Within the armouring community there is an idea that is taking foothold. This idea is that some armour parts, such as helmets and breastplates, were not only raised from a uniform sheet of metal, but also, an maybe more commonly, by forging out a thicker plate to obtain the final product of desired thickness. This is backed by medieval visual sources and documents. Today I tried this technique myself, with the aid of a striker and a specially designed sledgehammer. I started forging from a round slab of steel, 13 mm thick, 17 cm in diameter and 1.7 kg heavy. I started alone, with a simple dishing hammer. After a while I realized that I would need a helper, as dishing 13mm of steel to 2 mm on my own, would be too big of a task. 

The inside of the would-be helm looks remarkably similar to some museum examples, where there are plenty of hammer marks, showing that those examples were indeed forged mainly from the inside, rather than raised from a flat sheet of steel from the very start.

I'm finally making some solid progress on the forge I designed this spring. Currently I'm working on the bellows, and today I'm more specifically working on the valve system. The smaller valve at the mouth of the bellow will prevent air to be sucked from the fire pot and also stop any sparks from entering the bellow itself and damaging it. The design of the bellows is taken directly from the "De Re Metallica" by Georgius Agricola, written in the XVIth century. http://www.gutenberg.org/files/38015/38015-h/38015-h.htm

Not even the time to finish one project that I already start fantasizing about more about new projects. This particular one is my take on Lionello Boccia's interpretation of Konrad von Landau's helm. He seems to think that it's some sort of proto-armet, dating back already to 1363. it's uncertain whether the lines by him traced are actually there, so until further inspection of the original effigy it's still up to debate if that helm is a bascinet or a very early form of armet. Regardless, I'm fascinated by this concept and I gave a try to see how it would actually work. And in all honesty, I can see this as a functional design, even if somewhat unique. There's a lot of similar helm shapes such as that, with the "frogmouth" profile, but this one has the peculiarity of presenting a line of vervelles for the aventail and a moveable visor, while usually they are built as great helm, so of overlapping plates rigidly riveted to each other.

For the helm I'm using a few surviving examples held in various museums in Europe. They are all fairly large and reach down the shoulders, so I'll be modifying my design to make it more suitable to be used on foot. So I'm making it more compact, reducing the height and the width so it rests solely on the head, allowing for more movement. Right now the helm weights a whopping total of 5 kilos, which I think will be reduced to 4.5 as I work more on it.

First blog post ever. I will be posting here the various updates regarding my prjects, with pictures and also explanations about the various armouring techniques.

​Here´s a silly picture of me in the meantime.