The Armour Archive

I'm thinking of making my first bascinet in the summer, which is when I finally get off school. I decided to base mines off the Wallace Bascinet. However somebody told me that the first step was to draw it out on paper, which I did. In the middle of drawing it, I remembered somebody mention that the bascinet was not original to the visor, because of the hole that was used for a front hinge. So I decided to move the point back a little.


So I want to know, would moving the point back be blasphemy or would it be acceptable? If you squint your eyes you may be able to see where the point originally was.
Sorry about the quality of the drawing, its my first time drawing armour on paper!

Looking back, I now realize I need to extend the front of the bascinet a bit more

Maybe these might be helpful for you (from my pinterest page https://www.pinterest.com/aboerbront/)

Icepocca,

You are quite right in believing that the helmet and visor do not belong together. That is one of the reasons you are having trouble drawing them over a head profile. They really don't fit well together.

Is it that you like the visor more than the helmet? ... and intend to make a helmet the accords better with that visor?

If so, the first thing you may want to do is adjust the position of the visor on your drawing so that it is more ergonomic. To do that you will want to lift it up a bit and swing the chin in closer. This will level the sights and get them lined up with your eyes. When correctly positioned, most bascinet visor sights are quite close to horizontal. If they slope down in back it is only a little bit... no more than five degrees, if that much.

Mac

Thanks Mac!
I'll take your advice and redraw
and yes, its the visor that I like about it, but Im still not sure what kind of bascinet should go with it

I quickly redrew after i finished dinner
Although something seems off i think? What do you guys think? I think the paper is getting dangerously thin from all the erasing i just did...

According to Mac, I believe you still need to tilt the visor more to get the eye slots more or less horizontal.



I believe this picture shows a better tilt of the helmet. But dont trust me, bascinets aren't really my thing. Yet..

What does not convince me about the last sketch is:
A) the shape and proportion of the head look a bit off, how you obtained this outline? The skull does not look much human, it's too much circular.
B) there is very little clearance between the forehead and the bascinet, I would allow a bit more padding here, as this is a high impact area.
C) I would arch the back curve a bit more, to have a bit lesse clearance at the nape of the neck, this will make the bascinet look a bit less squared and more egg shaped.

Another thing to keep in mind, the bottom of visor on most of these helmets just extends to the point of the chin, about to the point where the line of the chin just starts to curve back towards the throat. It shouldn't cover the underside of the chin or any of the throat, at least on the historic examples. It looks like the head is stuffed a bit to high into the helm. This is one of the things that makes the eye slits appear to be to low in the drawing. Also, the bottom edge of helmet when worn, should be almost horizontal, as in the top pic, not diagonal as in the pic posted by xtracted, or as in your drawing. If it were redrawn with the helm tilted back a bit and raised a tad, I think it would look about right.

Otto,

I agree with you about the visor. The real ones barely cover the chin, and in terms of modern fighting, they sit perilously close to it.

However, I must disagree about the lower edge of the helmet. The typical "international style" bacsinet (like the Lyle in the Royal Aromouries that Xt posted) has its lower edge at an angle not unlike a modern motorcycle helmet.

Now, not all bascinets have the same angle to the lower edge. The Wallace bascinet that Icepocca posted originally has a horizontal lower edge. In both cases, the line begins in the same place in the back of the head, but in the first case it then follows the jaw line and in the other it follows a line that ends at the level of the mouth. This helmet, like the one on the Black Prince's effigy, does not cover the jaw.

Icepocca,

As Signo and Otto point out, you have got the skull of the helmet too close to your forehead. I was going to point this out after you got the visor under control.

The think I did not notice about your sketch last night was that your head profile is too close to the top of the page for a bascinet. So, the first thing you may want to do is either add some paper to the top of the sheet, of transfer the profile to another piece of paper with more "point room".

Setting a bascinet too low on the head is a very common modern error. Almost everyone does it. Real bascinets are surprisingly tall, and we tend to resist the evidence of our eyes and end up making them sit to low. This is the sort of thing that is better to work out on paper than in steel.

Mac

Ahh, Thanks for pointing that out Mac! I agree. Would you say its just the Italian styles that are close to being horizontal on the bottom edge? Or is it more of a certain time period? Or maybe both?

This is a good pic of this helmet. The angle is just about perfect. The only downside is this.. The Lyle bascinet may well have the greatest slope to the sights of any extant, authentic visor. Most bascinet eye slits somewhat more horizontal than this when they are oriented correctly to fit the head.



Mac

I think the whole helmets proportions are super funky. It appears massively tall and the eye slots seem to go really far away from the face. But again, I have not given bascinets much of my time.

Here's a drawing I made of the Lyle bascinet for Doug's book. I hope he does not mind. All the sketches is this series were made by tracing a helmet profile, correcting for camera distortion, scaling it to fit the standard head profile, and then moving the helmet around till it "fit".



By contrast, here is a helmet like the Wallace A69. I did not include the visor because it is not original to the helmet and does not really fit it properly. This helmet could be tipped back a bit, but it really can't be tipped forward any more than it is. I wish I'd had that nice profile from Goll's thesis when I made this sketch. I would have drawn the helmet a bit taller and pointier.

Xtracted wrote:It appears massively tall and the eye slots seem to go really far away from the face. But again, I have not given bascinets much of my time.

