i have already removed and changed the files i wanted to (armour) but ingame everything is just big white patches, would it work better if i made it into a texture pack or what? thanks for the help.
Never ever ever add custom textures right back into the minecraft.jar, that can cause a lot of issues and graphical bugz. There are many tutorials out there on how to make texturepacks.
how do i make a texturepack?