Showing posts with label Roman Armour. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Roman Armour. Show all posts

Wednesday, September 3, 2008

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/



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Saturday, September 8, 2007

Shoe Template

A few years ago, I got interested in Roman stuff, and they had found a set of Roman Combat boots (with the Roman still in them!) at the Coppergate Dig in the City of York in England. The ground was wet, and the leather stayed intact, so I could get a real idea of the pattern. Other finds have occured since, of course, notably the find which the fellow in the picture below made, but I figured I would share the original template I came up with way back when!
This is the Roman Caligae design from http://www.geocities.com/legio_tricesima_cohors_tres/campusMartis/MakingCaligae/newcaligalacing.jpg
He really has the right idea, and I urge you to visit his site, and see how he made those really cooo hobnailed boots!
But these are mine. On paper. Laid out about 15 years ago, and still used from time to time. Note that it is in four pieces. I cut them into four pieces just so that I could scan each piece. Just never got around to taping the pattern back together, thats all!



Click on the pictures to enlarge.
Anybody who wants to download these patterns are welcome to do so. Let me know how they turn out okay?