The Silk Road Designs Armoury

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Two Helmets in One
This helmet was created as a compromise reconstruction intended for full-contact batton combat in the Society for Creative Anachronisms ("SCA").
It is intended to represent a round domed helmet with sliding Nasal, a Curtain of Bands, and Bevor of bands.
Due to requirements of SCA combat, the face had to be fully protected with no gaps that would permit a 1" dowel. To this end, I made the Nasal rigid (only retaining the look of a sliding Nasal) by riveting it underneath the Nasal Bracket. I made the lower finial to the maximum size that extant examples would allow and then added crossbars to the Nasal.
As the Cross Bars would need to be supported at the sides, I needed to attach them to something. In order to retain the flexibility of the Curtain of Bands, while making the face-bands rigid, a hidden support would need to be used -- attach rigidly to the helmet dome and face bands.
I made these hidden supports in the style of ear plates that appear quite commonly in Western and Central Asia. At this point, if the owner ever decides to change his style of helmet, only very minor alterations are needed, removing the current curtain of bands, adding a backplate and supplemental plates at the ear.
Constructing the Curtain and Bevor:
The individual bands which form the Curtain and Bevor are laced together with leather thongs.
There are two common ways of doing the lacing - Verticaly or Horizontaly.
Here, I have used two variations of the first method. In the vertical method, a thong runs vertically through a single set of holes of all of the plates. The next thong runs through the set of holes next to the first, and so forth.
The first, more common, variation was used for the Curtain. This variation uses a set of three pairs of holes for each pair of laces.
The Laces enter the plate at the top pair of holes from the back forward. They cross each other in the front and enter the next set of holes from the front to the back. They cross each other once more at the back, and come out of the lowest set of holes.

The second variation was used for the Bevor. Here, two pairs of holes are used for each pair of laces.
The Laces enter the plate at the top pair of holes from the back forward. They cross each other in the front and enter the same set of holes from the front to the back. They cross each other once more at the back, and come out of the lower set of holes.

The second lacing method, which I did not use here, has a single thong run through all of the holes of two adjacent plates -- connecting the upper to the lower plate. The next thong connects the lower plate of this set to the next plate below, and so forth.
A third common method of attaching plates, which was used in the East, is to rivet the plates to leather straps which connect the plates vertically -- similar to the method used by the Romans.
Because of SCA safety requirements, I attached the upper plate of the Curtain to the Dome of the helmet using rivets -- so that this plate does not move in relation to the dome or faceplate.
Bevor attachment is at the same time conjectural and dictated by needs of the SCA.
While there are many art images showing Bevors of bands or lamellar sitting fairly high on the face, there are no surviving helmets I know of that have this. Here, I went with the rest of the helmet structure and hung the Bevor from the over-sized lower finial (after looking at alot of the art, it is my opinion that the vast majority of these Bevors were attached to full-faced anthropomorphic visors).

Contact The Silk Road Designs Armoury at normlaw@yahoo.com
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Articles and Illustrations by Norman J. Finkelshteyn.
Web Site designed and implemented by Silk Road Designs.
Contact us at normlaw@yahoo.com
Copyright Norman J. Finkelshteyn 1997 -- All articles and illustrations at this web site are Copyright protected material. Use of these articles and illustrations is subject to appropriate restrictions under United States, International, and local Law.