the top of a sheet of kikko armor

About a month ago, my friend Madigan and I started working on the construction of kikko armor. Kikko is a form of japanese armor that uses hexagons of leather or steel that are chained together or sewn to a backing.

I first hit upon the idea because I was complaining about how western brigandine and similar armors seem to work… they use rectangles, which of course means that, no matter how you lay them out, you will have angles at which a blade could strike you and find space between the plates. “Much smarter to use hexagons,” I said, and when I turned to google, I was not the least bit surprised that I wasn’t the first person to think of this.

Anyhow, our kikko has been made of hot-water-hardened horsehide (mistakenly called “boiled leather” by some) plates, chained together by 16ga blackened stainless steel. (butted rings.)

an in-progress sheet of kikko armor.

Step by step:

• take your vegetable-tanned, 8oz or so leather. Soak it in room-temperature (not cold) water for 10 minutes, roughly. Then immerse it in 180-degree-farhenheit water for 45 seconds or so (the timing matters a lot, and needs experimenting. We settled on 45 seconds). Take it out and put it between a rock and a hard place. You want two flat, non-water-permeable surfaces. (Cardboard did not work so well for us, it sucks the oils out of the leather or something weird like that.) What we did that worked best was put it on a plastic countertop and put a marble cutting board on top, then stacked heavy books on top of that. The water makes the leather pliable, and the hot water fuses the fibers of the leather, making it much, much tougher, but a bit brittle once dried. We left the leather under pressure for about 15-20 minutes. It takes awhile to dry, but will stay pretty flat after being pressed for 15 minutes.
• It’s easiest to cut the leather while it’s wet, but it’s not essential that you do so. We made two sizes of hexagons. One was a regular hexagon with .75″ sides, one was a twice-as-tall one with 1.5″ tall sides and .75″ other sides. I designed a template on a computer, because our hand-drawn ones were not as regular as we’d hoped. If anyone asks, I’ll post a pdf of it in the comments. We traced the hexagons onto thin cardboard from a cereal box or beer box, then one of us drew as many hexagons onto the piece of leather as we were able to fit while the other cut them out using a boxcutter.
• We stained the plates with USMC black leather stain. I want to try natural dyes sometime too. But as it was, I followed the instructions on the box, one coat of leather stain and one coat of sealant. I sealed the back too, to avoid mold.
• We punched holes in them. We used a small sheet-metal punch on some and a pin vice drill on others. The vice took longer but had more control. Figuring out the spacing was tricky, and getting the spacing as regular as possible helps a lot.
• We chained them together using a barely-modifiedjapanese 6-1 chainmail pattern. The rings we used, which fit well, are 1/4″ 16ga.

closeup of kikko armor

Lessons learned so far:

• make sure you dry the leather out before you put it into a plastic bag in your van or backpack for two weeks, or you’ll have moldy leather. If your leather does get moldy before you stain and seal it, use white vinegar to kill it, then dry it out and make sure the mold seems gone before you stain and seal it.

So far, kikko is pretty cool. Even more labor-intensive than straight chainmail, and probably not as strong, but it’s significantly lighter while still staying flexible and pretty tough. We’re making a skirt out of it first, then I’ll probably try some greaves with the plates sewn or riveted to a backing of unhardened leather.

The cover of the proof for BTE6

inside Being the Explorations #6, pictures of Finland.

inside Being the Explorations #6, Utah.

I just approved the proof copy of Being the Explorations #6, my second full-size photo book in this series. (The last one was Being the Explorations #5, which covers all of my wandering in 2011). I’m enormously proud of these books. They’re definitely the closest thing to a journal that I keep. The most recent book includes lots of my photos from 2010, 2008, 2002, and 1999-2000. I’ll put the whole thing up for free download when the book gets back from the printer.

Pirate Cinema
by Cory Doctorow

Cory Doctorow lets you download his novels for free, right off his website. Which is how I read his last novel, For the Win–which I also highly recommend. So when I saw his newest young adult novel, Pirate Cinema, in hardcover, I bought it. I set down to read it, and was blown away.

Most of what I loved about it falls into the realm of spoilers, but I’ll leave those out. The book takes place in a near-future London only the tiniest bit more dystopian than what we have now, and it’s about a young runaway who finds camaraderie, love, dumpster-diving, and meaningful ways to apply his talents to direct action social change.

Cory Doctorow has an amazing talent for making socially-useful fiction. And in this case, he’s written an immersive book that shows quite clearly the ways that legal and illegal activism work hand-in-hand. Of course, I personally found the direct action campaign more entertaining than the lobbying, but that’s how I feel in real life as well.

I’ve always known Cory to be a fellow-traveler to the anarchists, but we’re also given a bit of the limelight here: one of the central characters of the book works at Dancing Emma’s, an anarchist bookstore named after Emma Goldman (and, well, named after the real Red Emma’s in Baltimore). It’s not an anarchist novel, but it’s a novel that realistically portrays us as essential elements in social struggle.

And while the book takes the point of view of a straight male, it subverts the protagonist’s dominance, showing how he learns to be part of a team. I found the women characters to be strong and central to the story, and the way the book presented homosexuality to its young readers to be admirable.

But it’s also just an engaging book, a “stay up till 4am to finish it” kind of book. And a book I highly recommend.