Great Helm Thickness -- myArmoury.com

Steven H · Posted: Mon 26 Mar, 2007 8:05 pm Post subject: Great Helm Thickness

Hello,

I've read through this thread on helm thickness and almost all of the helmets mentioned are bascinets and later helms.

So what about great helms? What range of thicknesses were they and what range of weights?

Thanks.

Randall Moffett · Posted: Tue 27 Mar, 2007 7:32 am Post subject:

Steven,

Never looked at a great helm before..... let me get back to you on that?

RPM

Jared Smith · Posted: Wed 28 Mar, 2007 4:02 pm Post subject:

I have not researched "museum" great helm weights greatly but think the following is pretty true.

I don’t have any actual great helm reproductions to measure, but am guessing that we are talking about roughly 2 square feet of metal (based upon some armorer patterns.) Some good examples of historical great helms are on this web page.
http://home.scarlet.be/~klauwaer/helm/

The weight of great helms is not greatly out of line with that of bascinets. 8 to 10 lbs is a reasonable estimate. This really splits the 10 to 12 gage sheet metal range as an “average” of thickness required to agree with the weight, and would allow for considerable error in current patterns while still falling within that range of thickness. You could claim they were 6 lbs with 2 lbs of padding and that would make it a little thinner than 12 gage. On the other hand, I think the padding is accepted as being on a separate arming cap and not counted with the great helm. This pushes it closer to 10 gage. These remained in use for jousting into the 14th century and I suspect were quite robust as well as simple to beat back to shape and repair.