For my first foray into the world of armor making, i've decided to make a butted mail aventail for a klappvisor Cet is making me. Im wondering, does anyone know of any specific aventail patterns on the net, or should i just use a coif pattern and leave off the top and part of the back? I've looked around on several boards, and while ive found all sorts of coif and bishop mantle patterns, i havent seen any that were specifically for aventails.
Alternately, does anyone have any suggestions on how i should modify an existing coif pattern into an aventail so that it's shaped properly to the bascinet's face opening and drapes under the chin correctly?
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Otto von Aachen
Kingdom of the Outlands, Canton of Hawks Hollow
Looking for a mail aventail pattern
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Konstantin the Red
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Edmund, they are all made the same, be they coif bottom or bishop's mantle. You can generate your spread-out either by expansion ring, expansion hole, or rectangles w/triangles -- whichever you think you can do.
The fitting of your camail to your Klapp will depend much on the location and style of your vervelle row. Its two extremes will be a) running around the bottom edge of the skull; b) angling upward from center back of the bottom edge almost straight up to each temple. Between the extremes lies any degree of doglegging you'd care to make. Bottom-edge runners often (maybe always) dogleg up along the sides of the face opening, too. The difference all this makes is that you will need to insert triangles of extra rows of links where the up-angle is on the camail strap, so a camail before attachment to its strap is this mantle thing with a couple of pointy bits rising to frame cheek and jaw. Without these triangles, if you just go attaching the mail right around the strap, the edge of the camail will be pulled up into a shape remarkably like a harelip. Another important thing is not to have a great excess of mail before the face opening; pull it kinda tight, otherwise it will sag away from your chin. An additional triangle attached to the previous triangles to give the camail's part of the face opening a V shape to some degree may be helpful here. Firestryker also gives a valuable tip for camails: line your bascinet with a liner that extends out to line the camail also, which liner hangs from over your chin. You may stitch the face portion of the camail's edge to the face part of the liner here, and that will keep the camail exactly where you want it in the region of your lower lip, no sag, no nonsense. Then you can droop your moustache over the camail in the approved 14th-c. fashion.
Here's the link to the Firestryker thread; Hauptman's post is the one with the liner idea. I'm building such a liner myself, with the rest of the padding requirements taken care of by a simple arming cap worn beneath the liner -- I had been considering making the cap do service as a camail-lining hood, and I think it's feasible, but the tailoring is elaborate to get it right while also padding under a required gorget. Separating the liner and the arming-cap into a two-piece system looks to be far easier to do well.
http://www.wolfeargent.com/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=1&t=000104
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"The Minstrel Boy to the war is gone..."
[This message has been edited by Konstantin the Red (edited 11-25-2002).]
The fitting of your camail to your Klapp will depend much on the location and style of your vervelle row. Its two extremes will be a) running around the bottom edge of the skull; b) angling upward from center back of the bottom edge almost straight up to each temple. Between the extremes lies any degree of doglegging you'd care to make. Bottom-edge runners often (maybe always) dogleg up along the sides of the face opening, too. The difference all this makes is that you will need to insert triangles of extra rows of links where the up-angle is on the camail strap, so a camail before attachment to its strap is this mantle thing with a couple of pointy bits rising to frame cheek and jaw. Without these triangles, if you just go attaching the mail right around the strap, the edge of the camail will be pulled up into a shape remarkably like a harelip. Another important thing is not to have a great excess of mail before the face opening; pull it kinda tight, otherwise it will sag away from your chin. An additional triangle attached to the previous triangles to give the camail's part of the face opening a V shape to some degree may be helpful here. Firestryker also gives a valuable tip for camails: line your bascinet with a liner that extends out to line the camail also, which liner hangs from over your chin. You may stitch the face portion of the camail's edge to the face part of the liner here, and that will keep the camail exactly where you want it in the region of your lower lip, no sag, no nonsense. Then you can droop your moustache over the camail in the approved 14th-c. fashion.
Here's the link to the Firestryker thread; Hauptman's post is the one with the liner idea. I'm building such a liner myself, with the rest of the padding requirements taken care of by a simple arming cap worn beneath the liner -- I had been considering making the cap do service as a camail-lining hood, and I think it's feasible, but the tailoring is elaborate to get it right while also padding under a required gorget. Separating the liner and the arming-cap into a two-piece system looks to be far easier to do well.
http://www.wolfeargent.com/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=1&t=000104
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"The Minstrel Boy to the war is gone..."
