First Helmet Tips

[Konstantin the Red]

Clecos were invented for making airplanes with and you tend to find them in aviation sources. You're right -- not exactly Home Depot.

[critch]

Awesome, thanks for the link/ info. I'll be sure to get them then. Seem to make life a lot easier.. Especially since I plan on working with 3/16" 99.99% of the time.

[critch]

Well I just got two wisdom teeth ripped out of my head after 5 years of putting it off.. I'm going to be laying low the next couple of days so I may not have any progress pics for a bit.

[Konstantin the Red]

Well, like they said: Don't Bend Over. Too throbby, until a few days have gone by.

[critch]

It's a lot of fun, no question about that. I've been taking the opportunity to draw up some fantasy helm designs in the mean time though. I'm looking forward to getting my planishing hammer and going to town on finishing this great helm! I think my next project will be a helmet like this: http://p2.la-img.com/359/27723/10521008_1_l.jpg

I'm unsure if I have the skill required for it but even so, I'd like to try one at some point.

[Konstantin the Red]

It's an even bigger project than you thought, Critch -- close-helmets of both the close- and the armet type -- call for gorgets beneath 'em to, well, do everything they are supposed to in protection.

Close helmet and armet are used around here as distinctive terms for two closefitting and closely related kinds of knightly helmet. The armet came first by a little bit, and it opens up differently from the close-helmet in getting the thing on or off. The armet's jugular/cheek pieces swing up like gull-wing car doors after you lift the visor out of the way. The close-helmet, everything swings on the visor pivots, including the bevor on your chin, and you get out of it that way. Always thought that was rather elegant. The latest forms of either type eventually developed 3-piece movable visors, the upper pieces nesting into the lower to prevent lances catching: the visor proper with the sights in it, an intermediate deck-like bit called the mezail, and the ventilated ventail. The swiveling bevor piece came below that, and flexible lames hung from it.

That one there is a close helmet. The armet may be distinguished by its jugulars hinging horizontally to the skull about the level of the top of the ears. The hinge line is easy to see.

In your pic, see the two hooks there on the bevor piece? Both are unhooked I think. The one to the rear of the helmet holds the bevor to the skull so it doesn't get moved around until it's unhooked. The one higher up and more forward swings up to that little tiny peg (not the big one) low on the ventail to keep that likewise firmly shut. Both hooks have tabs on them so you can open and close them with gloves on. The big prominent peg sitting in the notch lifts the visor. Some helmets had hold-open rods that swiveled up to hold the visor open.

When would I recommend doing it? After you've built a few of the simpler kinds of visored helmets -- visored bascinet, visored sugarloaf. Maybe visored, bevored sallet. One of each of those and you're all the way ready to do the intricate fitted metal forming to make a close.

See, first, you'd want to learn getting a visor down. The old guys back then got skillful and did it very well. You'd need to get the skills to do the same. The visors to the various helmets I named are all a bit different from each other, and broaden your experience -- you've seen already that bascinets have two different hinge plans, single/central and double-temple.

[critch]

Thanks Konstantin, I agree with you that it might be overly ambitious right now.. The simple steps of planishing, etc right now seem to make the great helm a nice challenge. (I worked on the great helm yesterday a bit and got some planishing done ) The sugar loaf alone seems like a good enough challenge. I'm unsure how that would be done and ESPECIALLY the Sallet.. That seems next to impossible without welding? Or you'd need some very specific stakes to make one?

[Nicknizh]

Hey, Critch, those helmets are really tough to make, you can have a look at my armet being constructed in my thread and see what difficulties will await you on your way if you decide to make one.

[critch]

Thanks, Nicknizh. Do you happen to have a link to your thread? I'm looking forward to checking it out!

[Ernst]

Well, like they said: Don't Bend Over. Too throbby, until a few days have gone by.

Oh....wisdom teeth.

[critch]

Misunderstanding? lol

[Nicknizh]

This one, Critch, the helmet is towards the end of the thread.

[critch]

Never mind the end of the thread; I'm enjoying all of your progress! I like seeing the process in photos and video, nice work it all looks awesome. Thanks for the link!

[critch]

The Clecos are IN!!!

[Konstantin the Red]

Halberds just dropped a big ole clever tip for me on Jamesedgarson's "Most Amateur Friendly Helm" thread.

Weldable pipe caps come in a mess of sizes, would torch good and hot so you can shape them more oval or even going to almond shape more readily using your bricks and burner. With its varied diameters, you can use a weldable cap for any layout of helm upper half from visored sugarloaf using a little one, to any fairly big-topped one.

[Konstantin the Red]

I'm unsure how that would be done and ESPECIALLY the Sallet.. That seems next to impossible without welding? Or you'd need some very specific stakes to make one?

