Lore:Crafting Motif 79: Refabricated Style

:There's a   of a lot of salvage material available if you want to bash together some wicked arms and armor, but there are certain ways the bits fit together for best results. We mainly use parts from those old decommissioned "D-series"  s, but there's also a place for more modern Factotum parts, and even some old   pieces. Here are my recommendations (and I ought to know): 

AXES
For the blade, you're going to want a number 5 flange strut—two of them, for the two-handed axe. The strut's curved side sharpens up real well and holds an edge for quite a while.  For the haft, I recommend the light and durable   axle from the retired T-class motobarrows.

BELTS
For a really tough belt, get the elasti-strap from a belt-driven sump piston and mount it with a series of rigi-plates from the old die-stamp feeder bins. That'll get you a belt with enough tensile strength to support anything you care to hang on it, up to and including a lead-sledge. 

BOOTS
When you're working in an environment full of dense metallic objects that fall over a lot, the rigid toe-box that protects the front of the foot is the most important part of your boot. Just take a couple of metabrass slag scoops, detach the handles, flip them over and mount them on some flexible uppers, and there you are.

BOWS
A flexsteel spring from the suspension of an autonomous gyrocart makes a perfect Refabricated bow, once you machine a grip into the middle, and back the limbs with  -shelf light strut supports. A flow-rod case is easily adapted into a quiver.

CHESTS
The best Refabricated cuirasses are made by taking D-series Factotum torsos, scouring out the servos, and adding some duraweave gussets to either flank so there's enough room for a citizen to fit inside. You don't even need to add rout embossing to the outer faces, since it comes built in.

DAGGERS
If you think our daggers look like extended J-class manual pry-trowels that have been pointed and edged, well, that's exactly what they are. You can look for a better blade if you like, but I've got three motobarrow skids of pry-trowels just oxidizing in the warehouse, so you might as well use 'em.

GLOVES
For the flexible parts of Refabricated gloves, we repurpose the relatively soft duraweave fabric used in   refuse-sacs, then stud it with syncro-disks dug out of the metallics dump behind the Halls of Fabrication. For heavier armor, more disks.

HELMETS
Helmets are tough to Refabricate, mostly because only heads are shaped like heads, so we repurpose actual heads from Factotums and   to serve as helms for real people. I challenge you to find a sturdier and more durable helmet anywhere!

LEG GREAVES
Refabricated leg armor—and for that matter, cuirass sleeves as well—are made from Dwarven pipes and plumbing cut and trimmed to fit the mortal form. I mean, arms and legs are just jointed cylinders, right? It's an easy conversion once you know how.

MACES
Find a decommissioned elevator (or, you know, "decommission" one); if you open up the counterweight shaft, you'll find cables strung with oblong weights of a dense metal that I call "heavium" (that's a smithing joke, n'wah). With a little rework, these weights make perfect heads for war hammers.

SHIELDS
Sometime in the mid-  our Lord Seht must have come across a storage site of the ancient Dwemeri cargo constructs we call Dwarven Turtles, and brought in stacks and stacks of their parts. We're lucky he did, since if you just add straps to the plastron from a Dwarven Turtle, it makes an excellent shield.

SHOULDERS
The finest pauldrons you'll ever wear are made from Dwarven pipe joints split open and augmented with welded-on struts and flanges. It's the same principle we use to make Refabricated arm and leg armor.

STAVES
We learned some time ago that the best focal finial for a spell staff is the   bezel setting from a   (either ancient or modern). Of course, those bezel settings aren't always easy to come by, but we find the gripping element from a bread slice carbonizer works almost as well.

SWORDS
As you probably guessed after seeing our daggers, Refabricated sword blades are also made from J-class pry-trowels, just in multiples: two trowels for a one-handed blade, and three trowels for a two-hander. The real trick is welding them together without a seam, but at high heat those trowels merge together like they were meant to.