[This message has been edited by Konstantin the Red (edited 11-25-2002).]
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Konstantin the Red
- Archive Member
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- Joined: Sun Oct 21, 2001 1:01 am
- Location: Port Hueneme CA USA
So, one more thing, Edmund; if you are dancingly eager to get started, start building the big-steel-doily part of your camail anyway, and wait until your helmet arrives to fill in the extra face triangles, when you have the article before you. If you're really drumming your fingers waiting, do some dagging on your doily. So far (crossing fingers here and stepping out on a limb) all the historical pics I've seen suggested that many small dags, sometimes quite widely spaced, are more historically correct than fewer larger ones. I like to do dags by counting the links around the periphery, factoring that number, taking the larger factor and making up that number of dags. Don't make your camail too large or it will become difficult to turn your head, especially with butted -- too heavy. Just have the camail go out to the point of your shoulder or just over it. Dags don't need to be counted as part of this.
Say, for instance, that your camail's edge is 108 links around: 9 x 12 = 108, so make up twelve dags, each with a top that is seven links across, then attach each seven-link dag top with nine links to the camail's edge. You can make 12 dags that are smaller, and space them more widely, also. If your edge total links are a prime number, it's okay to fudge a bit.
Whichever part of the camail strap is either near the helmet's lower edge or parallel to it, the camail may be directly attached to without any further ado, but where it climbs significantly or does a dogleg, additional rows will be required.
[Y'know, I'd really like to see this board's smilies include one with an open faced bascinet and camail...]
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"The Minstrel Boy to the war is gone..."
[This message has been edited by Konstantin the Red (edited 11-25-2002).]
Say, for instance, that your camail's edge is 108 links around: 9 x 12 = 108, so make up twelve dags, each with a top that is seven links across, then attach each seven-link dag top with nine links to the camail's edge. You can make 12 dags that are smaller, and space them more widely, also. If your edge total links are a prime number, it's okay to fudge a bit.
Whichever part of the camail strap is either near the helmet's lower edge or parallel to it, the camail may be directly attached to without any further ado, but where it climbs significantly or does a dogleg, additional rows will be required.
[Y'know, I'd really like to see this board's smilies include one with an open faced bascinet and camail...]
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"The Minstrel Boy to the war is gone..."
[This message has been edited by Konstantin the Red (edited 11-25-2002).]
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Guest
Thank you sooo much, that helps a lot. I've got some rings on the way from Dc Wireworks, so i should be getting started in the near future. I really appreciate the advice on the dagging- I'd planned to dag it, but wasn't sure how many to make or how big they should be. The link and advice on the lining is also greatly appreciated. The idea of extending the lining down to serve as a cushion for the aventail had never even occured to me. Im almost thinking that if i were to make a typical 14th century hood(minus the long tail), padded it heavily and sew it directly into the helm that it would work perfectly.
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Otto von Aachen
Kingdom of the Outlands, Canton of Hawks Hollow
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Otto von Aachen
Kingdom of the Outlands, Canton of Hawks Hollow
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Konstantin the Red
- Archive Member
- Posts: 26713
- Joined: Sun Oct 21, 2001 1:01 am
- Location: Port Hueneme CA USA
Edmund, you are most welcome. The hood idea should work well; I believe it would not need any shaping to the neck or anything, just straight down and then flaring out. I intend to quilt my camail lining only lightly, trusting to the camail's ability to soak up incoming by requiring the sword blade to drag great areas of camail around with it, losing energy to the camail all the way. The liner idea was a complete thunderbolt to me, also. Firestryker may not be a hugely active board, but boy oh boy the stuff you can find there! Did you check the thread on the first page of their armour section about padding bascinets with tow?
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"The Minstrel Boy to the war is gone..."
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"The Minstrel Boy to the war is gone..."
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Guest
Yes, i did read that thread, and now im going to have to see if i can find a source for Tow locally. It caught my attention because the person asking the original question is the armorer thats making my klappvisor. 
Actually, im ordering an entire harness through him, but due to finances im being forced to do it a piece at a time. Im planning on doing the mail portion of the harness myself, and if this aventail turns out right then i'll move on to doing the hauberk. I'd actually prefer to be doing it out of riveted, but i figured that i'd better learn how to weave mail using butted first.
