all right first things first thing is your first thing you're going to want to do is uh take uh some kind of cloth put it over the vise you don't want the um vice bit to mar up the metal and you only want it to be open around that much you're just kind of playing with the angle on it a little bit uh you're not actually going to be vicing it down you're not going to be actually crimping it that's the way you get hard hard lines and you don't want that you can kind of play with it put it in the hole first things first you're never gonna actually put a lot of tension on this you're going to make sure hey it's lined up with whatever has a straight line so for me it's on the bottom edge always make sure you follow whatever straight line you have or whatever your line is going to be and from the very beginning just springboard a little bit you're going to only put a little bit of tension on here see i i even i barely curved it at all you're not trying to do any fast bending right now what you're doing is you're creating stress in the middle you're going to go up and down you're just going to keep going up and down the shaft however long mine's longer than the vise itself so i have to kind of play it a little bit but as you can see here there's no bend lines yet but it is bending it is curving like i said what you're doing here is you're just creating different areas of stress along the metal and you're going to do that for as long as you can meaning however your piece your piece will most likely be bigger than the um the throat is deep but that's okay we'll go over that in a second so you should keep going back and forth playing it with it like this like i said what you're doing here is you're trying to make sure that um when you do a little bit of harsher bends later that it has more than one line or one crack to follow essentially you're making cracks in the steel when i put i'm just putting a little bit of pressure here once you once you feel it start to give a little bit you stop at least for now so once you feel the once you feel the metal kind of bend a little bit because you don't want to push down hard you don't want to have it crease so so far we have this now we have we have a slight little little indenture and that's what you want the hardest part to bend in this fashion by hand is going to be those edges we if you're using 18 or 20 gauge steel at this point you'll have this shape and you can actually kind of flex it with your arms or put it up against the vise and kind of play it a little bit again you're going to want to do it as little as possible because the faster you do this the more crease marks you're going to have so again just kind of springboard springboard it messes a little bit and you can grab it from the sides and try to squish it a little bit you don't like you want to keep trying to do it at different angles or at different points of the metal you created a bunch of stress points and now and now you want to do that so now what i usually do yeah i have a kind of a curvature shape here you're going to put it in the vise with the cur with the curve facing outward and you're going to not you're going to do the same thing you did before except instead of having instead of doing it towards you the other way um you're doing with that way so basically now what you're trying to do is you're trying to curve that outer line in and this entire time all i'm doing is putting it a certain depth in there right now i'm putting just the tip of the depth in there just under this part of the vise so it has leverage just to stay in there and i'm i'm keeping an eye to make sure i'm not going too fast because the faster you go the more the more you have to clean up the more you have to look at a lot of crease lines later and then you can move up the shaft a little bit more do the same thing the metal doesn't tend to bend well in in the vise but that's why you kind of hold it out that's why you're when you're using 18 and 20 is because once you make those crease lines on the outer edges you can um curve it by hand and as you do like i said as you're doing this the whole time kind of kind of play with it putting into your arm see where you are for me it's it's almost good except for the uh the front end so now we have two options i can either just kind of switch it with my hand or i can but uh i'm gonna need to make this a little tighter because now we're gonna actually have to bend this inner edge and more than the back edge because my arm is oblong your arm may be a little uh more even than mine my arm is really really skinny at the base and really thick at the top of the arm i know guys like with your build or it can be kind of the almost near the same thickness all the way down so now instead of going straight you're going to be playing with the angle of going along this way because you're trying to get you're not trying to bend the whole piece now you're just trying to bend the uh where your hand is going to be i can go back up here and pinch the upper area and this is where the play comes into comes in now it's almost in the right spot but my my vice won't let me do much more so now you gotta try custom contouring with your hand okay there there we go we're going we're getting good and one of the things that i like doing uh i mind you do this very carefully if you ever do this with your hand with your with your hand actually in the vise you sometimes have it sit there like that to kind of see what you what you have going on or you can just simply put it in the vise right now we have to actually grab my hammer for this for next part what i have now is this these two tower shapes right here are are aren't good we're gonna need to smash that down a little bit so take a light hammer