MkI / MkII helmet storage

[Tinhat]

I normally travel a lot for work and the whole COVID thing has me camped out, working from home, for a change. I’ve worked through the guilt backlog of jobs and the family is more than over the novelty of me being at home, my side mission is to get control of my collection which is piled up in various places.

I’ve had quite a big cleanout and sold a lot of stuff, which hasn’t helped because now I’m buying more.

Helmet storage has been long overdue, I liberated these boxes from work a few years ago because they are perfect MkI/MkII helmet size but I wanted something better than somewhere else to pile helmets in. 1/2" thick cardboard with wooden ends.



The idea was to rack them so that they were not sitting on each other and Mr. Composite made point on another thread that the thinking is to stack upside down the remove pressure on the liner – which makes total sense.

It took some trial and error -let’s face it who hasn’t struggled with radial angles on an irregular circumference - but the result is an overengineered ‘helmet ladder’ that I can slot the helmets in and the sit there, all the weight is on the shell, and I can take the bottom one out without removing any other helmet. People that have read this far may also notice the CPH fits in the same spacing.



The beauty is not in quality of the jigsaw work. The helmet is only in contact withe three rubber stoppers.



Screw some feet on the box, mount the rack and next stop Dragons Den / Shark Tank.



The second one will be done this weekend.

Steve

[Composite]

Very nice indeed. I’ve found a British Army missile box which can House Mk2s...but one has to cut the original moulding out and I simply can’t do that. Plastic crates which take 6 Mk2s each but you then need the space for lot of crates. The best solution has to be be a bigger room in which you can display everything...after all, what’s the point of having great pieces hidden away...though I suspect we all do it....

[SMP]

I think it is only British helmet collectors who have this problem ! Every Brit collector ends up "stacking" their MKIIs simply because they can't stop buying them ! Even Marcus Cotton "stacks" his lids

Nice storage solution.

[Composite]

Is that because we have thousands and thousands and every other collector has 10-15? :-)

[Tinhat]

Thanks for the comments.

I thought we have so many because no one is interested in them.

One day I will have a room, another side effect of COVID is that the play room (or the video game room to be more correct) is now an office and possession is 9/10 of the law.

[AZPhil]

WOW!!!
Great idea for storage!!!

Semper Fi
Phil

[Greg Pickersgill]

As well conceived and carried out as this idea is, you still have to have somewhere to put it. And, frankly, it takes up marginally *more* space than a heap of helmets. On the other hand it is a world tidier and offers better access and is just damned clever.

I have maybe a 'boxful' of Mkll, but a lot more Mk3/4 and a lotter more everything else. All stacked because there's no other option. We don't have a big house (some US or Australian collectors I know have larger garages...). Starting helmet-collecting in a house already full of printed paper was an arguable decision.

[Kohima]

There’s always the ceiling...

[Composite]

...you don't wanna be anywhere near that lot when it starts to tumble!

....although I think that brickwork in pic 3 has potential to support a lot more vertical growth...yeah you might chip a few rims but it's all about volume!

I read somewhere here that "it's not the size of one's collection blah blah blah".......B*LL*CKS!!..BUY 'EM ALL!!!!!!!...just think of those sad badge collectors with their little display folders....and....errrrr.....space......wait a minute.....

[Tinhat]

As well conceived and carried out as this idea is, you still have to have somewhere to put it. And, frankly, it takes up marginally *more* space than a heap of helmets. On the other hand it is a world tidier and offers better access and is just damned clever.

I have maybe a 'boxful' of Mkll, but a lot more Mk3/4 and a lotter more everything else. All stacked because there's no other option. We don't have a big house (some US or Australian collectors I know have larger garages...). Starting helmet-collecting in a house already full of printed paper was an arguable decision.

You are correct Greg there is a sacrifice on space - 4 helmets per box to be exact - but I can stack on top of the box now. I had a similar pile to yours on my bench which fell over, that was my breaking point to get some sort of control. MKII design helps here, it's going to be harder coming up with something for other shell types.

You are also right about house sizes, when I moved to the US from the UK I was blown away by the square footage of our 'small' rental, no usable loft space though, so the garage is full of the crap that would be in the loft buried out of site, helmets and outdoor toys.