I guess by "very specific stakes" you mean what they call "dopples" -- doubles -- which are hefty things formed like the helmets they make. This was done for mass production of infantry helmets beginning in the sixteenth century if not the fifteenth -- and there's real likelihood we even have a tenth/eleventh century dopple for conical helms. It looks just like a conical but it's three times as thick and seems there is nary a trace of anything for lining it or anything else. It has holes around its edge that look like they'd serve just fine to nail the thing to a fitted stock of wood to be sunk into the shop floor, and a tiny hooked tab of mysterious purpose at the bottom end of the nasal; it may have anchored the metal blank to start working it.

Anyway, one or more stakes made with surfaces and curvatures to match parts of the helmet skulls make good final formers. The hammer technique used is a raising, and the work may be done hot. Imagine something shaped like all or part of the helmet bowl or skull, hot-formed from red-hot 1/2" plate and sanded to about 400 grit. It seems to have been a good way to whack out helmet crests easily, to any size, from not-much to billboard.

You don't have to use any dopple to do the job -- but various forms of stake become darn handy for hammering various styles of sallet.

[ManOnFire68]

Critch, have you seen Eric dube's videos on youtube? he raises a couple sallets and an armet. Definitely worth checking out.

[critch]

I've seen a couple of his videos I think.

[ManOnFire68]

I would definitely recommend watching all of them, especially if you plan on doing any raising, his videos help alot.

[Konstantin the Red]

Thinking about obvious stuff during downtime this evening, 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. 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.

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 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.

[ManOnFire68]

Konstantin, what about padding a great helm?

[Konstantin the Red]

Welllllll... I haven't tried a suspension lining yet. But I think I know how. They are nice and airy, and that's a real comfort in a hot brawl.

One of the best cheap & quick & dirty padding methods for a barrel helm is using tubular neoprene pipe insulation. That's the squidgey kind, not the stiffer cheaper kind, though that stuff works okay too. Comes about 4-5 4-foot tubes to the package, and you scissor or razor-knife them to length. A tube can be easily cut in half lengthwise too. A length of it can be coiled up in the top of the helm. The sides, all round, should have the tubes put in vertically, either touching each other side to side or secured slightly apart, to give air channels for ventilation and to allow sweat a very easy way out. Setting a channel between two tubes centered on your earhole also helps you hear the Marshal, and any calls of "Hold!" Helms do not inherently provide excellent hearing; you shouldn't just leave matters, but should take active efforts to promote hearing; no foam on your ears is a good one.

Three washable lightly padded arming-coifs, with round buttonholes at the ears to listen through, aid cleanup, helm fit, retaining your glasses, etc. You'll always have a clean one to use, rotating them.

[ManOnFire68]

Informative, as always. How far have you looked in to these suspension liners? I'd be interested to see some designs. I'm picturing something like a hard hat?

[Konstantin the Red]

Informative, as always. How far have you looked in to these suspension liners? I'd be interested to see some designs. I'm picturing something like a hard hat?

Yeah -- in webbing anyway. Or even more like the inside of a German WW2 helmet, working like webbing but shaped differently.

Another way to think of it is like Jughead Jones' gray spiky cap: Pointed things rising straight up -- but only long enough to make them, you see. Or visualize a crown: pointy things going up, from a band at the brow. These tall pointy things are laid over your skull, all round, and their apices are tied together with a bit of thong poked through all the points. Thus, the whole schmeer becomes a ventilated hat sitting on your scalp, and by tying that thong tighter or looser you get some adjustment in its height to line your eyes up with your helm's sights or tweak your eyeline just enough to miss having your pupils directly crossed with a bar from your grill.

Makes a marshal happy, being able to easily poke around in your lining and see the inside of your helm's metal and any strategic neoprene you've got in there as a last-ditch layer. (Good Marshal pacifier)

Use any stout cloth -- about three layers of it -- that is comfortable to wear if you aren't using an arming-coif. Soft, belly-margin leather is good too and not much more trouble to clean with leather-cleaner soap like saddlesoap. There is probably a reason saddle-soap smells a lot like Mane & Tail hoof treatment and lotion.

Two methods of fastening inside the helm

About the only trick to it is that you rivet it into place upside down (inside out too), so your rivets are covered over by your sweatband. Have your sweatband double wide to do this fold-over, and attach the crown points to that double wide band.

Rivets go into the half of the sweatband farthest from the crown points, affixing your liner. Push it up into your helm's skull; the doubled sweatband now covers the rivet heads.

Cross-sectional view: Rivets go about here -->U<-- crown points are based here and extend well up and over. u(

Or you can do it with household cement and velcro, gluing the hook side of the velcro in the helmet and the loop, the softer, side of it attached to the sweatband. The band doesn't have to be double wide, but it doesn't hurt for it to be soft and thick, like lining its interior side that touches your head with a band of terrycloth as a bit of padding and a sweatcatcher.

[Konstantin the Red]

A man making a bunch of helms and trying to get their assorted sizes right can build himself a spangen-frame or even a spider-like shape from pipe insulation taped together. He can plop it on his head, slide the helm down on it, confirm its size and fit.

