SS Helmet Relic
I have a pretty extensive collection of relic helmets that I am restoring. This is an example of one that I bathed in Oxalic acid and cleaned. I don't really have any "before" pictures, but the rust was flaking off of this in large chunks. I love my relics, some have almost completely fallen apart over time so I did things like coat them in penetrol. Is there a better solution to recover the ones that are completely falling apart?
Nice!
About preserving, I got advise to heat up a flaking helmet (literally above a cooking pit or something like that) and cover it in bio bees wax, wiping the surplus of. I worked ok till now, but is sort of tricky with the heating and all (at least it feels tricky :-).
How do you apply the wax? Is it better than something like paste wax?
The way I do it (learned to do so by an experienced relic finder) is simple: Heat up the helmet and while it is hot I just rub a large piece of bees wax over it. I Recently discovered that smeering it out with a paintbrush works good. When the whole thing is covered let it dry, and hen needed you can heat it up and further smeer out the surplus. With some that kept flaking I repeated this 2 or even 3 times.
You do see that it was treated but it helped to stop the flaking (up till now anyway). Needless to say that this is only needed when the flaking (falling of of pieces) itreaaly bad, and that in extreme cases this does not perform miracles :-)
Here is one treated with bees wax, like described (I did not re heat this one and remove the surplus wax)
I would recommend using renaissance wax insted of generic bees wax for valuable helmets. Bees wax also seems to work fine, but I heard that it can damage the remnants of paint/decals (here we are talking about a timespan of years, maybe even decades, so you cant see the effects right away). Renaisance wax seem very expensive, a ~50 g dose is like 20-25 eur, but its enough for at least 4-5 relic shells, or a dozen non-relics.
Hi Dan, I did not hear that B-wax damages the paint or decals. I think it is even used for paintings, so I doubt that they will do such a thing if it damages paint?
I don't like Renaissance wax for relics. It gets trapped in every little rust or pit hole and is noticeable.
Some of mine.No wax on it.
Heat gun is good for bees wax.
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