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Nva pith helmet original?


LE LOUP DES MERS
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LE LOUP DES MERS

Bought this from a local collector, paid the guy $100 it's broken on the helmet liner a little bit. But other then that it's in nice shape, so what are your thoughts? Did I do good or bad? 

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Cap Camouflage Pattern I

Sorry to be the bearer of bad news but unfortunately this is a post-war pith with a recent fake cover/net over it. 

 

For one during the war this style of pith with an adjustable suspension (essentially just the Chinese PLA's Type 65 pith but with a fabric skin) was only made in China as aid for Vietnam and as such didn't have a Vietnamese label and in fact didn't have markings of any kind as was standard practice on Chinese made aid. North Vietnam did produce pith helmets during the war, some of which did have similar paper labels, but they were in fixed sizes with a non-adjustable headband held away from the body with cylindrical spacers and no suspension.

 

The headband on yours looks to be plastic but it should be made out of a rubberized/vinyl backed fabric which has a cross-hatched pattern facing inward, but looks like normal white cotton fabric on the backside. The brackets which connect the headband, suspension, and chinstrap to the body were made of cardboard painted green over a red/pink primer, yours are plastic. The tunnels on the suspension which the center adjustment tie passes through should be sewn, not riveted by eyelets. The chinstrap appears to be faux-leather while wartime ones were usually real leather and if not they were a bright reddish-brown plastic and the buckle was attached by a rivet, not an eyelet. The inside of the top vent looks off too, the holes are too close to the center, the bolt should be held by a hexagonal nut, and the dark color of it makes me suspect it is steel instead of aluminum. 

 

I suspect that the 9/89 on the tag denotes manufacture in September 1989 but I'm not certain on that as post-war piths are outside of my focus.

 

Cloth covers like that are pretty much a fantasy item on North Vietnamese piths. It was probably done on a few occasions for some reason or another but it's pretty much just a misunderstanding. The Viet Minh and the Viet Cong made pith helmets by weaving a frame out of rattan, and then stretching a cover over it to fill in the holes to block out the sun and rain. The Viet Cong also made fairly frequent use of white plastic piths widely worn by civilian outdoor laborers in South Vietnam, and of course a cover was needed to camouflage the bright white plastic. Clearly at some point these were confused for actual North Vietnamese pith helmets which is understandable as it's fairly hard to tell from the outside (although they can often still be distinguished by the shape as well as a lack of a bump where the top vent is in the case of the woven ones) and fakers started putting covers on post-war piths. 

 

Nets were certainly used on North Vietnamese piths, but they were less frequent than most people believe. They were fairly common in training in North Vietnam in the first half of the 1960s during which a number of widely seen propaganda photos and films were taken, and they remained pretty popular with North Vietnamese militia, but they weren't actually used all that much in South Vietnam, and the odds of finding a pith with an original net on it today is extremely slim. For that reason I am not too familiar with how original nets were constructed, but they definitely didn't have that fabric band.

 

I hope this helps and I hope you have better luck next time. 

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LE LOUP DES MERS

Thanks a lot for the information, yeah I figured after doing research I got burned but we all gotta learn sometime. What's the value on post war piths 

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On 3/7/2023 at 7:00 PM, LE LOUP DES MERS said:

Thanks a lot for the information, yeah I figured after doing research I got burned but we all gotta learn sometime. What's the value on post war piths 

as for value of these types of helmets id say about $20 to $40

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