Alexander & Sons Museum Quality Helmet Restoration
Welcome to Alexander and Sons restorations. I offer museum quality World War I and WWII helmet and field gear restorations to collectors who are looking for the highest degree of authenticity.
The name Alexander and Sons come from my Great Grandfather, Alexander Kölher. He was an ethnic German from a small village in Lithuania. He in fact served in the Kaiser’s army in the early 20th century. My Father told me one of his early memories of Alexander was being taught to goose step. I felt it was a good name for my company, sounded a little like some of the companies that made helmet components during the war.
Back in the early 2000s I purchased a M35 German helmet that has been painted black by the Czech fire brigade. I wanted to restore it to its original war-time look; little did I know the headache I was about to cause myself. The first thing I did was get a few books about German helmets. I was amazed to find out all the different sort of paint schemes, textures and camouflage patterns the existed between 1935 and 1945. I decided I wanted a pre-war apple green double decal Wehrmacht helmet. The problem was where to find the correct paint. This was where the head ache started. I went to several different paint stores and no one had anything close to the colors I has seen in my books. I decided I would have to do it myself. During this time I was fortunate enough to meet some collectors who were kind enough to let me match the paint on original helmets from their collections. I finally did find a nice apple green helmet and I was able to match the paint. I ended up enjoying the process so much that I soon started to buy more helmets and restored them as well. There were so many interesting camouflage configurations I wanted to attempt them all. It was not long before I started to get phone calls from local re-enactors asking me to restore their helmets. Before I knew it I have over 300 restored helmets under my belt.
It was around this time I realized that I had the start of a business. I decided then and there to get myself a website domain name and offer my services to anymore who was interested.
You may be asking yourself what makes me different from some of the others out there that offer similar services. I like to let my work speak for itself. I will say however that I bring a great deal of research and knowledge to my work. I have examined many original helmets and I have a pretty good feel for how they should look from different factories and at different stages of the war. If you have questions about this feel free to drop me an e-mail. I am more then happy to answer your questions. Some of my competitors may do decent work but many lack the historical knowledge to correctly restore helmets. This ranges from incorrect paint, dome stamp decals instead of ink stamps to the use of sand instead of aluminum oxide to texture the paint.
I like my restoration to tell a story like the originals. Not too long ago I examined an original M40 that had been started life as a single decal field gray army helmet. It was then painted with tropical tan paint, then over-paint with white wash and finally re-paint again with field gray paint. Imagine the campaigns this helmet might have been on. When I restore your helmet you can have it tell what ever story you want. Do you want it to look like it was with the Totenkopf division at the Demjansk pocket, maybe a Belarusian volunteer Luftwaffe flak gunner’s helmet fighting in Berlin in 1945? How about Stalingrad, El Alamein, Monte Casino, Normandy? You’re the boss, let me know the story you want your helmet to tell and I will make it happen.Welcome to Alexander and Sons restorations. I offer museum quality German helmet restorations to collectors who are looking for helmets that are restored historically accurate.
