Gamers with Hobbies: Chainmail (image heavy)

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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?

Tamren wrote:

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.

Tamren wrote:

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.

Tamren wrote:

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'm currently waiting on a package to arrive in the mail. It was due in 3 days 3 days ago. So it will probably arrive today.

Once it gets here I can start showing you guys the process from the start.

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.

Radical Ans wrote:

Looks awesome, but my wrists hurt just looking at those pics.

I guess there is such a thing as having a metal fetish.

Rat Boy wrote:

I guess there is such a thing as having a metal fetish.

There are people like that. But what sets them apart from me is that MY rings aren't attached to my face. D:

Robear wrote:

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. :-)

I like European 4 in 1, as we generally call it nowadays. Its going to be one of the weaves on show because elfweave and tiffany have a structure that is very similar. If something works on E4-1 it will usually work with elfweave as well. So I use it to do a lot of experimenting.

Radical Ans wrote:

Looks awesome, but my wrists hurt just looking at those pics.

Its not so bad. Like any task you get used to it after a while. The 14g wire is still giving me trouble but that should get better in a week or so.

There is one glaring exception. Whoever packed my order made a mistake and mixed in some tempered rings into my batch of stainless steel. These rings are spring tempered to 3/4 hardness and they are SUPER tough. Trying to bend one, even with the leverage of pliers makes my wrist tendons scream in terror.

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.
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Yellek wrote:

Very nice work! I like working with chainmail designs in my jewelry. It's not very useful against crossbows though.
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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.

Mystic Violet wrote:

Wow. So how did you discover this hobby? How does one even begin?

Short answer for both? The internet. About two years ago I was looking for a hobby. Pretty much went "COOL people still make this stuff?!", typed "chainmail" into google and went from there. My second highest choice was collecting and painting miniatures and as they say "crack is cheaper" so my wallet is probably thankful. All of my skill has been self taught with the help of tutorials, articles and pictures found on the net. Not everything is recorded or explained so I have had to do a lot of experimentation.

As for where to start there are a ton of places. My two recommendations would be:

http://www.mailleartisans.org/
The Mail Artisans International League is a big website devoted to chainmail as a hobby. It has an extensive database of articles covering tons of subjects. However it is a purely volunteer effort so not every subject is complete.

http://cgmaille.com/
CGmaille is a site run by a guy named Phong. What makes his site stand out from the rest is his selection of tutorials. Instead of taking pictures of real work he uses 3d graphics programs to render very clear images which makes his tutorials very clear and easy to understand.

Nosferatu wrote:

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.

What Robear said. When you simply push the ends together to form a complete ring the end result is referred to as a "butted joint". This is plenty strong for my work. And since I am not Welsh the chances of me getting shot with a crossbow are rather slim.

And now, for the pictures! I figure what I will do is give you guys a look at where I am at now. Once I get going you will get a more detailed commentary on the process and specific details of whats going on in the pictures.
IMAGE(http://img43.imageshack.us/img43/8917/2pliars.jpg)IMAGE(http://img52.imageshack.us/img52/5604/4ringsize.jpg)
LEFT: These here are my tools. 90% of my work using cut rings is done with one in either hand. Every now and then I have to swap out for my "chain nose" pliars for work in tight spaces. These have pointed ends but are otherwise identical.
RIGHT: These are the rings I use. The penny is there for size comparison. There are 5 sizes ranging from 3/16ths to 7/16ths. All are made from 16gauge galvanized steel.
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LEFT: This monstrosity sprawled over the lap of my G15 is a big sheet of a weave named "elfweave". That gold coin is again a penny, blame the crap lighting. When "relaxed" this sheet is a foot square, it has considerable stretch as you can see.
RIGHT: It weighs about 4 pounds. Took me a week of spare time to make from scratch using bulk wire. 9 more of these and I could make a shirt with sleeves. But I decided to use another weave which is...
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LEFT: This here is a patch of tiffany. Named for the inventor's girlfriend. It is a variant of elfweave with the connecting rings joined to each other. This makes it tighter overall but it remains quite flexible. I plan to make my shirt out of this.
RIGHT: This here is an expansion joint done in tiffany. Simple shirts do not require these but shirts tailored to a specific shape need to add and subtract rows every now and then. If you look very closely you can see that 1 row on the left ends in the middle. The rows above and below it combine into one, for a net loss of 2 rows.

This is probably an internet first. If anyone has done this before I have yet to see proof. Now there is a tutorial for doing an expansion join in elfweave, but I found it after the work was done and upon examining both it turns out I did it a different way.
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This here is another first. Look closely and you can spot the little round bit in the center of the hexagon. That is what we call a "rosette", a tight circle that can then be built upon. In this case the hexagon of tiffany weave is composed of 60 degree triangles. The half moon on the side was intended to see how far I could extend the piece without using expansions before it became too tight.

If I kept going I could make a hat.