I think that when you take a close look at bascinets you would be surprised at how far the eye slots are from the wearers eyes.
Some of the common mistakes we make is trying to get the eye slots as close to the eye as possible & also making the eye slots too large.
While this does maximize the visibility it does not necessarily follow the historical examples.

Love this kind of conversation =).

There you go (I guess not all the visors belong to the skull, but it's worth showing what I've got)

Were they made to sit far away from the eyes and face for safety purposes? I have never worn a visored, well made bascinet but it feels like the visibility would be minimal.

It's impossible to say for sure why anything was done the way it was done, but it does seem reasonable to consider the visor as a "crumple zone" and a space for penetrating points to come to a stop before reaching the face.

Vision out of a bascinet is notoriously poor. It's not just so we can see his Saintly face that George has lifted his visor here.



Mac

It seems to provide a very nice glancing face for jousting but they must have been absolute crap for hand to hand combat... I can't imagine fighting in one of those. That and they're just generally goofy looking...

Augusto,

The sad fact is that very few of the bascinet/visor combinations that we have to look at are original assemblages. The vast majority were "associated" in more or less recent times. Of the ones you posted, I count only five as being beyond reasonable doubt.


Le Landeron. One of the cleanest and most complete extant. It belongs to that other elite group of original aventails as well.


The votive armor from Chartres. This one also has its original avential, but the mountings were stripped by the French Revolutionaries.



Sempach bascinet in Nuremberg. These two were found together. They are badly rusted and the visor is squished, but there can be little doubt that they belong. This one also has one of the rare examples of metallic plates to cover the aventail band.


Churburg Ch15. The fit is a bit funny looking, but the provenance is impeccable. It's also part of the "original aventail club"


Veste Coburg Everything fits, including the hinge and its catch. The matals and their patinations and finishes match.

Xtracted wrote:Were they made to sit far away from the eyes and face for safety purposes? I have never worn a visored, well made bascinet but it feels like the visibility would be minimal.

I believe that it's mostly about providing a shape that encourages blows to glance. Visibility is certainly worse than helmets the put the eyeslot closer to the eye, but I wouldn't describe visibility as minimal.

So what you're saying is that the entire helmet needs to sit higher, the visor slits should be almost horizontal, and the bottom of the bascinet should be less angled?

I would leave the neck line/angle where it is for the moment. Make the whole helmet taller. There should be at least a half and inch between your head and the inside of the helmet at its closest approaches. Once you have established that, start re-sketching the lines of the point till it looks like one of the real helmets.

The eyeslit should be higher, and a bit more level. A horizontal line from your eye should pass through the middle of the sight. If there is any slope to the sight, the eye-line should pass through the median height of the opening. That is to say, not by the nose or by the corners, but right in the middle.

Mac

Another thought. Would this visor plus tall pointed bascinet be appropriate for a late 14th century french harness, the ones where you can't see much because they all wear those gambesons over their armour? And I also notices that they had both visors with a single horizontal slit and ones with vertical slots for vision, I guess I could switch them up?

Are you familiar with the Manuscript Miniatures page? http://manuscriptminiatures.com/ If not, you are in for a treat. Go to the search page http://manuscriptminiatures.com/search/ type in a date range, check "France" and hit "Search".


Mac

Is it just me, or do the klappvisiers generally get the eye slots closer to the face?

I think that's right, Ernst. Even the pointy ones are not as pointy as their side pivoted cousins, and the result is that the sights are a bit closer to the eyes.

Mac

Well I tried to redraw the whole thing
The first thing was to redraw the head and trace half an inch around it to account for padding
When I tried to tilt the visor to get the sights horizontal, either the chin flange would hit the chin of the person, which might be dangerous,
or the top of the visor would be about a million inches away from the bascinet
so I tilted the visor as much as I could, maybe the sights arent meant to be horizontal?
Also, maybe the artists couldn't agree, but they use both methods of displaying eye slots, and i cant tell which one would suit late 14th century France more....
Although maybe vertical slots are more early 15th century?
. I also drew up a front facing picture,
I didn't know people's heads were so thin, I thought they would be thicker...

That's certainly getting taller!

I would drop the neck line in the back by about an inch and see how that looks.

Have you got a front view of your head, or are your guessing? How much room did you allow for padding on the sides? Bascinets are surprisingly round for helmets. You might think in terms of allowing three quarters of an inch above the ears if your have roundish head and a bit more if your head is long and narrow.

You may need to raise the visor pivots a bit so the visor will open properly. You can check that with a compass. If your compass doesn't open that bit, you can makeshift with a bit of cardboard or some wire or string. The brow of the visor has to swing through about 50 or 60 degrees before it strikes the helmet skull. Raising the pivots will get more travel.

Mac

This is what I mean when I say that bascinets are rather "round" for helmets. The pic is from this thread. viewtopic.php?f=1&t=170835&hilit=mac+ba ... nd+section



I think there is at least one good top-down view of a real one in Goll's thesis pics. Does anyone know which one it is?

Mac

Mac, does this pivot okay?
Also, is it cheating to making a drawing by tracing?

Mac wrote: I think there is at least one good top-down view of a real one in Goll's thesis pics. Does anyone know which one it is?

Mac

Goll #1594
There is no top down view

How about Goll #1529 -Le Landeron Bascinet ?

Lets not forget the Brits (well, italians really).