News - ArmStreet's SCA-legal period and fantasy helmets

One of the main challenges facing fighters portraying a persona from an Early Period is finding armour that meets all SCA safety requirements, but still convincingly matches the style of armour worn during that period. This is especially true with helms that, in the period, would have been either partially or fully open-faced.

Most fighters “make due” with a helm that uses bars and bar grills attached to a period-looking top in an attempt to both complete their persona’s look and meet the requirements to get on the field. Unfortunately, most of these helms look exactly like what they are - a modern sport helm with Celtic, Viking, and Mongolian “bling” attached. At ArmStreet, we offer a reasonable solution for our Early Period comrades - fully SCA legal helms built to exacting reenactor-grade standards. We start by building the visible parts of the helm as we would do to meet reenactment standards, only with SCA compliant gauge steel, aiming to meet the design, look and feel of the historical prototype as closely as possible.

ArmStreet craftsmen ensure that eyeslits and any other open areas meet SCA width requirements before adding the solid plates to protect the neck from the front, sides and back. We then conceal these plates: we paint them black and cover them with an aventail to provide the helm with a historically accurate appearance.

For Middle Ages our first step was to provide classic knight helmets starting from bascinets with interchangeable visors so fighters can use both SCA legal (but not that much historically accurate) bargrill visors and history prototypes based visors. That's how we made our "King's Guard" helmet . Then we made the "King of the East" helmet, combining laser-cut grill visor for combat purposes with historical nasal piece for reenactment and appearance.

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You may also enjoy several types of our Italian bascinets which go with historically accurate plate visor and 4 different types of laser-cut visors which meet SCA requirements and also look cool and elegant. Designing these visors we took into account the visual culture of the required period so they look organically among other helmets on the battlefield.

We also designed several types of combined visors. Here fighter's face is partially covered with historically-looking laser-cut mask and the gaps are secured with a hidden protection under the maille or protected with cheek plates.