The Armour Archive

recently acquired a new helm and was wondering what is a good material to pad the helm with and how do I really get the padding to stay?

The usual (not always the best) way for sca use is yoga pad (also called smurf hide). Typically held in place by carmet tape or spray adhesive. You can get the yoga pads in black instead of blue if you shop around a bit. There are people here on the archive (I disremember who but Im sure they will chime in at some point) who make a more period padded cloth liner that I have heard good things about. Its biggest selling point IMO is that you can pull it out of the helm and run it though the wash.

And there are a number of excellent choices from back in the day, Kaiwolf. One little thing is, they vary with the helmet type. What type hat have you gotten? Helm and helmet types have names. These are useful descriptors.

Have you discussed any helm padding with anyone in your local fighter practice? They've got, shall we say, personal experience.

We can address materials, for starters. The Society has logged a lot of helm time with foam rubber padding in it. Foam needs air channels included or you will steam yourself in your own body heat. Foam water pipe insulation -- comes from the plumbing section of Home Depot in packs of black tubes, split down one side and about an inch across -- does pretty well from both shock absorption and ventilation-channel viewpoints. Especially the squidgey neoprene-ish kind. You just lay the pipe insulation pieces next to each other all the way around the inside of the helm, gluing them in with household cement or rubber cement, maybe using some ductape with or instead-of.

The rounded sort of helmet -- that is, not the flat topped bucket shape of a real helm -- does very nicely with "spangenbands" of closed cell foam: a band run around the brow like a hatband, another strip centerline front to back over the top of the head, and any arrangement of strips you'd like on the right and left sides, such as a single strip on each. There may be more space to fill in on any particular helm so it stops wobbling and rattling around on your skull, and this is where another material comes in: linen fabric. Period-like fabric helmet-stuffynge combined with a last-ditch absorber in the form of a spangen-frame hidden against the metal is a good KM-pacifier (for the knight's-marshals who don't know their padding all that well).

People who have made themselves either a suspension-liner or a quilted hood-like affair to fit their heads and only secondarily to the helmet, attaching said hood thing to the lower edge of the helmet, swear they will never go back to any sort of overall foam padding. This method is particularly good, and highly historically accurate, to stitch a quilted linen hood into a bascinet helmet. These have little bitty holes in their bottom edges, and the later models across the top of the face opening as well, to sew the hood liner into the hat. Making the bascinet hood of all linen will also make it the coolest-riding, best sweat-wicking helmet liner you'll ever get. Some people also use light arming coifs on their heads to be the sweatcatchers, so at the end of the day they can just toss the coif in the wash.

In fabric choices, 100% cotton breathes okay, but holds any moisture and doesn't wick. Thin wool is surprisingly good about all this, breathes, and thick wool actually pads some along with wicking well, if perhaps not so good as linen does. Linen and woolen fabrics together are also worth a look. Linen lining and woolen shell.

Suspension liners are kind of like the inside of a hardhat. They fasten at the brow level, or lower, then are turned up so their petals meet at the top of the head and are tied together with a little loop of twine or shoelace. There can actually be considerable air between a suspension liner and the helm metal. Unrolled and laid out flat, a suspension liner has several big sawteeth, triangles, from browband area to the top. Fastened together to fit you, the whole thing looks like a crown, or Jughead's cap. How strong does a suspension liner have to be? Well, fairly. It can't be tissue paper. About three to five layers of 100% linen for coolness and strength will do plenty well.

Another good thing about suspension liners is you can pull them out of the way to inspect the inside of your helm for signs of failure or to check for rust. Rust Reformer is excellent at controlling rust inside a helm. It actually uses a little rusting to advantage, and is a good primer coat for real paint.

I am checking the thread you were talking about helmet styles in to see what you got. Accidntprone's starter hat? Well, what'll come out of padding that style of helmet will be both simple and effective. No prob.

Konstantin the Red wrote:People who have made themselves either a suspension-liner or a quilted hood-like affair to fit their heads and only secondarily to the helmet, attaching said hood thing to the lower edge of the helmet, swear they will never go back to any sort of overall foam padding.

I am one of them. I will literally give up fighting forever before I put my head in foam again.

Foam is done because it is expedient. You can get a helm padded with foam in fifteen minutes.

Natural padding is not done because it takes at least a few days of pretty diligent work to make your first liner, and it might look pretty bad, and it's not going to perform 100% for you, until you redo it completely.

That said, there are shortcuts you can take to make something passable that only takes a day or two of sewing.

First, fulled wool. Fulling is like felting only you start with cloth.
Get some really heavy wool fabric - suiting will not work. If you can see individual fibers in the fabric from 2 feet away, it's probably good and thick.
Make sure it's a light color, or soak it with some Rit fabric dye remover. Seriously, don't use dark crimson red wool unless you want to look like you got seriously hurt when you work up a sweat.

Next do the one thing you're never supposed to do with wool. Wash it on hot with lots of soap, and put it in the dryer as hot as possible.
If all goes well, if you started with 44" wide fabric, it should be 30" or less wide when you take it out. It shrinks - which is what you want. But the fibers don't disappear: most of the length and width get turned into thickness.

