The Armour Archive

I've finally aquired a full aventail to put on my helmet. I'm curious about the best way to attach it.

One of the most popular seems to be to sew it onto leather and rivet the leather onto the helmet.

As in this picture, which I believe is an Icefalcon piece.
http://static.fastcommerce.com/content/ ... 5B1%5D.jpg

What weight leather works for this? Any particular variety work better than others?

Also, I've seen this method which looks nice. I have no idea how it is done though.
From Windrose
http://www.windrosearmoury.com/zc/image ... /h-190.jpg

Any suggestions?

Both links go to the same picture.

As to the attachment, what type of helm are you attaching it to? This will lead to better advice.

fixed it. thanks

This helmet in the center...
http://i249.photobucket.com/albums/gg22 ... 000124.jpg

Hmm...

[img]http://i235.photobucket.com/albums/ee11/fryeguy_2007/brassharness1cropped.jpg[/img]

Oh, Vladimir, looking at that first example of attachment you linked, the leather isn't attached by rivets, but by a type of screw, so the mail can be removed.

Which should have no affect on the weight or type of leather used.

Those would be chicago screws or post screws.
You could go for vervelles but hey are expencive.
the leather used if your not useing vervelles is usualy vegtan or latigo.
If useing vegtan tool, dye, shape, and seal then attach the chainmail before attaching the helm.
Sewing it on after just makes things more difficult.

Quick'n'dirty vervelles -- large cotter pins. Fairly cheap too.

Drill holes along desired vervelle line. Put in cotter pins. Splay their legs out inside the helmet. If you want, cover legs over with a square of ductape. It is helpful then to have your retaining wire run through all the cotter pins' eyes so they are quite correctly lined up.

Camail strap may be pierced with oblong holes to fit snugly around the cotter pins' heads.

You may find this thread useful:

http://forums.armourarchive.org/phpBB2/ ... ostdays=0&

-Derian.

Too bad the Gilded Boar tutorial is offline. This topic needs to be compiled and made sticky on this forum. It seems to come up twice a year.

If you're going for an early Russian look, don't use leather.

As Konstantine mentioned, use cotter pins for verveiles
Thread a wire through the upper row of the mail and the cotter pins.

Thats what they did.

One thing to add to Konstantine's note -
I put a washer on the other side of the helmet (ie: where the legs come out - so they splay over the washer rather than over the helmet itself). It may also be good to put a nail or something through the eye of the pin while splaying the legs or it may pull through too far and loose the nice round eye.

Norman wrote:One thing to add to Konstantine's note -
I put a washer on the other side of the helmet (ie: where the legs come out - so they splay over the washer rather than over the helmet itself). It may also be good to put a nail or something through the eye of the pin while splaying the legs or it may pull through too far and loose the nice round eye.

Don't make the holes too big. Then the sideways action of spreading the cotter pins won't muster the leverage to pull the eye-end through the hole. Big cotter pins have correspondingly large eyes, so that's a lot of space metal would have to move through, and a lot of metal to move too.

Nice thing about the Q&D is that it's made the holes to insert fancier vervelles if and when desired. Since the method works very well, that "when" can be quite a ways in the future.