Hey guys, as I might have mentioned in voice chat I do chainmail as a hobby. Recently I have been giving Torchlight a break so as not to burn out. Lacking anything else to play I dug out my tools and somehow decided to make a shirt. As far as skill goes I would call myself a "hobbyist", or if you want to get snooty and technical about it, "mail artisan". In order to call yourself an "armourer" you first have to demonstrate that you can make a piece of armour. This can be a belt, or something more complicated like a glove.
But the most common "rite of passage" is to build a chainmail shirt.
Now chainmail is one of those things that is really cool to see at first glance, and when completed. But otherwise boring as dirt to watch after about 5 minutes. Its like watching a sculptor shred his neighbours car into flakes with a chainsaw and then glue them together bit by bit into a dragon. Or build a full sized medieval castle out of sugar cubes. You get the idea.
But I thought you might enjoy seeing progress pictures and help motivate me to finish the damn thing.
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Here is a small glossary so that later you will understand what the heck I am talking about. Will be updated as I go along.
Mail: Or "Maille", the original term for chainmail. "Chainmail" and worse "Platemail" are bastardized words that became memes mostly thanks to DnD.
Gauge: Thickness of the wire. I mostly use 16g SWG which is 1/16th of an inch wide or 1.6mm.
Mandril: A cylindrical metal rod that wire is wound around to form a coil.
Coil: Looks just like a spring.
Cut ring: A raw ring with its ends spread slightly apart.
Closed ring: A ring with its ends butted together to form a complete flat circle.
Open ring: A ring with its ends far enough apart that you can add closed rings to them.
Inner Diameter: The width of the mandril. This is what is used to determine the size of the ring.
AR: Aspect ratio, this is the ID of the ring divided by the thickness of the wire. Very important.
Springback: The tendency for wire coiled in a spiral to expand a bit. Affects AR.
Weave: The pattern you shape the rings into.
Stretch: How much a weave can be pulled in a specific directly. Most weaves are biased towards vertical stretch, but with many exceptions.
Flatnose Pliers: Small 6.5 inch pliers with a wide flat set of jaws. Great for general work.
Chain Nose Pliers: Basically miniature needlenosed pliers. Needed for tight spaces.
Seam: A seam is a line where the weave pattern changes direction, but the rows remain continuous. The most common are 45 and 60 degree seams.
Joint: A joint is like a seam only the direction of the weave changes between two pieces. For example when you attach two pieces together and one piece has its rows in perpendicular direction from other.
Rosette: A tight circle of mail. Most are round but they can take the form of other shapes. Usually built upon to form the bowl of a helmet and other rounded objects.
Trim: Decorations at the edge of a piece of mail. This can be as simple as changing the metal colour, or adding a band of another weave.
Expansion joint: A sub pattern in the weave that adds new rows of rings to make a piece larger. Can also be performed in reverse to produce a contraction. For the European family of weaves these can be done on two axis relative to the weave, vertical and horizontal.
Bias: A bias is the tendency of a weave to be flexible in one direction, but not another.
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In the picture above you can see the current state of my desktop. Its rather dim because my room light isn't a good one and makes everything very yellow. My monitor is just above and the PC tower is out of the frame to the right. My PC in general only occupies about a third of the available space. Scattered across the desk are patches of mail and various tools. Nothing you won't get to see in more detail later. The white piece of paper is there to protect my desk from the sharp tips of my pliers. You can't see it but the veneer underneath is a mess. The circles are gauges that help me measure proper angles. The white bundles are stainless steel rings wrapped in tissue to keep them clean.
More pics to follow.
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Lesson plan as follows. Stuff will be added all the time. Bold items are things that have been covered and will be tagged with a page number. If you think I missed something or are curious about something not covered just let me know and I can add it.
Demonstration: (Cool stuff)
- European family
- Byzantine family
- Persian family
- Orbitals
- Spiral weaves
- Chains
- Inlays
Methods and Materials: (How stuff works)
- p1 Coiling/Cutting by hand/Score and Break.
