The title ought to tell you that this will be my series of threads on making good-looking, affordable Japanese armour. As members of the 14th Century Mafia have found out, the key is not expense, but form and line. To that end, these articles shall detail the making of fighting kit, acceptable to SCA standards, from the skin out. In particular, this article addresses some assumptions and such, so that further threads' discussions may concentrate more on the method, rather than whether or not the method, or its results are correct for some other set of assumptions.
1. This project shall use plastic. The majority of Japanese armour is made of lacquered rawhide or lacquered metal. Japanese lacquer is made of compounds called urushiols. There are 3 plants in North America that produce urushiols: poison oak, poison sumac, and poison ivy. Additionally, the hull of the cashew (which is not a nut, botanically) produces lacquer. Most Caucasians find uncured lacquer to be allergenic, which limits its use. Further more, experiments with lacquered armour in the SCA have results indicating that it does not hold up well enough in SCA combat to be useful as an armour coating. Finally, Japanese lacquer is a polymer (though possibly not technically a plastic). Therefore, I conclude that some modern plastics are an acceptable substitute for lacquered metal or rawhide. Additionally, I personally find that there is no weight advantage to plastic, as my kit weighs in the range of weights of period kits.
2. Because of the rather large difference in average height of a modern North American and a period Japanese, there is a need to deal with the sizing of patterns, individual pieces, and components. What I shall show is what I believe that the Japanese would make for a person of modern size, rather than scaling all things up such that if the modern person were shrunk, all would be to period size. In particular, this runs counter to Master Effingham's advice, but I feel that it is more a matter of taste.
3. Although I shall undoubtedly use some rather advanced equipment is the production of this armour, because I own it and it's faster to use it, there is nothing that I shall do that cannot be accomplished relatively quickly using basic hand tools. There shall be a thread for tools and materials, which I shall definitely have to update often as I don't think I can, from a standing start, get all the tools and materials correct at the beginning.
4. Discussion of these articles should take place on the Armour Archive, on the thread dealing with that particular article. The discussion threads shall be named in a similar fashion to the titles of these pages. I would also prefer to limit the discussions to questions about the method, but I doubt that will last. My account there isn't any more important than yours (and less important than some).
5. I'll note that there are no active email addresses at j-armour.com.
These articles are dedicated to the idea that, for the same amount of time and effort, one may produce something decent, rather than something vile. Yes, you can make much fancier armours, but the intent here is specifically to move the lower end of Japanese armouring upward, rather than to extend the upper end.