The Armour Archive

Ok, I personally hate them, just something in the look of it but one of my brothers wants a bascinet with one. My question is: How does one go about raiseing and shapeing the eye slots?

Does anyone have some tips or even an essay on doing them?

You can raise them, which requires skill and tools that fit the shapes you're trying to make. Ideally, you would heat the piece in order to work it more easily and reduce the risk of fatiguing the steel enough to make it crack.

You can also cheat a bit, and avoid raising, by building the ocularia seperately and then welding then in place. This takes more in the way of grinding, and you have to fit your ocularia to the mask, and be a good enough welder to do that part right.

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Gundobad,
Wise Ogre Armory

'Soylens viridis homines est.'

A position worth taking, is worth defending.

Make it in one piece - it is so much more fun and you get a real feel of moving metal around. Wait - I guess I have been moving metal around for a while.

Some of the method depends on exactly what visor you want to make. I have done them at least 3 different ways, each better suited to different shapes or different types of work the armourer really wants to do.

Step one - pick one from which you are going to work. Stare at it a lot.

Post it, and we may be able to help on some ways to work toward that specific shape.

A lot of it will depend on how much you want to work with heat - or how long you want to take. Most of these really have a lot of shape in them. If nothing else they are a very good thing to make to work on your hammer control and feel for how the metal moves.

Wade

How can you possibly hate globose klappvisors?!

Here are some pics on Cad's site of one he made;
http://www.isd.net/cdavis/current.html

Anyway, I made a test piece a while back, just to see if I could form the shape, especially the eyes. I have as yet not got around to making a final one.
I dished and raised the visor from a single piece using Sinric's pattern(it turned out too big, but then again it's not for SCA use).
I formed the eyes(occularia) by sinking them.
I did this by first cutting the shape I wanted into a small wood stump and then working the metal into the stump using a rounded off cross pein hammer.
It worked well and I did it cold, in 1.4mm(17gauge) mild steel, without getting any tears in the metal.

But, by all means, go for any advice from Wade first. I know nothing in comparison.

Erik

I did mine all cold except for an anneal that was more of a chance to play with fire then something that was necessary.

Here's how I did it.

I used sinric's visor pattern.

First I dished out the rounded face area using a 4# sledge that I've made into a dishing hammer and a depression in my dishing stump.

Then I planished that area over a shotput using an autobody planishing hammer.

Carved a groove into the edge of my dishing stump that was basically the shape of the occulars.

Took an old masonry hammer and cut a bit off of the pointy end so it'd be a little duller and then rounded by grinding, sanded and polished both faces of the hammer.

I then dished the occulars into the groove with the pointy end of the masonry hammer. Got them to about the right depth and shape (sorta). They're not gonna look much like occulars yet. Basically just sorta blobs with the volume of the occulars.

Next I moved on to a T stake I'd made by welding 2 pieces of 1" square stock together in the shape of a T. I also sanded and rounded the edges of one end of this stake SLIGHTLY so it wouldn't cut into the metal.

Then I cleaned up the occular and made it actually look like an occular using the flat end of the modified masonry hammer.

The oculars I made came out to a point and didn't have the flat spot at the opening area. The visor was meant for AEMMA combat which requires vertical grills preferably pointed with the openings being a maximum of 1/4" wide by 1/2" tall with 1/4" of steel between them. So I just cut into the pointed occular with a cutting disk on my grinder. If you were to make the occulars pointed you could just cut the whole tip off of them.

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The budding mid 14th century German Transitional guy.
Mad Matt's Armory

Ok found the page that JT kindly posted the pics of the helmet I made on.

Here it is.

http://www.armourarchive.org/gallery/madmatt_bascinet_2002_04_25/

The actual helm isn't that hot but I'm pretty happy with the way the visor came out. The customer still had to do a bunch of filing on the eye-slots to open them up to the maximum limit. But that's what we had agreed on before I started.

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The budding mid 14th century German Transitional guy.
Mad Matt's Armory

Thanks a ton guys. Working it hot isn't really a option right now so I was hoping I would be able to do it cold.

Now to actually get started...

Time to drag out my other stump and make another odd shaped hole in it. It's already got a few.

Thanks again,