- p1 Cleaning/Polishing/Burnishing
- p2 Aspect Ratio
- Measuring in units
- p3 Stretch
- Bias
- Speed weaving
From this point on it can be assumed that all work is done with elfweave and other european weave variations. I am focusing on these because they fit the overall theme that I want. Other weaves may come in later as trim and the like.
Experimentation: (Stuff I don't know is possible)
- Expansion joints vertical/horizontal
- Kinging/Doubling
- 90 degree seams/joints
- Square Rosette
- Mirrored seams
Testing: (Stuff I know is possible, but maybe not practical?)
- Possible trim patterns.
- Perpendicular and diagonal seams
- Multi expansion test
- Weave transitions
- Size transitions
Design: (Figuring out what will fit)
- Collar
- Shoulders
- Chest
- Armpit seam
- Upper arms
- Body tube
- Forearms
Construction: (Final assembly of the body panels)
- Same as above.
Wow. So how did you discover this hobby? How does one even begin?
Now chainmail is one of those things that is really cool to see at first glance, and when completed. But otherwise boring as dirt to watch after about 5 minutes. Its like watching a sculptor shred his neighbours car into flakes with a chainsaw and then glue them together bit by bit into a dragon. Or build a full sized medieval castle out of sugar cubes. You get the idea.
This is pretty much true of any craft. I can't imagine asking someone to watch me paint or bead for more than five minutes. But it does make the piece more impressive by just knowing you sat there for hours linking metal coils together.
More pics to follow.
Show!
So are you just bending the wire, or doing it "proper" (but way more labor intensive)? From the photo it looks like just bending the metal into a ring shape with no additional finishing of the rings to make them unable to simply bend open again since I see neither hammer nor punch to work rivets.
Nos, you can't work it "proper" without finding pure iron wire and making a set of unusual tools, as well as having a place to bury a case-hardening container in coals. However, the stiffness of the pre-made steel wire actually approximates that of a finished iron shirt (although it is heavier) so it's a reasonable substitute. The biggest difference though is that actual medieval mail is steel with an iron core, making it more flexible and thus more durable than all-steel mail. (BTW, actual period tools for mail-making are rare as hen's teeth, since the ones that were single purpose (like the punch base that allows the smith to open the ring, flatten the ends and sometimes the sides and punch a hole in each flat end all in one thump) were lost or discarded, while the multi-purpose tools simply were reallocated to other tasks. We have to depend mostly on descriptions of tools and the few that remain by accident or in very old armories.)
I made a steel mail shirt in college for credit (and for my SCA persona). I also made copper and silver jewelry using mail patterns for a while. Both were fulfilling, but the shirt was onerously repetitive. I have seen actual iron wire mail made; the process was actually not so bad, but it was much more expensive and if the case-hardening screwed up, the section was lost.
Its like watching a sculptor shred his neighbours car into flakes with a chainsaw and then glue them together bit by bit into a dragon.
I would so TOTALLY watch that.
Looks awesome, but my wrists hurt just looking at those pics.
That's pretty sweet. I came in the thread expecting something about letters and postal service.
I had a friend in college who spent some time making a real simple loose "weave" (if you can call what they did a weave) chainmail shirt. Of course, since they were in college and all, they had plenty of time to waste on doing it so finished in a few weeks. They definitely didn't use the tiffany or elfweave.
My friend is now doing woodworking and all and we rented a house with some other guys to have a woodshop together for a couple years.
Keep up the posting, this is interesting stuff, as I always like to see how things are crafted.
I just did one to four, because that's what was usually used. Obviously you take in or let out for joints, but that's not hard with 1-4 density as your norm. It does matter which way the fabric hangs, however.
Looks awesome, but my wrists hurt just looking at those pics.
I guess there is such a thing as having a metal fetish.
Very cool hobby, man. Keep the updates rolling in as you can!
Very nice work! I like working with chainmail designs in my jewelry. It's not very useful against crossbows though.
Very nice work! I like working with chainmail designs in my jewelry. It's not very useful against crossbows though.
