Hat Tricks Part III: The Grinder of Skulls

Been a bit since I last posted.  Sorry about that but I was...well...making armor!  My apology is something along the lines of "Never trust a skinny cook."

Anyway, the third stage of my helmet building procedure is to "grind in" the cranium halves I've made so that there is as little gaping as possible along what will be the center line of the helmet skull (cranium, melon top, etc.).

I do this by placing the halves together and, wherever they touch, I draw a line across where the point of contact starts and another where it ends.  This line will be perpendicular to the center line of the skull and should be on both of the pieces you have made.  This tells me where I need to grind.  The idea is that wherever the helmet halves meet are the high spots and these should be ground down to reduce the gaping.  I try to grind equally on both sides.  After each pass of grinding, the two halves are brought back together and lines are renewed or added as necessary. *A word of caution: do this bit very slowly and methodically as it can be quite easy to take off too much material with a grinder.  The pieces pictured below are nearly at the end of the grinding stage but the lines from the process can be seen in the picture.

The next picture shows what the halves look like before the start of this process.

  The next part of the process will be to make the central ridge which will cover this seem and join the two halves together.  This whole operation might seem a little tricky but, once you get the hang of it, it's a nice way to produce a usable helmet with no welding required.