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Otto von Aachen
Kingdom of the Outlands, Canton of Hawks Hollow
[This message has been edited by Edmund Greyfox (edited 11-26-2002).]
Actually, im ordering an entire harness through him, but due to finances im being forced to do it a piece at a time. Im planning on doing the mail portion of the harness myself, and if this aventail turns out right then i'll move on to doing the hauberk. I'd actually prefer to be doing it out of riveted, but i figured that i'd better learn how to weave mail using butted first. ------------------
Otto von Aachen
Kingdom of the Outlands, Canton of Hawks Hollow
[This message has been edited by Edmund Greyfox (edited 11-26-2002).]
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Konstantin the Red
- Archive Member
- Posts: 26713
- Joined: Sun Oct 21, 2001 1:01 am
- Location: Port Hueneme CA USA
My first camail is attached to my Northstar Armory grill-face center-hinge bascinet. It's butted, with copper-clad wire as an inlay on each dag. The way I've got it fastened to the camail strap is without doubt not historical at all: The camail strap's bottom edge is pierced with many oval holes and the camail woven to it with a row of butted links. The historic way seems to have been to stitch it on with stout thread. Either stitching awl thread or artificial sinew should answer. However, stitch-on methods have to be carefully done with butted links to avoid having the thread pass through the link join: I recommend that the entire length of a stitch be within the link's inner diameter so that there is the beginning and the end of the stitch going through the strap and the link's butting can't slide over both passes of the stitching thread at once. Since the link row at the camail strap will be compressed, not stretched out, this probably means using a back-stitch to loop around and tie things down. A back-stitch will probably go through more than one link at a time, too. The tidiest sewn attachment would place the camail strap outside the mail. The camail strap may be decorated with indenting, trefoiled tabs, dagging, and suchlike Gothic-era decorative motifs on its lower edge. It may also be tooled in Gothic-style patterns. Do the tooling before you assemble it, of course. I've done up a camail-strap cover entirely of oak-leaf dags of lightweight dyed leather, green and yellow with red undersides, not particularly based on anything historic, just something I thought looks pretty. It's got so many oak leaves of graduated sizes on it that it's rather shaggy. Experience will tell if it affects my blow acknowledgement.
Well, all that stuff is about one way to make a camail strap, which I call the single-strap method, using fairly stout leather of 6 to 8 ounces. One may also use a doubled-over folded strap, which would be twice as wide as any single strap, and may use somewhat lighter leather. The half of the strip folded over to the outside may receive decorative cuts to its edge, and tooling may be employed. This is approximately what I did with my leafy thing I described above. When I made it, I doubled it over, glued some cord in the fold and stitched the cord in tight with my sewing machine and yellow thread to match the leather, so now it had this "piping" to the top edge. With a folded camail strap, you stitch the two halves together through the mail links, keeping them compressed well together in dense rather than extended order. Stitching arranged so butted links can't fall out of the stitching is, again, a must. Stitched-on camail straps, too, are about the only practical method with riveted links, as the camail strap will likely give out before the links do, therefore it must be replaceable. With riveted or solid punched links, you won't have the slip-out problem, of course.
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"The Minstrel Boy to the war is gone..."
Well, all that stuff is about one way to make a camail strap, which I call the single-strap method, using fairly stout leather of 6 to 8 ounces. One may also use a doubled-over folded strap, which would be twice as wide as any single strap, and may use somewhat lighter leather. The half of the strip folded over to the outside may receive decorative cuts to its edge, and tooling may be employed. This is approximately what I did with my leafy thing I described above. When I made it, I doubled it over, glued some cord in the fold and stitched the cord in tight with my sewing machine and yellow thread to match the leather, so now it had this "piping" to the top edge. With a folded camail strap, you stitch the two halves together through the mail links, keeping them compressed well together in dense rather than extended order. Stitching arranged so butted links can't fall out of the stitching is, again, a must. Stitched-on camail straps, too, are about the only practical method with riveted links, as the camail strap will likely give out before the links do, therefore it must be replaceable. With riveted or solid punched links, you won't have the slip-out problem, of course.
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"The Minstrel Boy to the war is gone..."