Well, it seems that today I sold my first Pewter badge on Ebay.  That would be great if it hadn’t taken about 2 years at roughly $15/month to do it.   Stupidly this is totally my fault for not actually doing anything with the Ebay store, just leaving it there each month paying the fee.  I guess what I should do is actually use the Camera I bought specifically to increase the stock in my ebay store to take photo’s of other things, and add them to the store.  This I should do now that I have some time…  In fact this I should have been doing since I was made unemployed as that was the only pathetic excuse I had back then.  Feel free to hassle me into getting stuff on the Ebay store!

So what have I been doing in my unemployment instead of doing sensible things like selling stuff on Ebay?  I have been getting armour and stuff ready very slowly in an attempt to start fighting heavy.  It’s another one of those things that I have been procrastinating about for ages, so I have been doing bits here and there to get prepared for it.  Today I spend an hour or two modifying the faceplate of my helm so that I can get the legal 1″ apart bars welded in place.  I have also needed to change the way the helm and faceplate meet, so it shall signifficantly change the look of the helm.  Last week I made a Boss for my shield, and once I manage to find my acrylics I shall paint the shield and finish off the edging.

Like always I think there is always a better way to do something and I experiment with everything.  When my helm was originally made I used boot polish to prevent it from rusting as I’m not a fan of the shiny helm look or the look of painted metal but I do enjoy the look of bear rough metal.  This provided a happy compromise, giving the metal a dull grey, but still metallic look.  It has lasted really well only showing sings of rust where friction had rubbed the polish down to metal from the canvas in my armour bag..   My latest experiment is to make a shield edge that lasts longer than the normal shield edges I have seen…  Now I must admit to start with that my experience of shield edges is very limited, so I won’t confess to knowing whether this has been tried before or not.  The shield edges I have seen are either aluminimum channel then hosepipe then tape, or just the channeling with leather edging over the top.  What I’m going to try is to silicon on a rope around the outside of the aluminimum edging.  I’m hoping that this will provide enough of a buffer between the blow on the edge and the wood to stop the wood from starting to split.  It should also increase the life of the leather going around the edge as the leather will no lnger be hitting directly onto metal.  Anyway..  that’s the theory.   Time will tell, and there’s also the fact that being a newbie fighter, my head is likely to be taking most of the blows, not the shield edge.

That it from me tonight, but remember feel free to hasle me about either looking for work, or getting the Ebay store working better.