preferably a plastic one or a rubber ballot and you're just going to rub along that edge and you're going to taper it in because you're not going to get that edge otherwise to go down now i'm hitting it directly on top but since it's already purchased an angle i'm kind of swinging from this way but i'm also heading down so you're kind of the idea is you're trying to do that where you're curving the edge in and i'm having up against the vise right here to kind of kind of keep it stable for the sideways and down so you don't shape it too fast you are going to be hammering more down than you are you're gonna make sure you're hitting it at an angle but more vertical along the actual piece than horizontal i mean you're not gonna sit there let's see and just smash down like that you're going to kind of want to look at it on the straight line and just perch it a little bit and again slower is always better if you swing harder and faster you'll you'll miss you'll you'll have mistakes and you'll you know you won't know what's going wrong and you can always play that you know if you did a little too much you can kind of pull it back out again now you see the kind of thing in my arm a little bit a little bit better now and i just have to put a little bit more tapering on this upper edge again remember with metal and with any cosplay project less is more you can always you can always add you can always take off more or you can always bend more uh you can't always bend or shape less so before you if you think you're if you think you're you just need a couple more swings before you're done just or a couple more inches in check first just kind of putting us your arm and go oh okay yeah i'm going to need a little bit more there because you can always go you can always do more but sometimes you can't go back so as you're saying i'm hitting it down like that and now it's perfectly shaped in my arm now for the final stage you're going to need some kind of a rolled edge or something with a you're gonna need something like uh you need to you can just take a bulping hammer and stick it in the vise that'll work anything with a wide base edge i'm using a a giant bolt for a railway but you can use almost anything what you're doing right now is you're going to take a hammer with a bit like that and a bit like that depends on what side you want to use now what i'm doing is i'm placing the edge up against the item and i'm taking this and i'm making sure that i'm not actually hammering it flush on the piece where the metal is hitting the metal i'm hitting it in the gap where there is where there's air and what i'm doing is i'm just barely about a centimeter in hammering in that gap of air if you hammer directly if you have it flat and you're hammering metal on metal you're going to cut it so you want to make sure that when you're hammering it like that that it's tilted up and that you're when you're the actual area you're hitting is going to be air and it's in the area that's resting on is just the edge now what this is going to do is just flaring the edge up and i'm going to do this by myself you if you need to see a video about how to do the flaring a little bit better sorry if you need to see the uh air they have to do the flaring better i can see another video but right now i'm alone so i can't do much um but what this is doing it you can come back around and hammer down straight onto the edge now what you're doing is instead of the metal on your hand resting on this blade edge here which no matter how smooth you get it's going to chafe your hand up you're now going to be having it on this edge it's the curvature out and having it on my wrist is actually very comfortable i mean this is kind of still a little rough but moving it around my wrist in there it's nice and smooth i can roll my wrist out without feeling it against cutting me yeah i'm gonna i'm gonna wear a long sleeve shirt this one go along this anyway but um even with padding if you don't do that as it's resting down like this and it's jamming on your wrist all day if you don't flare that edge at least a little bit it's going to hurt and once you get the edge flared a little bit you can then go back through and you can hammer it down now with a flat edge of a hammer to make it more pronounced it's up to you um but like i said before you uh wear anything take your hand along the inside edge make sure it's not make sure it's clean make sure you're not gonna get hurt do it slowly first so you don't actually cut your hand at something there you want to do it slowly you want to have your hand go on the inside and the out just to make sure that your you have no burrs or anything that came out during the project and put your wrist in and just kind of feel around now and the most important thing is near the end on the edge there you want to come up a little bit into the piece a little bit so you have a triangle shape instead of just coming straight across that'll keep that edge from digging into your wrist as well so i'm trying to get you a good angle on that so in the other project my piece looks like this and uh it's usually smarter i'd probably do with this but i can fix it later to put your holes in first with pieces like this with shoulder pieces the joints up near the top you want to wait to put those joints in because uh when you shape it it moves around but um with with with the vambrass you definitely want to at least put two or your two pilot holes most likely for this members i just used either one or two belts one belt would be right here two belts would be probably right about here and here right i hope this helps uh go ahead and give me any questions i'm not sure how good the video i'm gonna check the video quality now uh i hope you enjoyed