tools for helmetsmithing
tools for helmetsmithing
I'm thinking of making me a helmet, nothing fancy, something with a bar grill and a lobster tail. What tools would I need for such an endeavour? Ideally i'd like to use stainless steel but the regular 12/14 gauge would do as well.
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Konstantin the Red
- Archive Member
- Posts: 26713
- Joined: Sun Oct 21, 2001 1:01 am
- Location: Port Hueneme CA USA
...Armour Reproduction, but yeah 
, that one, by Brian R. Price. It's available in softback now as well as hard -- hardback is getting to the tail end of its printing but still to be found on the book sites and the right part of eBay -- softback for about thirty bucks.
Worth every red cent, especially for the first-timer. It gives about as much knowledge of dishing and raising metal into armor shapes -- almost all are complex curvatures, or dishes -- as the printed word can do. The rest of it is putting your metal blank on a stake and yourself on the helve end of a hammer and getting to know metal up close and personal.
Metal can't heal, doesn't forgive, but can be moved and can go where you want it. Enough philosophy, let's get down to brass rivets -- you may use some, they were common enough on lobstertail pot helmets like you want.
Save working in stainless for later, because that metal is very stubborn, fights being cut and drilled, and needs to be hit with a bigger hammer. First timers are much better served with plain ol' mild steel. Go 12 gauge, particularly if you're designing for SCA. Living history, that can go lighter. But the thicker steel is less sensitive to errors in raising and dishing -- it doesn't crack, tear, or have a hammer go through it quite as easily and curiously enough in mild steel it's only a little more strenuous to form with a hammer.
Nothing Fancy = Munition helmet. Search the site also on "munition grade" which should get you about everything we've ever posted about plain Jane gear. Probably a 400 grit finish when you get done, cleaning up the entire hat, and a going-over with wire brush to give a smooth satin effect. It seems from analysis of pieces, though, that a near-mirror finish was common. It resisted rust a little better. About the only rust resistance they knew was a polished surface, and painting it.
Are you designing for SCA or are you hewing to a strict Living History model? SCA won't pass a helm(et) that doesn't rigidly protect the entire cranium including down the neck at least halfway. So if it's SCA, the lobstertail articulations shouldn't start too high, but down on the neck. They can reach some way down your spine.
Lobstertail pots start fairly fancy with hinged bits and get even more so. They were a sort of army-issue burgonet helmet, with a simple skull for ease of production, a possibly movable brim shading the eyes a bit, perhaps with bars attached giving coverage to the face. There might be hinged cheek pieces that buckled under the chin, and then there's the lobster tail down the back.
It is possible to buy helmet skull halves from some of the armourers in this forum. This takes care of the technically toughest part of the forming once the halves are well welded together. The other parts essentially hang down from or are attached to the bottom edge of the skull halves, which cover about half the height of your personal headbone. They are simpler because they are mainly simple curvatures, only curving along one dimension of the piece. But there may be some slight convexities!
What tools do you presently have? You won't necessarily need an anvil, as most armor forming is done over stakes. Some of us make or buy dishes to hammer metal into. Within their limits (dishing's depth is limited) dishes are good tools, and will also suitably bend barstock.
A couple of ball pein hammers, preferably with hemispherical, not bullet-shaped, peins -- 16 oz and 32 oz. These are good for general bashery and for upsetting rivets. A larger hammer for dishing -- 4 to 6 pounds, with a rounded-off face to bang gentle curves into pieces of helmets (vide spangenhelm or conical helm) covers most of your starter hammers. A raising hammer is more advanced, sometimes homebuilt, and when professionally made looks like some kind of extra-large silversmiths' hammer, long in the nose to reach into places. Its face is usually rectangular, three or four times wider than it is tall, polished very smoothly, very slightly rounded and with all corners and edges radiused and as polished as the rest. This better controls which way the hammer makes the metal go than a circular face does, but you can indeed raise something down over a stake with a circular hammer.
Something to cut your steel with. Cheap, though slow and noisy in metal, is the saber saw and about a dozen extra metal cutting blades. And a few for working in wood too. Saber saws are great for cutting out plywood shields. Except for the messy method of using a cold chisel shearing sheet metal on the edge of an anvil, it's the cheapest one. The other usual sorts of tools are either the six-hundred-dollar Beverly B-2 shear, or the $350-400 electric power shear, a handheld tool vaguely like some giant jigsaw, but using a shearing cutting method, not sawing. Another is the power nibbler, which can make 90-degree corners in its cuts but takes a quarter inch kerf, punching out thousands of sharp little crescent moons of waste metal.
