Making HEMA leather armour
Equipment for HEMA is expensive, so I made some of my own using patterns from the internet. (Dark Horse Workshop are far and away the best ones, and are very cheap!)
I sourced leather from a place near me. They give away small offcuts, and have a bin full of bigger offcuts for cheap that I use to practise with. I bought some tools from them, but I also picked up a $50 kit from eBay. The eBay tools were very mediocre and broke / wore down very quickly.
I found this study on leather hardening techniques which convinced me to buy a cheap slowcooker and some stearic acid. I did my own tests and found stearic acid hardened a lot more consistently, and left less residue than paraffin and was much easier to achieve than boiling which is really easy to over-cook, ruining your piece.
I ended up with two good pieces of arm protection (and a bunch of failed prototypes) and a gorget that have served me every Wednesday since March 2023.
Update from the future - January 2026: I've had to repair them a few times, particularly where my basket hilt rubs on the stitching of my demi-gauntlet. This has caused the stitching to snap along the join, which just required me to pull out all the old thread and re-stitch from scratch. The design can be improved to work around this. If you are using a sword without a basket, the design is fine.
Performance is as good as, if not a bit better (because I can make adjustments easily) than the basic supfen arm protection I also have. Supfen do not have a demi gauntlet option so this was the easiest way for me to get one. Also, the supfen plastic kit has cracked on me twice now (first an elbow, then a knee) which isn't super easy to repair, and sent a shard of plastic flying across the room.
I also made a forearm protector using the Dark Horse pattern, however I don't like it much. It's too short for my forearm and is a bit hard to get on and off over my jacket. I intend to adjust the pattern to make it fit my arm better, and to attach it to the elbow guard so it stops slipping down. This piece was the most expensive one, as it used a lot of 4mm leather and required a few hours of hand-stitching.