy in the armor, and shoot the dummy. Dummies are way cheaper than grad students. Asshole. I don't care if it was his idea as a grown adult, you loosed the arrow, you're responsible if anything goes wrong.

> Dummies are way cheaper than grad students.

It's painful to read a statement like that, knowing that HN is largely intolerant of jokes. Holding them back is very painful.

> HN is largely intolerant of jokes.

That has also been difficult for me. This cohort is sublimely brilliant in many ways and I treasure that, but it almost seems to be at the price of a sense of humor.

Another thing I've found is that simply asking questions often gets treated as an act of aggression. I have tried lots of ways of being more diplomatic and have failed completely. I will accept this as a shortcoming of my own, and I truly have attempted to be nicer somehow. My new solution is to ask them and just take the downvotes on the hopes that I also get a thoughtful answer. Doesn't work very well.

Dont worry about the downvotes, you will gain them back when you post popular opinions or sensational news ;) But you can help by upvoting good questions, and things you do not agree with if its presented with facts. And upvote buried posts you think was wrongly downvoted.

Thanks for the pointers. I do indeed upvote good stuff even if I disagree, and buried posts (I like to check the New section regularly).

I get the no jokes thing. Most jokes aren't funny (most assuredly includes mine when I've tried here).

As for asking questions, I don't see that. I can post contentious stuff which gets downvoted without any constructive response (eg. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24118034) but normally asking questions gets a helpful, polite response from others.

> I don't see that.

Glad to hear it. Could just be me, or that I have an abrasive way of asking questions. Have tried for a couple of years to regulate my behavior that way, but just haven't got the knack and recently decided to give up. Now I ask and just take the downvotes.

Peeked at your history (stalker alert). Your questions look ok. Don't worry about it.

Thanks kindly. I have tried to be better behaved because I am a guest in this house.

I think HN tolerance for jokes is exactly where it needs to be. Some good and non-obvious jokes make it through. Anything more would degrade into the stream of low effort humor which makes many other forums painful to read.

I think you are probably right.

For those who weren't there and don't bear the scars, some keywords to Google:

  first post
  grits
  Natalie Portman
  in Soviet Russia...
  CowboyNeal

There are lots of stupid, low-effort jokes that are little more than obvious tribal reference and hat tips. Allow one thing, it's hard not to allow them all; and in a subjective, memetically-active area with lots of easily-amused eyeballs around, stupid jokes end up deluging niche topics.

That said, a clever joke often manages to evade the downvotes, effectively meaning there's just a high-bar for humour. YA-TWSS need not apply.

I've experimented with jokes. That isn't a cheap shot or pun, and it isn't the only thing I've got to say. But even if a cold truth said starkly gets a laugh, I don't really call it a joke, personally.

I usually don't call people assholes here, either, but this is just one of those lines that professors really must not cross but it's distressingly unsurprising.

Sigh...yeah...first thing I thought was "are you sure" then "how can you tell the difference", but knew I'd get tut-tutted about how 'that's not what we want on HN'.

It sounds like classical fiberglass.

What I'm wondering is what kind of bows did they use.

I remember from school shooting arrows at targets and then some kids bringing in compound hunting bows that put arrows right through the targets.

As a child my four and half foot yew bow with only 40 pound draw put arrows through targets. Mind you my target wasn't an official one, it was painted on the bottom of a drawer taken from a chest of drawers. Still, that was several millimetres of plywood. So I don't think I would have fancied being shot wearing linen armour!

Compound and longbows are both known for being able to pierce the armour of the time when linothorax might have been used. It was insanely stupid to test it with someone living inside it.

However, from what I can see from the video (there's a second or two at 2:16), they were using a modern recurve bow (usually less powerful than compound/longbow), the kind often used at school which tend to sit around 20-25 ft/lb.

And it very nearly pierced the armour under those conditions.

Fiberglass is my answer to the technology you'd use to make a name for yourself if you woke up in medieval times. I think it should be possible to manufacture using period equipment, and there are many uses that would be interesting to that time period.

reminded - failed body armor test (Donbass war) https://youtu.be/2ysQqHKYV1o?t=8

What does SCA mean here?

I really do not feel like spending time on looking this up myself because typing the full meaning of "SCA" out would have taken the parent poster a fraction of the time that it took them to type the paragraph that derailed the discussion before it even started.

Society of Creative Anachronism.

www.sca.org

Thanks!

It sucks when people are not thoughtful enough to type out uncommon abbreviations because the effort to type is constant while the amount of time spend by people looking it up scales with the number of readers.

Great name. Who would ever acronymize such a name?

Society of Creative Achronims (SoCA) ?

Looking it up yourself would have taken you a fraction of the time it took for you to complain that someone else didn't do it for you.

"We also found out that linen stiffened with rabbit glue strikes dogs as in irresistibly tasty rabbit-flavored chew toy, and that our Labrador retriever should not be left alone with our research project."

Animal protein glues enjoy a lot of interesting uses to this day. One of the weirder ones is glue-chipped glass[0]. You roughen the surface of glass, spread hide glue with a high gram strength on it, and as the glue dries, it contracts, chipping out the glass leaving a neat texture. One has to be quite careful disposing of the glue/glass waste. Dogs will apparently eat that, to their considerable detriment.

Fish glue is also still available from luthier suppliers; it has a higher tack than hide glue.

My favorite glue for general woodworking is Old Brown Glue[1], which is a hide glue that's been modified to remain liquid at room temperature (it's still best applied warm though). It has a longer open time than hot hide glue (which is a gelatin at room temperature), while retaining all of the benefits of hide glues generally: reversability and low creep. For a neat demonstration of the reversability, I highly recommend his column veneering video [2].

