The Armour Archive

I just purchased a stainless, riveted aventail from His Grace, Andreas, and I'm having a bit of an issue attaching it.
Has anyone that purchased one of these from him, or a style similar, had to cut them to fit up around the chin area or is it supposed to simply drape that way due to size?
I see extent examples showing aventails that attach as high as the temple area and then some, I believe, that attach straight across at the chin area. Is there a reason for this? Is one better than other other or is it strictly aesthetics/ease of installation?

If you are installing it on a bascinet where the verveilles go up the face (not the standard SCA craptastic around the bottom of the grill look), you do have to cut it in order to get the nice drap effect around your face.

There used to be an awesome how to site with pictures (Gilded Boar? maybe?) that I used as an axample. Not sure if it still exists. Maybe someone can post it?

I recall staring at mine for about 2.5 hours before getting up the nerve to start cutting it.

How high your aventail rides and whether it has "risers" to either side of the face can depend on period and place.

Though generally there are such risers, or "temple triangles."

Most premade "one size fits all" camails have a turtleneck rising from their middles. Trim this tube to fit your vervelle line. Are your vervelles installed, and what does the vervelle line look like anyway? Low on the hat, very high on the hat? Doglegs reaching for the temples: right-angled or obtuse-angled?

Whether you go with a completely historical scheme for your camail depends on your helmet: has it a movable visor/grill or a fixed bargrill? With a fixed grill, some of it can be covered over with a slightly modified historical shape with temple triangles and there will likely be fastening to some part of the bargrill to ward swords and thrusting tips away seamlessly. Have you a thread on a new helmet?

No "turtleneck" on the aventail, looks like the one pictured below.

And it has a pivoting klappvisor.

I have an Icefalcon maille aventail. I wound up building up the triangles about 8 rows on either side of the face, and then cutting the v down several rows into the "collar". But then wound up cutting off 2.25" of links on the outter edge as I felt it was too long.

-Cian

Oh right! -- that bascinet. I'd forgotten that was yours now.

Be a durn sight easier had it come with at least a short trim-to-fit turtleneck, but then, riveted and stainless... I see why it didn't. You have a high, horizontal line of vervelles, no doglegs. The one example of that method I've ever seen documented used tunnel vervelles instead of the posts you have, but leave that for now unless it starts to pluck at you. That broad vervelle spacing looks like tunnel-vervelle to me.

The camail would hang straight down from the camail strap then, sewn inside it with the mail linkrow slightly compressed to match the basc's circumference. You can conserve a little breadth of your camail upon your shoulders by making your camail strap quite wide, so as to hang the mail lower by a linkrow or two. Three or four linkrows would be pushing things a bit. There will be enough of a cutout at the face opening to drop the mail to just under your lower lip. The mail will be at nearly full stretch right here, leaving enough slack to ride around any tailoring of the camail liner to cup your chin a little, but the rest of the inner edge slightly compressed around the rest of the horizontal camail strap to fit its inner circumference to the length of the camail strap, kind of the mail equivalent of shirring or fine pleating. Since there is not any scope for temple triangles here, I won't get into an elaborate description of rocked-back temple triangles, but instead simply recommend the cutout be shaped rather like \__/ across the lower part of the face opening, the slanted sides starting at either end of the camail strap, and not made so wide as to have its bottom corners peeping out on either side of the Klapp. The narrower you can keep the flat bottom of this truncated-V cutout, the less floppiness you'll have to contend with, but more important than that is that the mail rides covering your chin, with light padding behind the mail so you don't chafe. That part of a camail liner can hold and support all the links everywhere at the chin and cheeks part of the camail. Mechanically anyway, camail liners may attach to the bascinet liner, hang by eyelets from the vervelles, or be sewn to the camail strap itself. I know of no graphical proof of any method but the first, and that is a Spanish funerary statue with polychrome (indoors its entire career and the paint regularly restored, very pretty) -- what was that fellow's name again? Federico somebody??