The Armour Archive

A few months back, I picked up a sugarloaf-style greathelm off a friend of mine for real cheap, hoping to use it for my 14th century impression until a better helmet (ideally a bascinet) can be procured. To make it look more 14th century and less 13th, I set out to give it a visor.
The base helmet was pretty simple: Just a factory produced one from Get Dressed for Battle.

My first step, after getting the base helmet, was to get some steel (I got 16 gauge, a little thicker than the helmet itself, I think, but what I like working with). I cut that into a triangle with a jigsaw outfitted with a metal cutting blade, then cleaned the edges and rounded the corners with a tabletop grinding wheel. I measured out eye slots and ventilation holes, marked them with a sharpie, and drilled in the ventilation holes with a normal power drill (I hadn't quite finished in the picture).

Next I used a handheld angle grinder to cut the top and bottom of the eye slots, drilling along the right and left sides and just clipping the rest of the metal there. I then went ahead and filed the edges to clean them up and get rid of the bits of metal still protruding.

In anticipation of possible issues sliding the visor up, I cut a bit off from the top, just so it wouldn't collide with the peak. At that point, I had been hoping to fit it to a different helmet I'd gotten from a different friend, which was roomier, but had a much steeper peak. I ended up not using that helmet anyway, but I kind of like the little dip.

Once I'd rounded the corners and cleaned the edges on that, I curved the visor by hammering it over a piece of pipe I secured in a vice. A bit rough, but it got the job done, more or less. I went on to remove the brass cross from the helmet, just to give it a uniform bare steel look. To make sure it would work before I started cutting the face off the helmet, I used nuts and machine screws to secure the visor in place temporarily, spacing it out from the helmet with washers. It worked.

Once I was satisfied the visor would fit and move, I took it off and used the angle grinder to cut the face off of the helmet. It came out rather jagged.

I used a grinding wheel to clean off the protruding pieces, then files to finish the edges of the face and dull them. Once all that was done, I cleaned off the visor, sanded off the worst of the rust that had developed on the base helmet, and riveted the visor into place with dome headed rivets.


It's a little uneven looking, and certainly not pretty, but I'm pretty happy with it, all things considered. It will definitely work for a while, until I can get a bascinet.

It'll work for SCA Youth Boffer, at any rate.

A lot of us around here are building for SCA hardstick, which at a minimum gauge number wants 15 gauge everywhere on the helm, and many of us find a 12 gauge helm skull is wanted for durability and obviating concussions.

You can still easily enough pretty up the curvatures using a strip of autobody emery sheet rubber-cemented to a flat bit of wood like a stir stick or a large tongue depressor, and not a file, since you'd want to not scratch up adjacent helm metal. You just put the abrasive work-face where you're using it, and leave the edges plain, safed as they say.

Bringing an ordinary file to bear along un-pretty edges in the draw-filing technique can do a lot to neaten a rough edge right up, into a long smooth clean line. Pretty does lie much in the finish. All the rust can be polished away simply, if quite taking some shop hours on it, just by use of gradually finer grits of emery from the auto shop... that stuff goes down to like #2000-grit, you know. That's practically polishing fineness. At the other end, you can use #36-grit like a file and make excess material disappear fast.

Some unevenness... well, the Medievals did live with a little of that. They were ready to get stuff on the field when it worked -- yet one did see things like center ridges wandering or slightly asymmetrical curves. They strove against these with great skill, but often enough they can still be detected.