The Armour Archive

I've got a flat ring welded aventail
( via one of Duke Brannos's orders on Legio Draconis )


It seems a little small.....( I could be wrong )

If I just drop it over my basinet it.... ummmm

I cannot put the helm through the neck hole.
It will not fit.....it gets 'stuck'

Should I be able to put the helm thru the neck hole?
or is that the correct size?

I do not want to start cutting it up if it is too small

Pictures needed to answer this question?

Well, It's hard to be 100% certain with pictures but it's not a tube, it's a flared ring right? So if you remove 1 maybe 2 rows at the top it will suddenly be large enough to pass your helm? It's that PI*D thing. remove 1 ring from either side and you effectivly gain 2*3.14 ~=6 rings in circumference. I'd be careful not to accedentally remove more then you need to.

A little too tight on an off-the-shelf aventail is a lot easier to deal with then a little too loose. Too loose would mean the mail wouldn't sit flat when sewn to the leather for the vervelles.

How does the length look?

Sean

That depends on where the expansions start.
On aventails from Knuut it is a straight tube for quite some distance befor there are any expansions.
Examine the aventail to see where the expansions start.
In my experience there are expansions in strange places on the "imported" aventails.
I needed to cut a face opening in one and there was an area where it was 7 links on one, completly strange.

pictures....

( there is an aventail on the helm now... )

No time to take it off before the event tomorrow.










I think I see what you mean about the straight tube part....

With the vervelles running along the bottom you will need to cut away almost all of the "tube" portion.
Basicly a large trapezoid portion needs to be removed
Like this, only flip it over
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/e ... pezoid.jpg

white mountain armoury wrote:With the vervelles running along the bottom you will need to cut away almost all of the "tube" portion.
Basicly a large trapezoid portion needs to be removed
Like this, only flip it over
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/e ... pezoid.jpg

a trapezoid cut out from the back....



so I need to man up and get out the cutters......

any good way to gauge where to cut?

and how up the face are we talking?

Conal, l I've done a lot of these and have sort of a system which I'd be happy to explain though it would turn into a bit of an essay. If you want to e-mail me I'll give you my number as I can probably explain it a lot better rover the phone.

That sort of thing is typical of marketed camails, Conal. You have this big-steel-doily part for the shoulders and centrally a turtleneck part going straight up like a smokestack, which is deliberately intended to be cut to fit your vervelle line/camail strap layout. You likely will end up cutting out a face opening as well, down approximately as far (maybe lower but more likely some linkrows higher up) as to the back/main portion of the camail strap -- everything that isn't the dogleg ends, that is.

Your camail's temple triangles may be shaped several ways. Recent Archive research has uncovered a somewhat surprising detail. A temple triangle may be cut as a right triangle, hypotenuse to the rear, vertical side forward. (That's right, the face opening doesn't initially taper, but is rectangular -- |_|. It's also a bit narrower than the helmet's face opening, all the way up to the top of the camail strap.) This reversed right triangle is then leaned back a bit to mate the hypotenuse to the doglegs. The vertical leg is now leaning back towards the bascinet's point and the front hem of the camail is picked up just a bit, all across the front. Snug to the chin, no harelip to the hem like if you forgot about temple triangles altogether, and it follows a historical exemplar.

I'm sure a lot of people would benefit from a short article on that topic.

Konstantin the Red wrote:That sort of thing is typical of marketed camails, Conal. You have this big-steel-doily part for the shoulders and centrally a turtleneck part going straight up like a smokestack, which is deliberately intended to be cut to fit your vervelle line/camail strap layout. You likely will end up cutting out a face opening as well, down approximately as far (maybe lower but more likely some linkrows higher up) as to the back/main portion of the camail strap -- everything that isn't the dogleg ends, that is.

Your camail's temple triangles may be shaped several ways. Recent Archive research has uncovered a somewhat surprising detail. A temple triangle may be cut as a right triangle, hypotenuse to the rear, vertical side forward. (That's right, the face opening doesn't initially taper, but is rectangular -- |_|. It's also a bit narrower than the helmet's face opening, all the way up to the top of the camail strap.) This reversed right triangle is then leaned back a bit to mate the hypotenuse to the doglegs. The vertical leg is now leaning back towards the bascinet's point and the front hem of the camail is picked up just a bit, all across the front. Snug to the chin, no harelip to the hem like if you forgot about temple triangles altogether, and it follows a historical exemplar.

obviously I need to drink my coffee and read this again later......

I may at long last have to discover how to upload a diagram of all this.

If you laid out the temple triangles/front part of the camail out smooth and flat, the temple triangles along with the face opening would look something like this _/|_|\_. All this flat stuff would wrap around the front of your bascinet.

The triangles would be rocked slightly back to meet up with the dogleg-ends of the camail strap.

kinda like this?

I would say sort of like that but with a much smaller gap between the two triangle. You want to have the triangles sit so that when you attach them to the side they make either an oval face opening or a V shape.

Yep, kinda like that, with the tops coming to points -- a single link at the apex, that is. The triangles are likely to end up proportionally bigger -- the hypotenuses built at 45 degrees rather than exactly copying my pidgin-ASCII sketch. The vertical leg of the triangle is going to rise to pass over your cheekbones, perhaps as close together as the pupils of your eyes.

When the triangles are rocked back to meet the camail strap they will make the face opening into a steepsided blunted V shape. If the rockback is slight, the effect overall will be quite subtle.

To determine how much cutting you're doing, and how many rows deep, you could experiment with a mockup of paper or even better of old T-shirt. Tape the mockup into place and put the bascinet on, with helmet padding, to see where your chin comes in behind the mail. You want to have the mail riding no higher than the bottom of your lower lip. You've got plenty of potential there for all the slack you need to accomplish whatever fit or drape you desire. A lined camail can cup your chin and the lining will make it comfortable, and give a place for that part of the camail to anchor to.