Thanks for the compliments gentlemen. God knows, it took me long enough. There were additional problems that had to be fixed. The sweat band was torn in 2 places, small thin pieces of original sweat band leather were glued to the back side of each tear to stabilize them. Then the entire silk liner was restitched to the sweat band. Officer helmets are especially hard to restore. The officer liner has to be pulled outward to access the stitch line along the inside of the shell. The silk liner is simply tack stitched along the sweat band with fine thread which is often rotten and breaks easily, so you are trying to avoid doing that. Often this old thread breaks and you end up having to partially restitch the silk. The stitching along officer visors is also very fine obviously, which again adds to the level of difficulty. No wonder so many old time collectors just glued them back on!
Regarding a description of how to refinish, this request causes some problems for me. I earn extra money for doing this for customers, if everyone knows the process then where does that leave me and other restorers? Even if the process was published could an amateur do the same quality of work as some one who has worked on 100+ helmets? To my knowledge there are only 3 restoration experts in North America. I do not know the ones in Europe but I have seen some "faked" work from there, like hand made chin scales, glued visors and chemically "aged" repro wappen. You can make one heck of a mess of a piece of History if you do not know what you are doing. For example, my latest project, try restitching 100 year old thin card board officer visors where half the stitch holes are broken....try doing that by hand. This also had to be done with the chin scales and wappen in place, at the customers request. The wappen (Wurtt) was missing a screw post, so its flopping around as were the chin scales while I am trying to stitch the front visor on and deal with the silk bag problem mentioned earlier. Not a job for everyone. B
Regarding a description of how to refinish, this request causes some problems for me. I earn extra money for doing this for customers, if everyone knows the process then where does that leave me and other restorers? Even if the process was published could an amateur do the same quality of work as some one who has worked on 100+ helmets? To my knowledge there are only 3 restoration experts in North America. I do not know the ones in Europe but I have seen some "faked" work from there, like hand made chin scales, glued visors and chemically "aged" repro wappen. You can make one heck of a mess of a piece of History if you do not know what you are doing. For example, my latest project, try restitching 100 year old thin card board officer visors where half the stitch holes are broken....try doing that by hand. This also had to be done with the chin scales and wappen in place, at the customers request. The wappen (Wurtt) was missing a screw post, so its flopping around as were the chin scales while I am trying to stitch the front visor on and deal with the silk bag problem mentioned earlier. Not a job for everyone. B