Above left are some of the tools I use to form cased leather, including a stapler, heavy shears, and assorted dull tools for pressing the leather against the form. On the right is the beginning of shaping the leather over the form, with just a few staples in place.
Today I formed the leather for one half of the helmet and it turned out well. It is crucial that I use the correct type of leather for a project like this one. It needs to be vegetable tanned—or oak tanned as I learned to call it (and is much easier to say). Leather thickness is measured in ounces. For this helmet I used 8-9 oz, which measures 1/8” – 9/64” in thickness. You can buy anywhere from 2-3 oz to 10-11 oz, and even a sole bend which is the thickest. The 8-9 oz works well for a helmet as it holds its shape well after forming.
The most common oak tanned leather is cowhide, and may be called tooling leather. I got mine from The Hide House in California. I bought Economy Double Shoulders, which measured 13 square feet, and cost $3.25 per foot. The economy leather has a looser grain then the premium leather, and therefore is easier to stretch. The Hide House shipped the leather to me as I don’t live nearby.
Once I had the leather I prepared it for forming. This is called casing—or samming in Great Britain—and is simply soaking the leather in water, and then allowing the excess water to evaporate. I wanted the leather to be wet throughout, but not have so much water that it prevents the leather from bending. I measured my form and cut out a piece of leather measuring 11” by 16” with one side cut at an angle so as not to waste any. I soaked it, and wrapped it in a towel so that the outside didn’t dry out too fast, and let it sit for over an hour.
I then laid the leather over the form and began shaping it around it by hand. Cased leather has two types of plasticity. The first is the sheet type, which allows one to change a flat sheet of leather into a hemisphere. The second is surface plasticity, which allows the surface of the leather to be tooled as is done with Western belts. Very fine detail can be applied to the leather using steel leather tools or dental picks. When handling the leather at this stage I needed to take care that I didn’t press it with a fingernail as it would readily indent if I did.
Once the leather was centered on the form I stapled a few places tightly against the plaster on the inside of the "L". I took care not to leave a large crease anywhere, and kept checking how the leather would lay down as I continued to staple around. The photos show one where I just started the stapling, and another where I was almost done with the stapling.
As I expected the leather wanted to bridge between the crown and the crest. To deal with that I cut a crest shaped piece of Masonite and clamped it down over the crest in order to pull the leather down tight. I did have a piece of thin foam underneath to protect the leather from getting a mark from the Masonite, but when I removed it I saw that indeed there was an ugly mark there, so at that point my design changed. I removed the foam and intentionally put a large indent there over which I will place a piece of tooled leather with a nice design.
I used an Arrow T-50 stapler with ½” staples, heavy shears for cutting the leather, a flexible tape measure for determining the size of the leather blank, and three smoothing tools: A spoon, a leather tooling tool from Tandy Leather, and a spatula handle that I hacksawed off and sanded down smooth. I use the smoothing tools for removing fingernail marks, stapler marks, etc. Any flaw I’d left in the leather while stapling (and there were quite a few). Especially where the staples held down the leather I went all around with a fairly small tip and pressed in a line.
Oak tanned leather shrinks as it dries, so I will resist the temptation to pull the staples out and remove it from the form until it is bone dry. Otherwise it will be too small, will distort, and the two halves probably won’t line up.
In my real life I teach classes on resin casting and rubber moldmaking. As I have discovered during those classes, one can learn as much from watching the teacher do a procedure wrong as doing it right.
Once the leather was completely dry I pulled the staples and removed the dry leather shell from the forms. As I held the two halves together I realized that when I clamped the Masonite crest piece down on the leather, I lined up the two halves differently from one another. While it is tempting to ignore such a flaw and move ahead as if no one will ever notice it (After all, you can't look at both sides of the crest at the same time), I knew that I would always know it was there, and I didn’t want to put in all of the remaining work required to complete a damaged piece of artwork.
At first I decided to replace one of the halves and to remake it to match the other one. But I realized that it would still be a bit of guesswork to get it aligned where I wanted it. I thought of a much better way to construct the leather shells—by making the crest form have an indent in it—and decided that I would be happier if I remade both halves and did it right. The new design would allow the crest insert—the red tooled dragon—to actually lie below the surface of the crest, and would look far better than what I was going to do.
I cut the crest forms out of two pieces of ¼” thick acrylic, instead of one piece out of ½” material as I did before. In the outer ¼” piece I’ve cut out a hole the shape of the insert, and when I stretch the leather I will clamp it into this hole. You can see in the pictures the leather shell removed from the form, and with the excess leather trimmed off.
Next step will be to stitch together the two halves.
How I made the Rus Viking helm |
How to make an American Dragoon helmet |
Making a British Dragoon helmet |
How to make faux ivory buttons |
Leather Helmets |
The Sigurd Viking helm kit
You can email me here.
Home | Ambigrams | Ambigramautomata | Paintings | Graphics | Garden Art | Resin Paintings | Batiks | Sculpture | Cut Paper | Costumes | Wood Carvings | Fused Glass
© Tom Banwell 2007-2008