Article about: Well, I've decided to dip my toes into fleabay and found something which I liked thelook of, and it is this CKL60 M42 helmet with what should also be original split pins and liner. Though th
Right, bit of a good news bad news situation coming up, I tried to make the leather less crap than what I got it as, so I tried using steam as this is apparently often used to make leather softer again, and I thought I won't lose much if this doesn't work since the leather in this liner was already hard as tree bark, shrunken to the point it came off the inner ring and brittle as hell.
At first it really did work, the leather felt softer and more pliable than before, what happened next I can only blame on myself, I guess it just got too hot and withing 5 seconds the liner tongues had shrunken substantially and curled up, so that's that.. I tried to rescue what I could but there was no turning back now unfortunately.
Now I could just chicken out and not include this in this post, but I viewed this as a sort of learning experience and everyone makes mistakes and you better stand by them instead of hiding the truth, and this way you also get something of it, you really have to watch the temperature when you're messing with such items, but it can work!
So, with the bad news out the way, here's the good-ish news, I'm finally done removing the paint, took a lot of scrubbing with wire brushes and steel wool but I got there in the end, and I'm glad I didn't use harsher methods as otherwise I would have probably not been able to keep the dome stamp as is.
On the outside there is still some very thin remains of the slate grey factory paint left, but now much at all, just very small amounts unfortunately.
So, without further ado, here's some pictures.
Luis
Also thank you very much for your replies Andy and Kateri, very much appreciated also thank you for linking the other thread.
Here's two more pictures.
Luis
Looks like at least the shell is coming along. Good that you were able to recover the dome stamp. If you have it down to the remnants of original paint, I would just leave it as is and allow a patina to develop on the bare areas. Then at least you have an original surface to display.
Todd
Former U.S. Army Tanker.
"Best job I ever had."
Thanks for your replies.
Andy, like I hope I wrote in the last post , only few very thin remains of the factory applied slate grey paint are left.
I guess this helmet was sanded post war to get rid of most of the paint so that only very small amounts are still left.
Luis
OK, so I'm going to weigh in on this "dichromate" helmet theory .....
I have this M42 no decal Emaillierwerke A.G., Fulda (EF) made helmet, lot number ( as best as I can tell as the stamping is bad ) is 2887 for that's around mid 1943.
I KNOW its good and un-messed with and the paint ( if you can call it paint ) is barely there, man they were rationing it the day this lot was sprayed
But it is painted, just really thinned out - in fact when I test the shell with our company's galvanizing tester ( a device that measures resistance to magnetic pull through any nonmagnetic substrate ) it reads 5 microns. Now a "normal wet coat" of paint reads .001" or 25 microns so this is like a flash coat only!!!
Maybe there were dichromate dipped helmets late in 1944/45 but these mid war ones were still being painted .......just ... and restoring correctly one of these you need to take this into account. Too good a paint job is not doing the restoration justice. My 2c as always ..
Cheers, Dan
" I'm putting off procrastination until next week "
I've been looking for restorable helmets on fleabay, and have found nothing much, other than one that I believe will be too expensive, in the coming days.
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