Do you remove paint from your helmets and if so when would you do it?

[M.E.E.]

Try and get some outdoor pics in natural light without too much sun, slightly overcast.

Lets see if this works, forest fires produced a bit of cover.

[real steel]

If you look at the pic of the complete underside where the lights are not shining on it, it does not appear so shiny and does look to possibly be original wartime home front paint though in the hand outside would be best to tell.

The owner can do whatever he wants with his helmet and as he has started I hope it works out for him.

Agree...should have left it alone

[M.E.E.]

Agree...should have left it alone

I never did anything to it yet and if it is confirmed to be wartime I will not do anything to it. The patch that you see in the picture was a rub mark from storage, I removed less than 2mm of paint from under the rim and you wouldn't have known it was done unless I told you where it was.

[real steel]

Oh...okay sorry. I misread. The sloppily done style of the interior black paint sort of leads me to think it may be period done. It's brush painted, as in a prior post, if it was post war or modern painted, think a can of spray would have been used. But it is in your hands, so you be the judge. Just would be a shame stripping it if it were original.

[M.E.E.]

Oh...okay sorry. I misread. The sloppily done style of the interior black paint sort of leads me to think it may be period done. It's brush painted, as in a prior post, if it was post war or modern painted, think a can of spray would have been used. But it is in your hands, so you be the judge. Just would be a shame stripping it if it were original.

I agree, there are millions of wartime green helmets but far fewer black ones. It is definitely painted on with brush. I have no intention of removing the black if I find it is war period painted, I don't even take my helmets apart in case I could damage the period paint on the screw. The only reason I am unsure of the paint is the glossiness of it, it is almost the same glossiness of my Canadian made tanker helmet. That and the thinner I use does not remove oil based paints but my q-tip was black after testing. I know that acrylic paints were being used in early 1940's but I don't know to what extent.