The Armour Archive

Greetings! I've been using my Halberds dishing donut and hammer for a little bit of everything for a while now and love them but I want to get serious about making helmets out of 14 gauge mild and stainless. I also have access to a large ductile iron dishing form. Now that I will have my own B2 shear I want to know what size Garland hammer works best for helm halves and what head material or materials work best. I will eventually obtain or make my own planishing stake but it seems the split head hammers make a smoother finish with less planishing required. Any advice and input is greatly appreciated!

You can shape helmets both curved and bucketlike with a Garland over an anvil face, using "soft hammer/hard anvil" technique, with using a doughnut or dish form as more or less an auxiliary part of the process -- like starting with quite shallow dished metal and then doing most of the curvature upon the flat anvil face. Shallowly dished doesn't thin the middle of a 3-D piece to speak of, and hammer-on-air with a soft mallet seems more to, raising style, push the piece's periphery smaller and smaller to get the curve, without affecting the middle any further.

Use the rawhide faces -- they quickly mushroom over and become all chewed and raggedy around their circumference, but the hammer does its work with the rounded middle that results. Just keep using the hammer no matter how awful it looks; you don't even have to trim the ragged bits off, so they can help keep the rawhide face from eroding even more. Don't replace them unless you discover after years of pounding that the cast iron split collar has started to hit the metal and scar it. Since the replaceable faces aren't cheap themselves, you'll want to get all the return on them you could.

Don't forget 12ga stainless for the more exposed helmet skull. That will want the heavier mallet.

Your best drill for holing the metal while it's still in the flat would be a drill press you can adjust the speed on.

From Garland Mfg you're working up into the bigger and more expensive hammers: likely you want Size 3 (2 3/4 lb) @ $58.00 and Size 4 (4 lb) @ $66.00 -- and probably the Size 4 if you only get one now, for all their nine-buck difference. The Size 5 is an even C-note.

We were some of the first to start the rawhide mallet helmet stuff, and we did a lot with it.
We used (from memory) the #4 with the rawhide faces. To start we would grind the corners off of the face we used for dishing, but it then mushroomed so it formed itself.

We dished into a set o graduated steel dishes, with the final one the exact curvature that we wanted for the helmet bowls. The result was very smooth, we could work without any plannishing.

If you want faster dishing, a hard plastic face can be used. It will push the metal faster, but it has more of a tendency to to stretch and it can produce a more faceted result. The face will last a lot longer. At least whatever plastic I have seems to.

You will treat the faces as consumables. They will last through several helmets, but definitely not forever.

We did some work in 14g mild, but never for SCA combat. 12g mild worked a lot better for that.

Wade

The #3,4,and 5 work well. There are a few other brands besides garland that make a split head hammer. Green and tweed, Thor, and Chicago sometimes show up on eBay, usually noticeably less than the garland brand.
You can also try the larger plastic teardrop hammers like Eastwood, dagger, or other.
Not a good choice for hot work but the larger type are useful for 14 and lighter metals.
I use them for cops and general shaping.

Thanks for the info! After getting input from another armourer friend I plan on getting a 3 and 4 Garland. I figure between the dishing form, the two sizes of hammer and the dishing donut I can comfortably make mild helmet halves in up to 12 gauge and spangens in 14 gauge stainless. I will experiment with the hammer on air technique on lighter gauge but I think for it to work well I need a proper anvil surface. Currently I have an anvil shaped object that's all of 55 pounds. Since I currently work with a minimum of tools and no real shop to speak of, everything I do buy needs to be useful. I find that I often drill holes in pieces which are not flat so I've developed a technique of center punching and starting the hole with a small bit then finishing with the size I want. This works well with the 12 gauge helmet tops in stainless. Amazing what can be done with a rechargeable 12 volt drill and some patience these days. Hurray lithium ion batteries! The more I do the more I find what works best for me but the Armour Archive and it's members have been invaluable to me. Reinventing the wheel is tedious and I'm lucky in that I've avoided having to do so thanks to all the info here. Thanks everyone!

. . . I will experiment with the hammer on air technique on lighter gauge but I think for it to work well I need a proper anvil surface. Currently I have an anvil shaped object that's all of 55 pounds.

Should be enough for 16ga mild at least. All the better if you can spike it down onto a 100lb stump or bigger. There are stumps in AK. ASO's may be secured with RR spikes, large bolts and bracket-things (even home-shaped to fit the anvil's feet), even steel straps literally lashing the anvil down criss-cross and the ends of the straps lag-bolted into the stump.

Good drilling technique there -- has all the classics but the drop of oil or water to carry off heat from the drill spot. Using lemonade probably just edges into conspicuous consumption.

I forget: you got a house, or do you have to work around being in an Anchorage apartment?