He can check a helm too small for him by making the sides of the spangen-spider of half tubes. A helm that's much too small he'd need to borrow somebody with a smaller head.

Not frightfully worth it if you don't make a lot of helmets and helms in three or four sizes, though.

[ManOnFire68]

Thank you Mr. the Red. I will consider all you have said.

[Konstantin the Red]

How's Mister Grizzly the Punch coming?

[Konstantin the Red]

Absolutely none of this looks into welded fabrication of easy helms -- which does lend itself to working up fabricated top halves that are pretending to have been hot-raised from a blank, and the bottom half of the helm riveted onto that.

Lapped welds don't need as much overlap as rivets, and butted welds are just fine too. It's all very well suited to the strategic use of a weldable steel pipe cap with its 10ga thickness.

The difficulty such as it is is amassing the funds for the welding gear. For better-quality electric welders, also running a 220V line, like the one to your dryer. 220V welders are more efficient, with better duty-cycles. The small cheap 110V jobs are just barely adequate, and have the worst duty cycle availability. The internal coils have to cool down below a certain heat level after the buzzbox has been welding a while.

That's if you're doing it strictly all in-(the)-house, assuming She Who'd Better Be Listened To concurs, that is. Alternatively, bend and fit your pieces, and hire the welding out. Welders can come out to you in a truck, if you want. That is extremely convenient.

For the DIY guy who can afford a few hundred bucks, this Lincoln model K2185-1 sounds about in the desired 110V class. Looking around at small 110V and 220V units I keep seeing 20-25% duty cycle (2 mins actual welding per 10 mins clock time), with the higher voltage jobs more able to handle heavier plate than most people run into armouring, and the mid-price types capable of your choice of flux-core and shield-gas MIG welding.

Not the cheapest welder out there, but in welders you get what you pay for, and quality names count for a lot, like Lincoln Electric, like Miller. There's good reason the off-brands are off. You can pick up stick welders, the old-style arcwelding jobbies, new for ninety bucks like this one.. Don't expect too much, et caveat emptor. Though stickwelders have fewer parts. There's also what kind of work they're best suited for -- grills, yes, but I don't know about sheet metal. Arc welders tend to do better on fairly thick materials.

Lincoln Electric's K1170 230V arc welder may be among the better choices for the 220V class, priced around $300. This one's handy at making tools and large stakes. 20% duty cycle @ 225A; that means a longer cycle at lower amperage.

Professional welders understand that almost all welding equipment manufacturers rate their welders using the maximum current that can be produced as the key specification -- not the 100% duty point. So to compensate, a pro will buy a 225-250A welder in order to get the 100-150A 100% duty performance that they need to do their work.

Welding sheet metal together is tricky because it's thin.

My mainstay is 3/32 6011/6010 run DCEN in the 55-60amp range for 18-16ga.

3/32" welding rods, 60 = how many thousand psi tensile strength, 1 = usable any position, 0 or 1 gives info about coating ingredients; DC not AC, Direct Current Electrode Negative (vs. DCEP Direct Current Electrode Positive; they give different depths of penetration in the welds). All the more workable with heavier gauge steel, .0747" 14ga. And E6013 rod comes as thin as 1/16".

I regularly weld 14ga. I use 3/32 6010 rod. The 6010 will dig quite a bit so it's probably not the best rod to learn thin stuff on. However I have a 50lbs box [of 6010 welding rod] that I already bought. Close fit up is needed. [Least gapping between pieces] You won't be able to fill any gaps without eating away at the thin material. If you're not careful you'll just end up chasing the [melted-through] hole all over the place. There's not a lot of mass, so the thin stuff heats up quickly. If it starts [h]eating [or did he really mean "eating?"] too much, you may have to stop and let it cool off for a few seconds.

Brackets all mine. Looks like half the secret is to weld quite short beads so as not to melt too much metal, use a skinny rod, and let the work cool quite a bit between these big tackwelds. Something else I ran across was described as faking a spot weld: you overlapped, and the top layer gets a row of small holes drilled in it -- and you tack-weld through the little holes. Since the weld is all in the holes, there's next to no cleanup...

[Konstantin the Red]

Several weeks on, Nate/critch, what news? Been back here?

[Halberds]

Yes inquiring minds want to know.

[ManOnFire68]

I'll be posting very soon on my first elbow I've raised. First attempt and very promising results. How goes things Critch?

[Konstantin the Red]

His last posting was mid September. I hope he's still reading this.

ManOnFire, how's your Grizzly brand punch been treating you these months?

[Konstantin the Red]

Thanks for the input, I've never been to SCA and haven't really heard about it until a few weeks ago to be honest.

Critch is located in the Shire of Quintavia which is all of Worcester County MA.

Anybody else from around there?

[Konstantin the Red]

And what news?