After what is probably 2 ½ years, I’ve FINALLY finished my Valsgarde 6 helm from Zweihammer’s Armoury kit. This was from his first set of kits he sold and is 12 gauge. Aventail is one of Master Knutt’s flat ring welded stainless. Shirt is flat ring riveted (stainless also). Fighter is in need of a diet. Please ignore the leg and arm harness, it was used so I could try out the new helm with maile shirt at practice last night.

The full kit will have hidden legs with proper foot wear and the lower leg-wrappings (can’t remember the proper term for those). Hidden arms with new gambeson with hidden back pockets to slide in hard plates for kidney protection so the only visible armor should be the maile and helm (other than hand protection). And a HUGE shout out to Sean Powell from the Archive here who lent his shop space, thoughts, guidance and patients in this process.
 

For those that like the details, notes on the construction:
We modified the kit some (obviously) since I wanted the hanging aventail around the band line and right up to the ocularum from the beginning. The nasal is shortened. Removed the three “tabs” that were off the bottom of the eye pieces so we could more easily attach the leather strip and mail. The back slats shapes are more gentle so the maile hangs better. We could not get the original mouth/chin piece to work where it didn’t end up looking odd at best and most of the time like a gorilla, so we just ended up with some ½ inch stock bars instead since it’s under the maile anyway. The finish is done with an industrial powder coating. The color is an antique gold/bronze that was close to what we were looking to do anyway and the shop just happened to have enough leftover from a previous project where I did not have to order a full 5 pounds of a new color.

http://www.donatoarts.com

So, we have a nice 55 gal fresh water aquarium at our house. We had recently lost some of our longer time residence (most likely just to age) so I decided to add a couple more fish in to keep the population level even and add some color. So I picked up some neon tetras and 3 sunburst platys...
 

Apparently, they were not all male as the pet store said. We think we have 2 female and one male, because in short order, we had at least 2 new generations of baby platys. An apparently, none of our other fish eat other little fish, so they spawned and all seem to do fine….and I mean ALL of them. We just had our fish guy who cleans our tank take out the majority of the “baby” platys. He removed ~40 of them from 4 generations total. He left 11 (including the 3 original). So we had over 50 of these fish in our tank. Geeze….