Roman helmet

Antonious Pius asked me if I had ever made any Roman Armour. A little, here and there over the years. This is a helm which I had to make in a real hurry because the commercial "piece of junk" helm the lass had ordered for her hubby was temporarily out of stock. I offered to make her one, and would meet the price of the offshore piece. So this is a little rushed......but as the pic below shows when you click on it to blow it up to a more reasonable siae, the results were not too shabby. First I had to do a little research. It seems that the helms were made from spun bronze bowls. I could not find any examples of spun steel bowls, so right there, the "period-ness" of the piece suffered since I simply did not have any bronze spinnings.

The other problem was the large outside rolled edges. I hate outside rolled edges.

Above is pic of a roman helm from the British Museum (I think) I am not dead sure, but I "think" this shows a steel spun bowl, overlaid with a fair amount of thin bronze. Or maybe gold...it seems awfully well preserved for bronze.

After assembling all the disparate pieces, I was left with something like this. The bowl was way too thick for me to even think of doing that "bellows" effect at the back of the neck...it was battle grade at about 10 gauge....and 8 gauge near the bottom. Too heavy to even think about wrinkling the metal.

From the front, it looks not too bad. The lion was a sort of after thought.....I suppose I should have put two of them up there, one over each eye. But as I said, I was in a hurry, and only had the one lion.

I kind of like the rings on the cheek pieces. Very spiff.

This shows the little ear guards. They are harder to do than they look, and they look darned hard!

And a fairly fancy carrying handle on the tail drape. Well, it looked okay at the time.

There you go your excellency...a cute little battle helmet.

The emperor Antonious Pius's blog is here....http://antoninuspius.blogspot.com/