I did a project with a large bent lamination, and I was looking into the modern adhesives people typically use. Unibond and epoxy both have pretty substantial health concerns. You don't typically use yellow glue (Titebond, etc) because they do have a lot of creep, which can lead to your lamination changing shape over time. I ended up using Old Brown Glue; it had enough open time to get the lamination in clamps. I'm happy to report that I'm still alive and all four legs of my dining room table still sit flat on the ground[3].

[0] https://letterheadsignsupply.com/how-to-glue-chip-glass-inst... N.B.: You shouldn't sandblast with sand because of the risk of silicosis.

[1] https://www.oldbrownglue.com

[2] https://www.oldbrownglue.com/index.php/articles/11-articles/...

[3] https://www.longwalkwoodworking.com/gatelegtable/

Hello, fellow hide glue geek.

If you're not already familiar with it, here's a gem of a document called "Hide Glue in the Modern Workshop" [0].

I really like Old Brown Glue too, but shipping it from America is prohibitively expensive for me so I started cooking my own. My usual recipe is 0.2 parts urea, 1 part hide glue flakes, 1.5 parts water (by weight), heated to 60-70 degrees celsius, chilled rapidly, then heated again and chilled again (not sure why or if two heat and cooling cycles are necessary, but it works so I'm not trying to fix it). The result is indistinguishable from OBG.

I have also tried the "123" recipe of 1 part table salt, 2 parts glue flakes, 3 parts water (by volume) but it inhibits the gelling too much and the drying times are too long for my taste. However, it works better than the urea recipe in cooler temperatures.

I'll send an email to the address you have in your HN profile. Reply if you want to geek out about natural adhesives and woodworking in general.

[0] https://emgw.org/resources/Documents/Meeting%20Presentations...

I wonder if the historic version of this would have used boiled linseed oil as the resin rather than collagen glue.

Super cool point. Painters at the very least would have been aware of this technique.

I work with collagen glues and boiled linseed oil all the time, and they work great together. I have made wafer thin all-natural composite materials using wood fibers (thin plane shavings) as the substrate, hide glue to hold it together and thoroughly impregnated with boiled linseed oil with a beeswax top coat. The result is a rather strong material that's lightweight and thin enough to let light through.

It is plausible that they would have used boiled linseed oil instead of or in combination with hide glue or other materials commonly used in that era (bitumen, beeswax, etc).

Hi, I'm also a woodworker, and I'd love to see pictures of the material you're describing!

I'm sorry, can't find a picture right now.

I call it "basket weave veneer", made by taking thin plane shavings, boiling them in a kettle and straightening them under weight and finally weaving them like a basket and applying some glue.

Using (liquid) hide glue is essential in this job. With a PVA glue, you'd end up with a blob of plastic. Unlike PVAs, hide glue doesn't interfere with the finish (BLO).

I did a few prototype sheets with the intent of making a lamp or lantern but never completed the project.

Probably not. From a logistical standpoint, animal skin glues dry in a matter of hours in this type of use. Boiled linseed oil might take several days.

From a materials standpoint, animal skin glues dry to a hard, brittle substance. Linseed oil "dries" to a fairly gummy, flexible substance.

I'm willing to bet that the hardness of the glue combined with the strength of the fibers throughout the armor is what makes it effective. I'd be willing to bet that the linseed oil wouldn't bind the fibers of the linen tightly enough together to prevent them being pierced by an arrow.

That said, it's hard to make a direct comparison between historical and modern boiled linseed oils[0]. Historic BLO was literally boiled with white lead. I believe what you buy at the hardware store today as BLO is typically stand oil or linseed oil with some other metallic driers added, as the use of lead in all forms has fallen out of style :-)

OBLIGATORY WARNING: When people talk about oily rags spontaneously combusting, they're talking about linseed oil and a few others. If you do anything with linseed oil, boiled or otherwise, please take a few minutes to understand how to dispose of your rags safely so you don't burn your place down.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linseed_oil#Modified_linseed_o...

I don't know if you've ever worked with double boiled linseed oil -- the actually boiled kind not the chemically modified kind -- but that definitely dries to the point where it will shatter instead of bending. Some experimentation with impregnating paper with it makes me believe it'd be excellent for fabric armor like in the article.

Obviously it'll be a much slower process since the linseed oil takes so long to cure but depending on availability of materials it might still have been used.

I have not, I've only ever used the hardware store stuff. This is really interesting info; thanks! Where does one get this stuff? Please feel free to reach out by email. Address in profile.

I found mine at a small company that specializes in it. Don't think they ship internationally. Got me a 5L jerrycan which was the smallest size they would sell. Should last me more or less a lifetime with the rate I use it.

Sorry I couldn't be of more help. You could try looking around the wooden boat building community, it's not an uncommon finish for pulleys and the like on wooden boats.

Thanks for the info. I’ll look into it, though I’ve got to say, that’s probably 4 liters more than I’d need in a lifetime :-)

For me too honestly, but you do tend to find excuses to use it once you've got it lying around. It's a lovely wood finish in any case.

Flax Fiber and flax oil (linseed oil) has been used in place of fiberglass to make boats. Kind of cool that the same plant makes both the fiber and the resin.

http://compositesmanufacturingmagazine.com/2018/09/biocompos...

Huh, the process sounds like an early form of the same process used to make carbon fiber.

So now I wonder, why did the medevial era (at least knights) seemed to favor metal armors? I doubt it was less labour intensive, metal was harder to get for sure and it was probably way heavier. Was the knowledge forgotten? It seems unlikely but it might be so. Was the psychological effect of metal armor better wether at creating fear in the enemy or at creating a feeling of being safe? Would love to know more about this.

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