I had an interesting idea for my armor stands. Some of the armor comes on/off the stands frequently enough that I hate to tie/adjust/re-tie the lacing over and over, especially for things like making the arms/legs hang at the same height (yay, OCD). I found these "no tie" shoelace things online -
http://tie-x.com/shop/ (
UPDATE: Get the push-clips from walmart in the camping section; 4 for $0.58 instead of $9.99!!) - and ordered a couple. Oddly enough, there's even a set on the jacket I got for Christmas and I never noticed. They work much better than I hoped! Here they are in action, holding up my MRL gothic legs:
The laces they come with are elastic-ish and stretch under load, so I ended up buying some cheap $2 for 4 shoe laces at Wal-Mart and stashing the stretchy laces for some unknown use later. I put 6 "points" on the stands; 2 for the legs, and 4 at the neck; 2 for arms, and 2 for pauldrons/spaulders. The laces are 54" long, so I cut them in half, using 1 1/2 "sets" of laces per stand. The no-tie plastic things are $6 for a set of 4; most stands used 6, and one only used 4 (since the arms & spaulders are one assembly). So it worked out to about $11 per stand - not bad. Leather lacing alone was about $5 per stand, and I only had 3 stands done before, so it's a nominal cost difference.
Getting things on/off is so much easier and faster! Greaves on, slip the laces through the legs, put the cuirass on, laces through the arms, laces through the spaulders, helmet, done. I need to find something to do with the "frayed" end of the laces from cutting them in half, but that's minor. The pics of the armor in the "finished" man-cave / office in my other thread, all of the armor on the stands is using them.
My last "engineering issue" is a way to connect/hang gauntlets; I'm thinking about using Sir Brian's crest/mask attachment idea with the rare earth magnets, and attaching a magnet to the wooden frame at the end of the "arm", and have the magnet hold the gauntlets. Crazy enough to work, or just crazy?