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LEFT: This is what raw coils look like. Wire is wrapped around a mandril using an electric drill and you end up with one of these.
RIGHT: And these here are my tools for making rings. At the top are the mandrels, these have a slot cut into one end. The wire goes in here, the spring is formed then the whole coil slides off the end. The cutters are aviation snips. They work surprisingly well on the wire and produce a clean cut.

Also pictured are some new 14gauge rings I have been making. These are really hard on my hands because of the tougher wire and cutting a whole coil is time consuming. If you ever play against me in L4D versus its a fair bet this is what I am doing while waiting to respawn.

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This rats nest of ziploc bags is my stash of cut rings. I have currently have 10 sizes of rings in 3 different metals with another 4 sizes on the way once I finish cutting all this 14g. Most of it is hand wound galvanized steel. A third is aluminium and the rest is stainless steel. I plan to make my shirt out of stainless.

Bonus internet win if anyone can identify the book on the left.

And thats it for now. Thoughts?

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.

Well turns out "in 3 days" specifically meant business days and the post doesn't deliver on weekends. So that package should be here tomorrow.

So anyway, gameplan.
IMAGE(http://img94.imageshack.us/img94/1864/13plan.jpg)
Now there are 3 different patterns you can use to make a shirt.
1. Tube pattern. This is a t-shirt made up of 3 tubes, one for the torso and another attached at a right angle to form both arms. This is the simplest design and easy to make. If I did nothing else I could probably assemble 2 or 3 in week using the rings I have on hand. However it does have its problems. Because the shoulder simply bends downward the rings stretch in the wrong direction and hang open. Apart from being ugly they also protect less and become stiffer.

2. 90 degree seam shirt. This design solves the stretched ring issue. Basically the part that sits on the shoulders is composed of 4 triangles with a square cut out of the centre to fit your neck. The advantage over a tube shirt is that this correctly aligns the rings on the shoulder and sleeve so that they hang the proper way. One disadvantage of this design is that if you lift an arm up the shoulder drags the entire side of the shirt upwards. This can get tiring very quickly and limits movement unless you make the shirt loose.

3. The third design is the one I am using and it is far more complicated. This is called a "mantle" style shirt. Instead of a pattern based on shapes a mantle shirt starts with a mantle. This is a donut shaped mat that fits around your neck. The rest of the shirt is built in pieces and attached to the mantle, thus forming a complete shirt. The problem with this design is that there really isn't a design. The sleeves and body tube both end up hanging the proper way. But where these attach to the mantle you end up with strange seams and other connections. I know a few, but none that would work in this situation, some research is required.

Should be fun. Now I got rained in today so I spent an hour or two making some new rings. This is how it works:
IMAGE(http://img29.imageshack.us/img29/7153/14ringmake.jpg)
1. This is my wire reel, its built out of scrap plywood. As I wind rings this sits about two feet behind me and helps the wire feed at a constant speed. The bulk wire I get is wound around surplus welding wire reels.
2. These are the tools I use. Pictured is my old electric drill. Its had a hard life, one of the batteries is broken and the other battery doesn't keep a charge over long periods of time. This makes it useless for general work. But I can charge it up to full and get about 4-10 coils of rings out of it, which is enough for me.
3. Wire is wound clockwise around the mandril. I grip the wire with my fingers and support my hand using my thumb. This helps keep the wire stable. The paper towel in my palm is there to clean the dirty ruboff from the wire before it gets on the glove. The tape is to reduce friction as the leather thumb pad tends to stick.
4. Once the coil is formed I cut the wire with my pliars. You'll notice I made a mistake here where the wire got garbled. This can happen for a number of reasons. Mostly its just me not paying attention, but sometimes the wire has a sideways kink in it. In this case the reel didn't spin smoothly, got stuck and when it came free it gave the wire too much slack. This can be corrected in thinner wire but 14 gauge is so tough I have no choice but to just keep going.

This part of the operation is also a bit dangerous. Most wire is very springy and when you cut the coil it causes "springback" as the coil expands a bit. This whips the loose wire end around at a blinding speed. I have heard of people slicing their hands open this way, hence the leather glove.
5. When a coil is correctly wound it looks like this. The soon-to-be rings are all formed into a single spring that acts just like you would expect. Gaps in the coil cause the rings to be ever so slightly longer than each other, but is not a big issue.
6. The last step is to clean up the ends so they look like this. Ready for cutting. You may notice my nails are due for a cut. I've been putting it off because like beadwork and other finicky crafts it is next to impossible to pick up rings without long nails.

Nice :). Lot of chainmaillers popping out of the woodwork. If anyone reading this has other interesting hobbies (like woodworking) you should start some new threads.

I don't worry too much about closures unless I plan to wear something. In those cases I pay a lot of attention and make sure each ring is just right and does not snag. Right now my galvy ring stock is being used for experimentation before I make something permanent out of stainless. For the smaller rings I use aluminium instead because its a lot easier to work with, Losing control of small galvy rings is the leading cause of damage to my desk.

