The Armour Archive

I am looking to replace my current helmet that I wear in the SCA. The time frame I am looking at is around 1290. What design do most people recommend and or wear in the SCA.

Here is a link to a pic of my current helmet.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/25559583@N04/2437709574/

Well, I don't know what everyone else wears..But a good Sugarloaf, or visored sugarloaf is always cool in my book....

Great Caesar's Ghost, who is the dude behind you wearing the Tokyo crotch rocket street racer getup?
Airbrushed flames? REALLY?

The Maciejowski Bible is a little early, but it clearly shows kettle hats and spangens as well as the classic MC Escher-angled early greathelm.

His name is Ace, or at least that's what everyone called him. I don't like the pants either but its slightly better that Betty Boop printed pants that he use to wear until someone accidentally dropped them in a fire .

I have given thought about a kettle helm and gotten a lot of grief about it. It supposedly destroys rattan. A sugar loaf sounds good so far but I thought I would seek other opinions before I started to cut steel.

Hugo of wiesenfeuer wrote: I have given thought about a kettle helm and gotten a lot of grief about it. It supposedly destroys rattan.

That is a tremendous load of crap. The only drawback to wearing a kettle helm is the brim does act as a bit of a "landing pad" that shots might hit when a lower-profile helm might have it slide off. All the same, proper kettle helms look great, feel great (usually fantastic ventilation), and give you great fields of vision.

A sugar loaf sounds good so far but I thought I would seek other opinions before I started to cut steel.

Up until recently, I owned both a kettle helm and a sugarloaf. Sold the kettle helm due to bills, but I loved it all the same. I'd just been wearing my sugarloaf in combat far more often and had chosen that as a primary helm to wear. Both are great choices for the time period you're going after.

-Ed

To stop kettles from chewing up rattan, go for a small brim that is sloped well down, not so sticky-outy as the British Army WW2 helmet inspired by kettlehats. Pulled down more like a cloche. (There were 15th-c/16th-c. infantry helmets that looked mostly like cloche hats done in steel -- by then they weren't kettlehats, though they may have evolved from them. Or not. Nobody thought they looked sissy.) A thickish edge rolled around large gauge wire is the simplest kind of roll. We love our hollow rolls, without any wire inside, because they exhibit technical mastery. But that comes at a price, of course.

Don't forget you can hear better out of a kettlehat than out of a helm, if the helm doesn't have earholes. Some modern guys put a little diamond formation of five little holes in a quincunx for hearing purposes, but I've never seen an ancient helm so done. Maybe the knights didn't want to listen to anybody...