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"Easy" armor suspension for armor stands

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Sir James A:
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? :)

Sir Patrick:
Great solution!

Sir James A:
Update on this; I never used the stretchy lace that came with the push-clips. Obviously stretchy things doesn't work well for holding up armor. I bought the really cheap shoe laces from wal-mart, though if I were *really* hardcore I'd have braided some proper points; maybe later? Anyway, I was shopping for unrelated items at, perhaps of no surprise, Wal-Mart. The push-clips that slide on over the laces were there in the camping section ... 4 for $0.58!

Could have saved me around $75 if I had bought just the push-clips from there... I'm updating the first post with this info too.

Edit: Ah, I also have a solution for the frayed ends of the laces. I bought some very thin brass wire, coated in black, from JoAnn fabrics. Take about half a foot, and wrap it tightly around the frayed end, then cut the frayed bit down close to the wire. Works great as long as you don't tug on the wire itself, which will slide right off.

Sir William:
The pic's gone, Sir James.

Sir Brian:

--- Quote from: James Anderson III on 2013-07-13, 14:47:03 ---Edit: Ah, I also have a solution for the frayed ends of the laces. I bought some very thin brass wire, coated in black, from JoAnn fabrics. Take about half a foot, and wrap it tightly around the frayed end, then cut the frayed bit down close to the wire. Works great as long as you don't tug on the wire itself, which will slide right off.
--- End quote ---

I'll try and explain a solution to this without pictures...  :-\

Prior to wrapping the wire around the frayed end of the laces you should place a loop of wire on the end you intend to stop the wrap then bring the bitter end of the wire to the opposite end of the lace and leave a pull tail. Begin tightly wrapping the wire then when at the end of the where the loop is at, pass the wire through the loop and wrap it twice around the loop itself then pull the tail on the other end to pull the bitter end of the wire into the wraps to secure the wire and hide the bitter end.

Does any of  that make sense?  ???

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