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.

AnimeJ wrote:

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.

Using dremel cutoff wheels is actually not that efficient. The blade is very wide and produces a pile of metal dust. What is normally used are these super thin jeweller saw blades which leave a paper thin cut in the ring once you close it. With the right arbour you can fit em to a dremel. But tough metals require very precise slow cutting speeds, so people tend to use something more complicated. Saw cut rings are rarely used for armour, except in the case of decorative trim.

Malor wrote:

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'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!

Malor wrote:

I'm surprised nobody offers precut loops; it seems so silly to have machine-extruded coils, but then chop the coils up by hand.

A surprising number. Most places sell what they call "jump rings" which are a lot smaller than anything I use. These are meant for beadwork and jewlery sized pieces. I get all my supplies from a place called The Ring Lord. How they make the rings in bulk is pretty neat. They have these machines that are designed to make springs. A wire gets pushed into a wheel which bends it in a curve. It hits another wheel and both of them combined form the wire into a complete loop. If you needed a spring for a trampoline or something the machine winds the coil to the proper length. Then this little hammer comes down and smacks the end against a cutting blade. Last I checked they had a video of this on their website, neat stuff.

When they make single rings the process is the same, they just cut individual rings. The wire only forms one loop instead of a coil. Depending on what metal you pick the rings are quite cheap. 2-10 cents per. You can get all sorts of metal like copper, titanium, bronze or even supermetals like Iconel and Niobium. Aluminium and Stainless rings are very hard to coil and cut by hand so I buy these premade. I buy my galvy wire in bulk and turn coils myself since I don't need huge amounts at once and it saves money. Raw wire is about an 75% discount compared to finished rings. Even more if the wire is bought in bulk. The tradeoff is that you have to cut them by hand and this is a very slow process.

LiquidMantis wrote:

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.

Mine is fairly beat up and old so I'm not too worried about it. The drill rests sideways on my thigh and the mandril rests on my other thigh. I don't put any downward pressure on the drill or the mandrill.

Robear wrote:

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.

Right now I'm happy with the shear cut I get. But I will look into that. There are 3 kinds, the saw cut mentioned above, shear cut and pinch cut. Saw cutting is by far the cleanest. Machine made rings and my rings are shear cut. This means a slight divot in both sides of the wire, machine made rings only have one on the outside. A pinch cut is what you get if you use something like diagonal cutters. The ends don't snag but they are hard to butt together because the metal is so misshapen. I'm not sure how much those cutters would deform the wire.

As for polishing. Aluminium doesn't need to be polished. TRL sells "bright" aluminium which is chemically treated to be shiny. That treatment wears off after a while, but once the rings "weather" a bit and polish each other with a bit of rubbing they return to a nice shine. The bulk galvanized wire has a mirror finish on it that gets spotty and grey over time. If they get wet or placed in a wet environment the rings turn a matte grey. Stainless steel is the only metal I need to clean and or polish, so I picked the el-cheapo method. It doesn't even involve sand. If I have time later I can show you guys the polishing process.

NSMike wrote:

Does your mail lock up like that if it's too small?

Yes and no. I'll start from the beginning and explain aspect ratio and stretch and all that once I get my work plan in order.

Robear wrote:

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.

It would certainly help a lot on the big rings. The 16 gauge rings can be cut 2-5 rings at a time, so those go very quickly. The 14 gauge is all score and break, which is tedious.

Polishing is a multiple hour process that I don't have time for today. But I can show you the end result.
IMAGE(http://img695.imageshack.us/img695/1103/17ringpolish.jpg)
The rings on the left are the "raw" stainless steel rings I order in. The rings on the right are exactly the same, but have been polished to a mirror shine. When the rings first arrive they do "shine" but in a dull fashion. After cleaning and burnishing (which you will get to see later) the rings come out looking like a chrome bumper. This is then refined to produce the level of finish you see above.

The way I measure polish is somewhat arbitrary. Because the rings are a rounded surface at least one side is towards the light at all times. This results in a bright spot on the part of the ring that reflects light directly from the source into your eyes. On the raw rings the bright spot is large, diffused and grainy. The more you clean and polish the ring the smaller and brighter this spot of light becomes. The next "level" of polish is when you start to see secondary reflections on the surface of the ring where the bright spots start to bounce off neighbouring rings.

What I consider "final polish" is when these little secondary reflections are also sharp pinpricks of light. The end result is a pile of rings that truly "glitters". I have yet to see how they appear as a finished sheet.

I've been working on a "lesson plan" that is composed of the following.
- Cool stuff I think you would find interesting.
- Basic concepts you will need to understand what I am doing
- The methods I use to make and weave rings.
- Experiments and tests that I need to do before I can start working on the shirt.
- And a long way off, shirt construction and assembly.

If you have a question or comment feel free. I've heard before that you can never truly master something until you teach it to someone else. Also, think I should change the title? Its a bit confusing if accurate.

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