How does the museum take care of all the armor?

Hi, I'm Xavier. I'm eleven years old. I'm from Manhattan. We're here in the conservation lab of Arms and Armor. Hi, My name's Ted. I'm the conservator for the Department of Arms and Armor at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. How long does armor last? It depends how well taken care of it is. We have things up in the galleries right now that are 1,000 years old. A lot of that is because of conservators here in the Museum, like myself, who spend a lot of time taking care of those things. A conservator helps make armor last by preserving it. We make sure that they're in a good environment, and that they have good storage or display conditions. We keep them clean. And the more we take care of it, the longer it will last. How do you take care of objects without damaging them? - Do you want me to show you? - Yes. OK, we're going to go over to my desk. - OK. We have a rule here in Arms and Armor, and the rule is: Sneak up on the art. What do you think that means? Sneak up means, like, look closely. Exactly! Very good. Look closely and go slowly. - If you look here, what do we see? - Rust. It's got some rust going on under there. One of the ways I clean things is with little tools like this. This is a scalpel, like a doctor would use. Right? But I don't do surgery. I use it for scraping rust, and I'll work like this. And I'm going slow. - Remember I said, "Sneak up on the art?" - hmm. OK, this is how you do it. You go real slow. And I'm going to just scrape off a little bit of this at a time. I can see some coming off. You can see it coming off. Now, if I did this too fast, I might take off too much. I might scratch it. So I go very, very slowly to take off this rust. Just this little bit here, I've been working on it for a few minutes and it's still got a long way to go. I once spent four months on one armor. It was a big mess, and it smelled bad, 'cause I had to use chemicals and things to clean off some of the old lacquers. You have to be really careful with cleaning arms and armor. My job is to know when to stop cleaning. My goal is not to make it look brand new. What I want to do is protect it and clean it so that it looks as an old thing. I have a question for you. Do you know of any sports that people play today that need armor? One of the sports that I play is ice hockey. And what I wear for ice hockey, I wear a hard vest. I wear a helmet and the mouth gear. Sounds like armor to me, man. This is Xavier reporting from The Metropolitan Museum of Art. The end. (music)