Does it have a +16 to MDef?
That's really cool, Tamren. I'm looking forward to the updates!
Nice. Subscribing to the thread to follow updates. I dabbled with chainmail for a while and made some small samples with different size rings and patterns. The largest piece I have is about 2' by 2' that was the early makings of a shirt. I still have a bunch of cut rings and ready-to-cut spring coils made up. Hmmm.
I went through this phase about 8 years ago. I made roughly a shirts worth of pieces for my mother (who's a costume designer). 2 things:
1: Ultimately, my hands couldn't take it any more. I did some serious, serious damage, and it took well over a year before they felt normal again.
2: If you cut your coils using a dremel cutoff wheel, you get perfectly flat joins on your rings. Cutting with airplane shears you get point edges on every single link, whihc will catch on your arming garment something fierce. This is especially true with 14 gauge (whcih I worked in).
Good luck, and listen to your hands!
14? 15? years ago I tried making chainmail. I made a coif, with decorative dags, then decided that this wasn't the hobby for me. I got into it almost painlessly, a friend in the SCA decided he wanted to do it, and he knew the local mailsmith.
I had a spool setup similiar to that in the picture, also made out of plywood. Fortunately, I knew a local mad scientist, so I was able to get the rest of the gear made properly. The coils were made with the help of a variable speed electric drill, they ended up being almost perfect springs. The mandril was purpose-built for that drill, so it worked well, never had any safety issues. I used a frame to hold the mandril, which made it easier and faster than trying to hold the mandril free. One of us working the drill, and the other keeping the wire feeding smoothly while putting weight on the mandril frame to stabilize it worked best.
Cutting the rings was a tedious process, because I did them individually, via the Score and Break method. Crimp the coil lightly, hardly more than a scratch, then grab the ring with pliers, and give a hard flat twist to snap the ring off. Properly done, the metal sheared due to the torque and left a flat surface, almost smooth, without marring the ring where the pliers gripped it. When I twisted the rings closed, the ends butted up very smoothly, each section I made was almost snag free. People that had been making chainmail for years gave me high marks for the quality. Had I continued, I would have had to come up with a different method, I was trading a lot of time for that level of quality. I made a square patch, about 2 inches to a side, and used it as the fob on my keychain. 15 years later, and it still is in great shape, smooth and snagfree. A bit rusty on the inside of the rings, where the galvanization has rubbed off.
I also helped my 2nd wife make a skirt, of alternating panels of leather and chain. Having smooth, snag free sections was critical for that project. 4 in 1 worked for both the skirt and the coif, which I was grateful for, 6 in 1 was not my idea of fun.
Awesome stuff I dated a girl back in college who was into this stuff, except she hand coiled wire on a very, very long dowel and had her old man cut the rings off with a dremel. I'd imagine wrapping with a drill and cutting with a dremel would be about ideal, albeit expensive.
Boy, this thread really reminds of why armor was so expensive in the Middle Ages. Getting kitted out even in chainmail was a Big Deal.
I'm surprised nobody offers precut loops; it seems so silly to have machine-extruded coils, but then chop the coils up by hand.
You can buy manufactured rings but it's cost prohibitive for the typical hobby crafter. Plus I liked making my own rings as part of the experience.
As a note on making the ring coils, I highly recommend whipping up a jig to hold your mandrel if you like your electric drill. Drill bearings don't like the lateral pressure you're applying by freehanding the coiling process.
Really interesting stuff, keep the pics coming.
At least back when I made chainmail, the quality of the precut loops was poor, at best. Cost was okay, until you realized you'd be discarding waaaaay too many of the rings, or ending up with something you didn't want to admit you made.