Files: all kinds, all sizes, for finishing the edges of the metal not only for neatly executed shape of the components (Important! Ugly armor isn't fun to wear and often doesn't work very well either!) but also for safety in not getting gashed. Okay, not getting cut up as much.
Electric drill or hand sheetmetal punch like the Roper-Whitney No.5 Jr. Preferably both. The R-W punch would actually see more use as most holes in armor plates are within two inches of the edges.
The most flexible and efficient way to do bar grills of any description is welding them. Those files will be useful here too in cleaning up the welds into something smooth and beautiful and not all blobby or fissured. The easiest kind of welding to learn is oxy-acetylene. You can take community college courses in this.
, that one, by Brian R. Price. It's available in softback now as well as hard -- hardback is getting to the tail end of its printing but still to be found on the book sites and the right part of eBay -- softback for about thirty bucks.
Worth every red cent, especially for the first-timer. It gives about as much knowledge of dishing and raising metal into armor shapes -- almost all are complex curvatures, or dishes -- as the printed word can do. The rest of it is putting your metal blank on a stake and yourself on the helve end of a hammer and getting to know metal up close and personal.
Metal can't heal, doesn't forgive, but can be moved and can go where you want it. Enough philosophy, let's get down to brass rivets -- you may use some, they were common enough on lobstertail pot helmets like you want.
Save working in stainless for later, because that metal is very stubborn, fights being cut and drilled, and needs to be hit with a bigger hammer. First timers are much better served with plain ol' mild steel. Go 12 gauge, particularly if you're designing for SCA. Living history, that can go lighter. But the thicker steel is less sensitive to errors in raising and dishing -- it doesn't crack, tear, or have a hammer go through it quite as easily and curiously enough in mild steel it's only a little more strenuous to form with a hammer.
Nothing Fancy = Munition helmet. Search the site also on "munition grade" which should get you about everything we've ever posted about plain Jane gear. Probably a 400 grit finish when you get done, cleaning up the entire hat, and a going-over with wire brush to give a smooth satin effect. It seems from analysis of pieces, though, that a near-mirror finish was common. It resisted rust a little better. About the only rust resistance they knew was a polished surface, and painting it.
Are you designing for SCA or are you hewing to a strict Living History model? SCA won't pass a helm(et) that doesn't rigidly protect the entire cranium including down the neck at least halfway. So if it's SCA, the lobstertail articulations shouldn't start too high, but down on the neck. They can reach some way down your spine.
Lobstertail pots start fairly fancy with hinged bits and get even more so. They were a sort of army-issue burgonet helmet, with a simple skull for ease of production, a possibly movable brim shading the eyes a bit, perhaps with bars attached giving coverage to the face. There might be hinged cheek pieces that buckled under the chin, and then there's the lobster tail down the back.
It is possible to buy helmet skull halves from some of the armourers in this forum. This takes care of the technically toughest part of the forming once the halves are well welded together. The other parts essentially hang down from or are attached to the bottom edge of the skull halves, which cover about half the height of your personal headbone. They are simpler because they are mainly simple curvatures, only curving along one dimension of the piece. But there may be some slight convexities!
What tools do you presently have? You won't necessarily need an anvil, as most armor forming is done over stakes. Some of us make or buy dishes to hammer metal into. Within their limits (dishing's depth is limited) dishes are good tools, and will also suitably bend barstock.
A couple of ball pein hammers, preferably with hemispherical, not bullet-shaped, peins -- 16 oz and 32 oz. These are good for general bashery and for upsetting rivets. A larger hammer for dishing -- 4 to 6 pounds, with a rounded-off face to bang gentle curves into pieces of helmets (vide spangenhelm or conical helm) covers most of your starter hammers. A raising hammer is more advanced, sometimes homebuilt, and when professionally made looks like some kind of extra-large silversmiths' hammer, long in the nose to reach into places. Its face is usually rectangular, three or four times wider than it is tall, polished very smoothly, very slightly rounded and with all corners and edges radiused and as polished as the rest. This better controls which way the hammer makes the metal go than a circular face does, but you can indeed raise something down over a stake with a circular hammer.
