Attaching an Aventail to a Helm

[Beatrix Krieger]

How does one go about attaching an aventail to a helm? I have two stainless helms (one Norman conical and one sugarloaf as seen attached) and two stainless welded ring aventails. I have examined many helms and I cannot for the life of me figure out how to do it. Please help!

[Ernst]

I'm not sure I'd call the attached helm a sugarloaf, but...

The primary issue you are dealing with is that aventails generally belong on bascinets. All of the evidence for their attachment to bascinets shows the mail being attached to a leather band which was laced over vervelles. Of course there are the mail curtains on things like the Coppergate helmet, where the mail is attached to rings suspended from a wire held by "half-hinges" cut into the helmet.

Since you won't be removing the mail for cleaning, it's likely you'll follow one of two methods for attachment. The first is similar to the method used on bascinets. Cut a leather band to fit the location where you want the mail to fit. For SCA use, this generally means trying to cover the area of the helmet which didn't exist historically with mail, so immediately below the brow band. The mail should be sewn to the edge of the leather, and the leather band riveted to the helmet. The second method is to drill lots of small holes on the attachment line, and "staple" the mail directly to the helmet with U-shaped pieces of wire folded over on the inside. The holes need to be drilled at the distance of the internal diameter of the rings or slightly less. Lots of drilling in stainless is tough.

[Sevastian]

For the Norman I'd unmount the nasal then cut a strip of leather that goes around the bottom of the helmet's top. Punch small holes along the bottom of this and sew on the aventail with heavy waxed thread. You can sew or rivet the leather onto the helmet and sew the front of the aventail to the grill and reattach the nasal. A similar method would work for the other helmet. It's tedious and a big reason I'll be charging extra for helmets with aventails in the future.
P.S. As mentioned drilling in stainless is a pain. Use a center punch and slow revolutions. Speed will only burn up your drill bits when drilling stainless.

[leekellerking]

You can use cotter pins for vervailes on the bascinet. Open them and bend around a metal rod or screwdriver to create the source for the cord that attaches the leather to the helm, them put the ends through the hole and peen over on inside. Leave the rod in whole peening so the hole for the cord doesn't deform.

[Konstantin the Red]

Welcome, Beatrix Krieger!

Leekellerking's advice pertains to attaching to a bascinet, and you haven't got one. Personally, if it isn't on something of the bascinet developmental line from the cerveillière early in the 14th century through 1400 and a bit farther, I don't call it an aventail or the word I prefer, camail. On other types of helmets and helms I get all picky and say "mail drape" which allows concise clear discussion without having to trudge through clarifying. Especially given the drape's rather different attachment.

Vervelles-w/strap & wire tend to be a bit prominently anachronistic with either a sugarloaf or your more Dark Ages than Norman styled helmet in the pic. (It's the steel cheeks. Norman conicals did without 'em, T nasal or no T nasal.) It's a very handsome strong DA hat you have there; you spent your money well. We'd tell you that the temporally harmonious SCA harness for everything below your throat is: hidden hard stuff, under a shirt of mail, blackened gauntlets to reduce their visibility. Makes a simple, handsome outline and style to your harness, doesn't it?

The maker of your helm might call it a sugarloaf, but its style isn't sugarloaf -- though its manner of function is: curved and glancing up on top, pretty much all around, and pretty much straight up and down in the helm's lower half. Sword-slipping top, regular bottom. There's some grounds for saying either Dark Ages or sugarloaf, and a lot of room for debate, in what is essentially a hybrid form between them. I'm not so sure sugarloaf helms, whose overall shape is rather that of the gumdrop and/or a fireplug or further the pointy-top no-topcap scheme, ever sported center creases in period. Again, none of this will impair your hat's functionality in combat.

Sevastian and Ernst are talking about the methods that have been tried and work. The nice thing about the trouble of drilling many small holes for wire into stainless -- a right PITA because SS resists getting machined and that's what boring holes in it is -- is you don't have a leather strap showing up. On the other hand, with using a leather strap to suspend mail from -- or a strip of metal, drilled and holed like the leather and riveted into the same place -- is you can manage nicely with drilling fewer holes through that tough ole stainless.

Your best tool for drilling holes in stainless hats is a drill press, which can turn a bit very slowly. You get into the upper housing to find its drive belt and a set of pulley wheels of various sizes. Shift the drive belt to between the pulley pair that turns the bit slowest. You need that kind of thing to bore metal anyway -- wood can go faster -- and stainless all the more so. Make a cradle to hold the helmet stable while you run the bit up and down, drilling, and oil the centerpunched dimple you're drilling into which keeps the end of the bit cooler and the metal as well, so the bit's hardness isn't destroyed and it cuts. If the oil starts to smoke, that's still okay yet, but drip more oil in there to take the heat and start drilling again.

Okay, most of that is for hiding non-historical but mandated additions, like a nape-plate for Norman conicals that didn't have napes, underneath a drape of mail pretending to be part of a coif of mail.

Going to the bottom edge of a sugarloaf helm or anything really as tall as one, such as a 5-plate greathelm, that leather strip can go on the inside of the helm, so nothing of it shows but the heads of the rivets around the bottom. The mail-drape flares out from down there, protecting at the neck the same way a bascinet camail does and pretending to be a mail coif underneath the helm.

[The Red Knight]

http://modernchivalry.org/forum/index.p ... 656.0.html

[Konstantin the Red]

http://modernchivalry.org/forum/index.p ... 656.0.html

Though the method in that thread is how I would not do it -- I would pattern and fit the camail strap first, using application of masking tape to devise the pattern, make up and fit the camail strap as the first part of the project, then get around to attaching the mail. He got there, but he did it the hard way. Camail straps are far easier to work laid flat and kept so until final assembly.

But one may get some technique tips out of that thread.

[shamrockarmoury]

Something like this

Cheers
Jackie

[Konstantin the Red]

Yeah, it's an option B.K.'s looking at.

[Gocauo]

Sew the maille to the top of the leather band vs the bottom for a cleaner look...

[Steve S.]

Hello Beatrix,

The issue is that both of those helms in period would not be fully head-enclosing, and instead they would probably be worn over a coif of maille.

This is the look you are going for:



Of course this is a different style from your helms, but the concept is the same.

So people with these modern variants try to cover the lower parts of the helm with maille to simulate the look of a maille coif under the metal "hat". So it's not really an "aventail" in a historical context, but rather a way to disguise the anachronistic portions of the helmet.

The common way to do this, as was shown by others, is to rivet a strip of leather to the wrapper of the helm, usually under the "brow band", and use this to anchor the maille.

Steve