Armour?

[Aqtai]

That lorica musculata looks pretty good after just 5 hours work, is it bronze?

On the subject of mail, it's my understanding that mail was usually made from iron rather than steel, there were good sound reasons for this apparently. If I remember rightly if struck, a steel ring was more likely to break where as an iron ring would deform, but not break.

I would't worry too much about the armpits being exposed on the krug-style cuirass, AFAIK the krug, like the chahar aina, was meant to be worn over a mail shirt.

I still haven't found the bazubands I mentioned, but I'm sure I've seen one like yours somewhere. Here are a pair of Iranian bazubands circa 1700 from the Royal Armouries:


With regards to what you said about the size of bazubands, I encountered the same thing with a tulwar I recently bought, the hilt was too small for my hand. I can only surmise that the average Turk/Iranian/Indian circa 1400-1800 was smaller than most modern Europeans.

Solid plate bazubands were also used in India, like this example from "The Arts of War, Arms and Armour of the 7th to 19th centuries, The Nasser D. Khalili Collection of Islamic Art, VOL XXI" by David Alexander. These often look a bit bigger.