Raising a Kettle Helm

Raising a Helm

A pictorial article on forging a kettle helm

By Jacob Selmer

I chose the kettle helm because of its relatively simple shape and because it's a type of helm I wanted for events and for my persona. It is roughly based off of 13th and 14th century manuscripts, specifically the Maciejowski Bible and "Die Manessesche Liederhandschrift." A number of the examples are obviously riveted together in sections while some do not show these rivet lines. I have wanted to try raising for a long time so I went with that method. The rim could have been attached from the beginning, but I have decided to rivet it on afterwards for this helm. The method of raising the brim can be clearly seen in the intermediate steps of raising, but it would require significantly more material.

Equipment

This is most of the equipment I used. My heat source was a small rivet forge with a hand crank blower. The first fire picture shows the soft coal burning with some firebricks to concentrate the coal. The extra firebrick or two shown throughout the article are there to balance the helm over the heat. The second fire picture shows the fire just starting. I start all my blacksmithing fires as wood fires with the various sticks and twigs from the ground. Then I add coke and green coal until the wood burns out. Starting with wood ensures that the coal will light about 99% of the time. I don't have a lot of tools or anything specific to raising, so I made it up as I went along. Most of the raising was done on a round anvil. I don't know what it originally was, but it's a big, round, metal thing that I cleaned up with an angle grinder. It looks like a huge ball hitch. Not long after I started raising I altered a pair of pliers to help me. The teeth are ground off to reduce marring. The jaws did not close flat to start with and only got worse when I removed the teeth, so I made a metal spacer that wraps around one jaw. It comes off so I can use these pliers for other projects in the future. For hammers I used my 3 lb dishing hammer to stretch the material at the beginning and my 2 lb ball pein for the raising. A few other tools will be mentioned as they are used.

Setup

Day one is just setup and cutting out and filing the blank. The material used was hot rolled mild steel. It was just under 1/8" so it was probably around 10ga. The metal was free from a welding shop's dumpster.

Stretching the Sides

The first step was to do some plate work. Since the medieval armourer would not likely have used a sheet of uniform thickness, I started stretching out the outside while leaving the center the original thickness. The flat plate was oval, 14x15" with a point to mark the long side. Stretching the metal was mostly done by sinking onto the flat anvil. Material weight around the outside was reduced due to scale, but I never took any weight or thickness measurements. Since raising will increase the thickness around the outside, stretching the metal beforehand should even out the difference. I don't know exactly how much it will increase, so I don't know how much I should stretch it. I would rather have it thinner on the sides to reduce weight, but too thin could cause problems to work with and to wear.

Raising the Skull

Once the material was stretched enough that I thought it would cover my head, I started raising. This process starts at the end of day two, and I'm starting to worry if it's actually going to work. None of my usual tongs work very well for raising. Day three (starting at 1b) is a few days later, after Christmas and having all my wisdom teeth removed. I started using some new pliers which work much better but mar the surface.

With the second pass, the helm is looking more like I'd hoped. I took a quick break from the fire to grind the teeth off of the pliers. Now they leave a single deep mark at the tip because they do not close flat. I toss another piece of metal in the forge while I'm heating the helm. It gets wrapped around the top jaw of the pliers to act as a spacer. Now the pliers work pretty well. This pass is done in 2 steps. The end of step one is shown in 2a and 2b, the end of step two is shown in 2c and 2d. Picture 2d is actually after the first heat of the third pass, so it's a bit lopsided again. This is the end of day three, the second day at the forge.

The third pass shows it looking more like something which might go on your head. This is a good thing. This pass is also done in two steps but the pictures only show it at the end.

The fourth pass was done in three steps. The metal around the edge is moving pretty far so I did the edge in a step by itself. Pictures 4a and 4b show the first step. Picture 4c is of the second step. The rest of the pictures are after the third step.

The fifth pass was a light pass done in one step. This just brought the sides down to be closer to vertical. The helm is getting pretty close to the final size now so I need to start making some decisions about the final proportions and the brim. I'll do that tomorrow. This is the end of day four. The sixth and seventh passes were similar to the fifth. Now I'm just bringing in the sides to the final form.

Grinding and Trimming

I've also never bothered to polish anything significant so this is another first. I don't want a mirror finish because I am trying to be somewhat authentic. I wont go too in depth about the grinding. Here I am going to cheat and use my disk sander, because I do want to finish most of it this week. The sander is really just a 6" disk on the bowl turning chuck to my wood lathe. I do not recommend this method if you have a choice, but it eventually works. Someday I'll get a nice belt sander. At first I am only looking for the high and low points so that I can planish out the bumps. I focus on the top because the edges still need to be trimmed. Planishing was done with a 1 lb cross peen on a large eyebolt. I only need to take out the significant dents, the rest will be sanded off.

Now most of the big dents are out of the top. The sides are harder to reach with the vertical planishing form I'm using. Now is a good time to trim the extra off of the sides. I marked the line with string and chalk. I used a jigsaw to cut off the extra, but it isn't an easy shape to clamp down anymore. You can see that the top is mostly round now. There are still a few low spots.

