Armorer's Shaping Stake

This shaping stake is among the 644 pieces that make up the very specialized outillage (set of tools) brought from Paris to New York by the armorer Daniel Tachaux (1857–1928) in 1909, when he was hired to repair and maintain the Museum’s arms and armor collection. Hammer heads and stakes of many different sizes, shapes, and weights are necessary to create the complex forms of different weapons and pieces of armor. Tachaux trained in Paris under the German armorer Ludwig Klein (about 1830–1882) and inherited his teacher’s tools, which he combined with his own. The set, possibly the most complete of its kind in existence, was purchased by the Metropolitan Museum in 1912 at the request of the Arms and Armor Department's founding curator Bashford Dean.