What is the most amateur friendly helm to make?

[Konstantin the Red]

Crossposted from Critch's First Helmet Tips:

Thinking about obvious stuff during downtime this [week], I began trying to figure helm tops and upper halves. Tried to estimate some quantities to the sort of thing I've been talking about more loosely and generally before.

Helm Top Cap, Interior-fit

If you're doing all of it, it starts with a flat sheet of steel to which you do all the bends. At the edge of the traced-out shape derived from how the Forehead plate and the Occiput plate came out when you riveted them together, you have the riveting flange which is bent down by a cold-raising technique (unless you'd rather work hot) over T-stake, creasing stake, or anvil point, to mate with the Forehead and Occiput. In a cylinder-topped helm like a Maciejowski, the flange has to bend 90 degrees. Lots of laps round the edge of the top cap to do that, from a bend line about 1/8" inside the trace-line you got tracing around the two upper-half plates. Or get the bend line in the same place on the top-cap by tracing around inside the upper plates.

It's okay to snip/saw one or two darts into the riveting flange on an interior-fit cap. They will be hidden, and hammer-bending the riveting flange will be easier. The obvious spot to cut a dart in an almond-shaped top-cap is at the almond's point where it nestles into a center-front crease, a later, advanced feature on a helm -- hardly earlier than mid-fourteenth century. This dart can be quite wide-angled. The spot I'd try cutting a second dart in an interior riveting flange is centerline back, creating two immense tabs from the riveted edge of the top cap, a big one portside and another starboard. Place the two rivets going nearest dead center rear distinctly to either side of this split, bracketing it. If absolutely necessary, maybe other darts somewhere in the right and left rear quarters of the top; I would resort to these only if running into real trouble. Even then I think I'd rather try and work the problem areas hot and fixum good. Too many darts making tabs around an interior-fit and you run into trouble with your rivets missing metal and only giving onto a dart. Weakens the top-cap and the top half. Use as few dart-snips as your skill allows.

So: the edge of the top cap has to bend downwards so many degrees to mate with the upper half's plates, and do that around a curve, too. How many degrees of bend do you have to make on that flange if the top cap has first been dished out of flat? Fewer. How much of a bend in the top cap can you make? Could you get it so the edges of the top cap are bent down ten degrees from flat? Twenty? More?

Certain small & deep styles of helm cap that bring a 5-plate helm to something approaching a sugarloaf stop only about 60-odd degrees of deviation downward from the flat, all round. Top caps like that tend also to make up an appreciable bit of the overall height of the top half, and it is well to have these caps, while yet small, still big enough to accept into their curvature some of the top of the fighter's skull. The upper halves of helms like this tend to show dishing, curving of the upper plates' profiles -- rather sugarloafed. Not showing a distinct zone where the riveting flanges are meeting and mating up there. Probably requires a different method of determining diameter for the top cap to stay out of fitting trouble -- cut, raise, try, and trim, fitting to a preassembled and rather low top half.

But most early/easy helm builders won't take it that far, but keep to a shallow curve, rounding the top cap to about 10-20 degrees below flat horizontal. Thus they subtract 10-20 degrees off the amount of circular, curving bend they need to hammer into the top cap for the riveting flange to mate with the upper half.

The Forehead & Occiput, the two upper-half plates.

Early buckethats, Maciejowski and other, featured cylindrical tops, no sloping to the plates. {ETA: were some of them interior-fits? That's very early.} By the late thirteenth, upper-half plates had taken on a sloped aspect, presenting glancing surfaces, somewhat lightening the weight of the helm overall, and with this tumblehome, this lean-in, subtracting the degrees of bend needed around that top cap just by sloping in and up. Well, how many degrees might we be talking about? Ten degrees? Fifteen? The forehead profile took to sloping quite a bit; the actual amount of slope there varied, leaning 30 or 40 degrees off the vertical -- or lesser amounts. But this degree of lean was confined to just this center-front part of the helm; to either side the departure from the vertical was much less, until we're about to that ten degrees again. And so, subtract another 10-15 degrees from the bend necessary at the top cap's flange.

And we're still not done with our tricks. The top edge of the upper half's plates, this too can be bent, either a pretty fair lot or just a little. Either was done; at one end of the helm era the Pembridges show a marked upper-half bend up there, whereas seventy years earlier, the Madeln A remarkably shows a 90 degree bend-over of these plates' upper edges onto an interior-fit cap, while the c. 1300 Bolzano and others show no bend at the upper half's upper edge for the rivet row. Instead, the top cap, exterior in these cases, is doing it all, that being the practical way with exterior-fit top caps.

{ETA, Those end up with a top cap bend that looks about like
/¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯\.}

But, a bend-over up there works for interior-fit topcaps. It could be a modest bend indeed. It too can be eased, early on in the assembly of the upper half, by cutting a little from the flange area of each plate where they meet on left and right sides. A file is the best tool for this; you're really just making some relief in the flange edge. Work these plates over a T stake already [assembled] together, until you've hammered in a bend of about 5 degrees. Could you do 10 degrees there? Maybe. Might take filing a rather broader-angled dart at the seam join.

So let's see where this puts us. A cylindrical helm upper half makes a flat top cap bend its flange over to a right angle, 90 degrees.

Dishing a top cap to bend its edges down to 10-20 degrees off the horizontal reduces the needed flange bend (around a curved line, remember) down to 80 or 70 degrees.

Sloping in the top-half plates takes another 10-15 degrees from that figure, bringing the needed bending of the top cap flange to 70 degrees, or even as little as 55 degrees bend.

Bending the top edge of the top half plates, assembled, another 10-15 degrees from the vertical brings the top cap flange bend to from 60 degrees to 40 degrees. 55 degrees being a typical middle figure.

Bending a top cap flange down 40 degrees and not having to wrestle it farther looks pretty easy.

All these variables may be included or left out in any combination for any plate-built style of helm, 5-plate, 4-plate, or 3-plate.

By the time you get to the bottom half of a 5-plate, the bottom half is child's play.

[Konstantin the Red]

A Will of Iron, and a Fred of Bronze.

[C. Gadda]

A Will of Iron, and a Fred of Bronze.

Weird thread necro....

Though I had missed it BitD so I enjoyed going over it.

[Konstantin the Red]

A Will of Iron, and a Fred of Bronze.

Weird thread necro....

Though I had missed it BitD so I enjoyed going over it.

Yup, necro -- "Breathe, Little Thread!! Breathe and be Cute!" -- that being all I intended.

[Patrick]

I’m 7 years late to the original post, but one of my Covid crafts was the simplest SCA helm I could make. I shot amateurish video of it and have it up on YouTube.

Not meant to be perfectly period. It was actually intended as a gentle rebuttal to the people who keep trying to get me to essentially donate gear to folks who won’t pony up any money to get into the game.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=asPKDhbrJ1k&t=38s

Patrick

[Konstantin the Red]

Nice, Patrick! You've come a long way from those plastic bearpaw gaunts of yore. Really quite a handsome rock-basic SCA bucket even with the mild faceting that's visible -- and getting better results with a basic daisy-top than most do. All in two working days, no less!