I used a piece of metal stock about 2 feet long and maybe 2" wide. Probably 1/4" or 1/3" thick. Bend both ends up at 90 degrees and put a hole in each end about 1/4" or so from the bottom (I need to find it and look to see exactly, maybe it's closer to the width of the wire but I remember having some play.) The hole should accommodate a steel rod the size of the inner diameter of the rings you are working with. Bend two right angles in it to make it a crank, in my case on the right, and on the left just before it exits the hole drill a hole to hold the end of the wire, again sized to the wire you are using. Then just thread the wire in that small hole after inserting the rod and crank away to make a coil. The coil will be the inner length of the frame, of course. The best part of this is that you can clip the end that is inserted to the rod after the coil is done, so the unwinding that happens is much safer since there is nothing sticking out and the coil is still on the frame. It's also portable and requires no power tools. (You can build a similar jig for a power drill too. But hand cranking works just fine.)
The other thing I recommend is that you get a pair of wire cutters with a very short, stubby cutting end. Shorter than the red pair in your picture by half or more. Clip one at a time and you can do a ring a second or better, if you are careful not to go into two rings at once. This makes cutting a much easier process than using shears, and I don't have trouble with the mail snagging. Try something like this.
Last, get a hogshead or other small durable wooden barrel. Something that will be half or 1/3 filled by a full mail shirt. Put the shirt in after it's made, add clean sand to cover it and roll it around the yard for a while. This will polish off the finishing gunk they put on fence wire to help it avoid rust, and it can be used to clean off rust as well after you've had it for a while. Shake the sand off, coat it in your favorite oil and wrap it in a clean white cloth for storage (or hang it somewhere, just watch out for humidity.) If it's going to be in contact with cloth, you need to oil it (and it would not hurt to oil the cloth as well.) Keep the barrel and sand and consider hiring a teenager to roll it for you. You could also build a frame to do that, with a crank or an electric motor.
Just some thoughts. The wire cutters though are much better than shears and 14 gauge does not scare a good pair. I strongly recommend them.
There was a guy I went to high school with who made a mail "gauntlet" of sorts (I say this because the finger tips were not completed) as an art project. The rings were stainless steel and VERY hefty. I'm not sure how he cut them. He made it specifically around his hand, and when I tried to put it on, my hands being significantly larger, it would not fit. This thing locked up so tight it was impossible to move my hand inside it to even get to the fingers. I don't know if he made it following any of the techniques you learned, I think he just winged it. Does your mail lock up like that if it's too small?
Sorry, yes, the polishing is good for galvanized steel, mild steel and case-hardened iron. Not stainless or aluminum.
I've read that one reason anvils have a pointed end is because they were used to close mail rings one at a time. The wire ring would be heated, then tapped close with a hammer. Which is insane!
Yeah, because everything I've read says that didn't happen. First, the pointed end of an anvil is for hammering curves and bends and the like. It's way too big at the point to close mail links on, but the neck is too small to be convenient for quickly manipulating rings. Second, we suspect that mail was made with specialized tools for closing. The usual process was to assemble the mail out of iron wire (really really hard to find these days, by the way) and then *after* it was assembled, to case harden it. (I'd love to see someone try to free-hand hammer a tiny rivet into red hot iron with a teeny tiny hammer.) Third, pure iron is soft enough to close and flatten rings without heating.
The speculative tools are cool. The first one is a metal piece with a tapering round hole in it, shaped and sized so that a ring dropped in it and hit with a punch has it's open ends pinched together, slightly overlapping. Then the ring is popped out, the ends are flattened (another die or possibly freehand) and a rivet is driven through the thin flattened portion. Rivets are made by clipping off very small triangles from iron wire stock, and they are simply placed over the joint point down and whacked with a small hammer (possibly on a form, but not on a tiny surface - if you did this on an anvil you'd do it on the main flat part). Open rings are held back to join together closed ones, by rows or in groups of four - the ring joints are usually aligned all the way through the fabric, as I recall. If the rings hardened during working, they could be annealed at any step. I know some hobbyists who have made similar tools for school projects, but I don't know if they still exist, it was 20 years ago. I suspect something similar was used for large scale manufacturing, as by the Romans or Celts, but I don't know if any have survived to this day.
The reason I recommended short nose wire cutters is because I recall cutting rings a *lot* faster than you describe. That's gotta be worth something.
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