Here's an example of 'back to front' construction currently on eBay: Bulgarian army M51 / M72 cold war steel helmet unissued still in factory paper | eBay
Best Regards, John
The m72 is a bizzare helmet in my opinion since they went from the m51 which was effectively a clone of the italian M33, to the M72 which is nearly identical to gheesoviet SSH40/68, but with a seemingly smaller shell size and Bulgarian style rivets/Vents.
The Italian and Soviet helmets already had a fairly similar design, which is why (i suspect) they adopted the design initially, so they could differentiate between the two, yet still remain similar. The m72 variant seems like a fairly unnecessary change and served only to give the Bulgarian People's Army a more Russian look.
M72 is very similar to M33, too. Even more than M51 if you look the lip.
This is M72, no doubt. M72 differs mainly with the typical lip around the whole shell.
Finally decided to add the later m71 shell type to keep my early shell m51/72 company ,liner is dated 1986 ,my other example is dated 1981 , one thing i did notice is a difference in thickness between the chinstraps including slight differences in the bail stitching area and also the liner is of a different quality
Regards James
Here is a line up starting from the first type M51 with rivited chinstrap up to the last production model M51 /72 . I wonder if any one would know if the last model type is still in use with some units in the Bulgarian Armed forces ? , i did read somewhere the earlier M36 model was still in use as late as 2010 .
I had a spare Bulgarian desert cover so added it for display purposes on the last run model type
Regards James
Here are some comparisons in shell profile between the model types i have shown so far from my previous post if it is of any help to other members ,I feel the earliest Model 51 on the left hand side of all three pictures is by far the most pleasing to the eye as most of the earlier model helmet types always are in my opinion from most nations ,the Yugoslavian M59 is another example i can bring to mind
I made a comment sometime ago earlier on in this thread stating i believed my M72 used an earlier M51 shell with the revised liner system as maybe some sort of hybrid or transitional helmet but having in hand an original M51 now to compare against i can see the differences are apparent with a much more subtle flared brim and again even more so on the reduced Brim example shown in the 2nd picture so there is still a lot I need to further research.
I can see why the M51 was upgraded to 72 spec as the liner has a tendency to rotate around inside the shell to a certain extent due to the Rivit points being the only point of contact and for having a lot of tolerance and nothing else present to stiffen up the liner struts .One more thing i noted was how similar in profile the very first and last model types are aside from the brim differences
Regards James
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