Before cleaning up the sides, I tossed it back into the fire for one last pass to bring the sides in a bit more. It's black again but now it has the final shape I want. After this I used a bench grinder to trim the edges a little more so it would lay flat. Now back to sanding and breathing dust. This is a nasty step. I only used coarse grit for now. Once the brim is made I'll sand some more with a finer grit.

Making the Brim

I made a pattern out of paper for the brim, then it was back to the pile of assorted scrap metal to find a good fit. The metal is 16ga hot rolled mild steel. It was also a free piece of scrap. The pattern is traced out and cut using a jigsaw.

The scale on the metal does not match the freshly sanded skull, so I have to remove it. This is also something I've never done before. It seems like most of the things in this article I'm also new to, but I have used a hammer before....really. I put the brim in a pan of vinegar and let it sit while I made lunch. When I came back, it looked the same but I was able to wipe off some of the scale down to the bare metal. The scale that did not come off easily I took off with the help of a Black and Decker Mouse sander. Most of the metal is now bare on both sides of the brim and the outside of the skull. Luckily it worked because I used all of the vinegar we had. You can almost watch the bare metal rust with it. As much as I could get back into the container is now in the shop for future metal cleaning.

To form the brim I used the side of my dishing stump and a rubber mallet. I'm just seeing how everything lines up now. The last picture should be pretty close to what the final product looks like.

Now comes the hard part. I have to make it fit together. The easiest way would probably be to leave the skull a little long and then make a flange on the edge. That puts the rivets vertical but I want the rivets to lay horizontally along the bottom of the skull. I'm going to try to turn the inside edge of the brim up to go inside the skull. Both sections of the brim are made to fit.

Now holes are drilled and the parts are bolted together. There is still some cleaning up to do, but it looks about done.

Polishing

Instead of sanding to a mirror finish and dying from dust inhalation, I used a stainless steel wire cup brush to finish the helm. Later I did go back and spend about 8 hours sanding by hand. Now it is shiny but still pitted where there are a couple low spots. This level of finish seems more realistic to me for the time period. If you want a mirror finish, now is the time to start sanding. I guess it depends of what quality level of armour you're trying to make. I'm just working on munitions grade stuff but I am trying to use mostly authentic methods. I think my armoury's motto should be "Striving to make the best of the worst." Then I could work on reproduction quality armour for the lower class.

Sections to come:

Suspension and chinstrap

Final assembly

Notes

References:

This style of helm was used for a long time. It dates at least as early as the 13^th century and similar variations have been used in modern times. There are many other sources, but here are the two I used:

Maciejowski Bible, French c1250

There are many examples of kettle helms in the Maciejowski Bible. There also seems to be two distinct types. The style this example is based on has a round dome with a distinct brim. The second style seems to have a flat top and the sides flare out into a brim. Both of these styles appear in some pictures to be various pieces riveted together, and in other pictures to be one solid piece. Other places in the book show hats of this second style in everyday use, where they are more likely woven than metal. A number of paintings include both styles, so it cannot easily be passed off as different artist interpretation of the same style.

Pages: (“_b” indicates both styles on the same page. Not a complete listing)

63, 65_b, 71_b, 79, 81_b, 83, 85_b, 89_b, 133_b, 137 (removed)

Pictures of this manuscript are available online at the ARMA site:

http://www.theARMA.org/arttalk/arttalk.htm

(see pictures numbered here as: 1, 21, 40-45 not all necessarily include this helm)

“Die Manessesche Liederhandschrift” (“Manesse Song Handwriting"), Zurich, Switzerland c1300-1315

This 14^th century manuscript shows the kettle helm still in use. The only style depicted in here is the round dome.

Pages: (Perhaps others as well)

73, 75

Pictures of this manuscript are available at the AEMMA site:

http://www.aemma.org/onlineResources/manesse/contents_body.htm

A note on fuel:

I went through at least 30 lbs of bituminous coal in raising this helm, probably more. Since I have not done this before, I don't know if that's average. There are a few factors which could have caused this much fuel to be used. First, I used a small forge with just a few firebricks as a fire pot. I'm used to working with a larger forge and usually inside a cave of coal. Since the cave style of fire does not work for large sheets, I used an open top fire. This type of fire seems to burn up more fuel. The small forge and quick burning fire also did not allow for much coke to be made on the sides. I was almost continually putting handfuls of green coal into the fire to keep it burning. I think the green coal burns faster than the coke as well as making a lot of smoke. Some of the pictures show coal inside the helm. These bits were just being allowed to turn to coke slowly and it seemed to keep the heat in that area a little better. I was also almost continually cranking air into the fire to bring the metal to the right heat. Less air should save fuel but it would have taken longer to make the skull. This was much less efficient fuel use than I'm used to. In the future, I'd like to try changing some things to see what works best. A larger forge or maybe just removing the firebricks and piling a lot of coal in could allow more coke to build up. This would be less important to people with local coal distributors.