Kit mod: heavy sparring glove

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See the follow up post here with the completed heavy sparring glove.

So I've given up waiting for someone to produce a HEMA glove that is lightweight, fully mobile and fully protecting. There are many out there, just beyond the horizon, that are promising but time drags on and nothing happens. Therefore I recently had some inspiration and decided to simply pool two different purchases, neither of which was good, to make something that works.

Initially I'd bought these "Cherburg Gauntlets" and I'm not going to review them as basically they are unsuitable for HEMA or any swordsmanship. It's obvious that whomever designed them never used them with a sword in their hand as the shell does not allow you to grip or swing a sword correctly.

I also had the Absolute Force HEMA gloves which you can see my review here. Again I was not happy with them.

It occurred to me however that between the two I probably had the workings of one good set of gloves: if I could take the lobster grip off the AF gloves and replace it with the fingers from the Cherburg.

It was actually remarkably easy to do. The fingers from the Cherburg were held on with a single badly secured rivet and therefore came off with a little violence from a screwdriver. I also added some curve to the finger plates with two pairs of piers to improve the finger actions.

The lobster ends of the AT glove come off with some quick unstitching and cutting through a small piece of foam. I simply sewed the fingers onto some plain leather gloves and then pushed them into the what were now a pair of mitts.

It works rather well. They are light weight, fully mobile and pretty much bomb proof = job done.


These aren't the best pictures and I've not completely finished with them, I'm sure over the coming weeks I'll make many little tweaks. However they done very well in sparring for the last few sessions both for longsword and single sword and I'm happy.


The only drawback for anyone to copy this is the cost, $160 + pp for the Cherburgs and $160 + pp for the AF glove. However it's a pretty sweet glove at the end.




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