The Armour Archive

My wife is looking for a pattern for a Roman helmet and I was wondering if any of you could help?

Grendal.

I don't have any myself, but if you don't get any joy, you might try contacting the guys on the re-enactment forum at the Roman Army page http://pub45.ezboard.com/bromanarmytalk

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Egfroth

"I can hear the word money from a distance of fifty miles, if the wind's in the right direction"

Major Dennis Bloodnok, Queen's Forty-Third Deserters (retd.)

see my webpage at www.geocities.com/egfrothos

Matthew Amt (who often hangs out here) is a fountain of information!

www.larp.com/legioxx

One of the European legions (on the links page -- I think it's the one in Norway) shows how they constructed their helms out of cut-down Swedish army helmets. (I know this is frowned upon in other contexts, but the pics do show how to fit the pieces together.)

And if your local library has Alex Bealer's "Art of Blacksmithing", there's a diagram showing how to raise a Roman helm in one piece from a keyhole-shaped piece of sheeting ... though it would require a lot of annealing.

Avete!
Thanks for the plug, Lisa, but I don't have patterns for helmet bowls, having never made one. The closest we ever came is putting cheekpieces and neckguards on spun bowls--for that I simply enlarged photocopies of drawings or photos from various books and fudged from there. Armor patterns, no prob, they're on my site! But actually making a helmet bowl is beyond my experience so I'm a little leery of offering advice.

Good luck to the Missus, though, Grendal, I'm always happy to see folks make more Roman stuff!

Valete,
Matthew/Quintus, Legio XX

Heres a link to a site where you can get steel hemisheres. They're 11 gauge but for 15 bucks a piece maybe you can figure out how to make them work.

http://www.kingarchitecturalmetals.com/Pages/Page10A.html

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The Artisan Formerly Known As Willing Pell.