Something to cut your steel with. Cheap, though slow and noisy in metal, is the saber saw and about a dozen extra metal cutting blades. And a few for working in wood too. Saber saws are great for cutting out plywood shields. Except for the messy method of using a cold chisel shearing sheet metal on the edge of an anvil, it's the cheapest one. The other usual sorts of tools are either the six-hundred-dollar Beverly B-2 shear, or the $350-400 electric power shear, a handheld tool vaguely like some giant jigsaw, but using a shearing cutting method, not sawing. Another is the power nibbler, which can make 90-degree corners in its cuts but takes a quarter inch kerf, punching out thousands of sharp little crescent moons of waste metal.
Files: all kinds, all sizes, for finishing the edges of the metal not only for neatly executed shape of the components (Important! Ugly armor isn't fun to wear and often doesn't work very well either!) but also for safety in not getting gashed. Okay, not getting cut up as much.
Electric drill or hand sheetmetal punch like the Roper-Whitney No.5 Jr. Preferably both. The R-W punch would actually see more use as most holes in armor plates are within two inches of the edges.
The most flexible and efficient way to do bar grills of any description is welding them. Those files will be useful here too in cleaning up the welds into something smooth and beautiful and not all blobby or fissured. The easiest kind of welding to learn is oxy-acetylene. You can take community college courses in this.
"The Minstrel Boy to the war is gone..."
-
Konstantin the Red
- Archive Member
- Posts: 26713
- Joined: Sun Oct 21, 2001 1:01 am
- Location: Port Hueneme CA USA
Konstantin-
It's gonna be an SCA helmet. I was gonna buy one but I decided it might be fun to make it myself. I have access to a steel shop with a plasma cutter, mig welder, punches, a B3 shear, a whole bunch of power saws and so on. The technician seemed interested in the project, so I'm sure he'll help me with using them.
The problem was the dome on top. There's a bunch of Roper Whitney steel benders/cutters but its a shop for art students so they dont go beyong 16 gauge steel. Are they usually just dished out?
It's gonna be an SCA helmet. I was gonna buy one but I decided it might be fun to make it myself. I have access to a steel shop with a plasma cutter, mig welder, punches, a B3 shear, a whole bunch of power saws and so on. The technician seemed interested in the project, so I'm sure he'll help me with using them.
The problem was the dome on top. There's a bunch of Roper Whitney steel benders/cutters but its a shop for art students so they dont go beyong 16 gauge steel. Are they usually just dished out?
-
Konstantin the Red
- Archive Member
- Posts: 26713
- Joined: Sun Oct 21, 2001 1:01 am
- Location: Port Hueneme CA USA
Are they usually just dished out?
Helmet skull halves usually can be just dished, yes, though raising down over a mushroom or fairly large ball stake can also work. The raising method has less trouble with the metal being thinned out in the center.
There's a way to do it with an anvil face and a weighted-rawhide mallet -- no stake or dish needed. First, dish your piece a little to start the curvature and make the next step easier. Then, "hammer on air" by propping the slightly curved blank on the anvil face and striking just above the point the blank rests on the face with the mallet. The metal "sees" the highly elastic collision with the anvil face much more than the inelastic collision with the soft mallet face, and is inclined to wrap around the mallet face as the process goes on. This makes your complex curvature, and also doesn't need much planishing if any. Soft hammers are good that way.
If the edge of your piece starts to take on waves, take a hard face hammer like a ball-pein or whatever and hammer all the waves flat again before continuing the soft-hammer work.
Raising works by taking a piece of metal -- for simplicity assume it's pretty much circular, with a certain given circumference -- and instead of stretching out the middle of the piece, which thins it out there like blowing bubble gum, it bends the metal down and reduces its circumference. The metal at the edge gets pushed together in the process. Theoretically it thickens up a little, but you'd need a micrometer to see it. I've never done that measurement.
Good easy raising practice can be had by doing this with lames for articulated joints -- only don't overdo the curvature, you don't need but a little -- and for the shoulder-cop of fifteenth/sixteenth-century spaudlers and latter-fourteenth spaudleroids attached to 14th-c. rerebraces. The component started as part of the rerebrace, then got its independence in the next century. By the pothelmet era, though, spaudlers were very little seen if at all, as very agile pauldrons, much cut up into lames articulating on leathers, had taken over completely.
"The Minstrel Boy to the war is gone..."