Then start making panels. You'll probably need 8-10 layers, or maybe even more. Think 4-panel spangenhelm sections (minus the bands). If you're shooting for 5/8" of padding, I'd make the sections a lot thicker, like maybe 1/4" over. They compress a bit.

Make muslin shells for these panels. Whatever fabric goes on the inside, think about how it's going to be rubbing you all day. Feel the fabric in your hands - if you can't picture being happy with that fabric rubbing your scrotum for a few minutes, find something softer.

Quilt the panels, then stitch them together. This is the part that takes a long time... you probably don't have a machine that will do this, and you probably don't know someone who does have one.

Alternately, you can order thick felt from the internet (mcmaster has it). I think it would work fine. Problem is this is a "throw money at it" solution that might not look that great - it'll definitely look more like a shell than fabric.
I think the stuff I've played with is grade F13, because I know I didn't spend as much money as the harder stuff costs. But I got thicker than 1/2"... it looks like if you play with this you might need to get two 3/8" pieces sandwiched together or something similar.
http://www.mcmaster.com/#felt-sheets/=pjt63y

Compared to raw cotton, does the wool padding retain more heat? Does it breathe better or worse?

Tibbie Croser wrote:Compared to raw cotton, does the wool padding retain more heat? Does it breathe better or worse?

Doesn't matter - cotton is an altogether inappropriate material for padding. It doesn't bounce back... at all.
Picture the stuff you pull out of your dryer's lint trap. It seems all gossamer and fluffy. Now take a handful and squeeze it. It pretty much stays in the shape of the inside of your hand.
Now do that with raw wool. It compresses, but then it springs back.

Wool does retain heat, if there is no air flow. I wear a wool coat in the cold, and it does a great job, provided there's no wind. I would not take it snowmobiling. Wool needs an air barrier on top of it to really trap heat.

If you have channels quilted into your wool helmet liner, then it works just like the water pipe insulation Konstantin described. Only it also wicks sweat away from your head, as opposed to sticking to you and making the sweat roll down your eyebrows.

I use a liner I got from Known World Treasures.

http://www.knownworldt.com/instock.html

It is linen and cotton with suspension on the top and good padding on the sides. At the suggestion of the good folks at KWT, I velcro'd it into my bascinet and I've had no problems. Now, in the spirit of full disclosure, I do have a bit of 3mm black foam under the liner on the sides, but that is more to reduce ringing than anything else. And I always wear a padded coif, too, to add more padding and reduce the 'funk' factor.

Like Schreiber, I will never go back to foam as my primary padding.

Known World Treasures is currently out of liners, but send them an email and see when they are ordering more.

Leif

Thank you, Schreiber. By "raw cotton," I meant the raw cotton batting that's used in upholstery. When you mention quilted channels, do you mean channels that are individually stuffed with raw wool, as opposed to quilting that goes through the shell and the padding both? Certainly, the stuffed-tube method would allow for better airflow in a helmet liner.

Inside the hard shell of a helmet skull, Tibbie, you could do it that stuffed way and it would work -- ventilation channels, custom degree of boofiness, etc. A more out-in-the-open thing like a gambeson seems more to need a more purely quilted method -- less boof.

The channels would show as deep crevices in the interior padding. Significantly less padding over each ear would help with hearing, particularly in combination with a good-sized ventilation channel leading down to the bottom edge of the hat from either ear. Some arrangements of helm interiors muffle exterior sound.

I have seen the quilted fabric style of liner and it looks better and feels stronger than foam. The very best mundane object that I have personally seen would be martial arts or boxing headgear. In fact Century brand martial arts products are garbage and should rarely, if ever, be used. However, their martial arts headgear will fit almost perfectly inside a sallet. More expensive shock absorbing foam is better than blue foam but blue foam isn't a bad item to use for the purpose of padding your helm. Use as many layers as is comfortable and make sure your helm is tough and you should be alright. Blue camping foam is good enough; it's just not the best.

My liner is stuffed tubes. I make no representations as to their authenticity... only to their function.

I made I think 5 trapezoidal pieces and sewed each one into channels. The channels are trapezoidal as well, so after stuffing the top worked out to be like 1/2" thick while the bottoms are closer to 3/4".
When the channels were stuffed I sewed another trapezoid to the first. I kept going until I had enough trapezoids to fit the inside of the helm. The top of this liner had a hole where the tops of the trapezoids met, so I sewed a little pillow together to the inside of it.
Then I added a brow band all the way around, using the fulled wool method I described above.

I actually don't have padding on the sides (which helps a lot with airflow) because it's a sallet with attached bevor, and the bevor is my chinstrap. So it is also lined with natural padding. The whole thing sits more like a modern fencing mask than a heavy list helm.

+1 to natural fibers, especially linen. Breathable, flexible, and resilient. And washable...

schreiber wrote: if you can't picture being happy with that fabric rubbing your scrotum for a few minutes, find something softer

favourite quote so far!

Do you have some images of the inside of your helm Schreiber?

cheers
Matt
Sunny Australia