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Hello and welcome to my recently updated site! This is mostly devoted to my newstanding hobby of making armor.
Since I was in kindergarten I have been fascinated by medieval knights and the armor and warfare of the ancient world (ie.
every thing from ancient Egyptians until the arival or arquebuses and early firearms). A year and a half ago I discovered
that people actually attempt to reproduce historically accurate weapons and armour from a variety of periods before "modern"
fighting styles and weapons. I decided that I'd try my hand at "chainmail" as I knew it, as I was later enlightened
to the term mail or maille which means mesh (chainmail is an outdated Victorian misnomer for an armour made of interlocking
steel or iron rings), and I bought about 3,000 cut 16 gauge galvanized steel rings, which I butted together to make a sheet
in very little time. I had read however that butted maille was not truly an authentic armor, that it was used mostly
in fairs and festivals to look like armor and that if I wanted to reproduce ACCURATE maille I needed to try riveted or welded
maille.
I enbarked on a quest to acquire a tools, technique and talent to effecively reproduce riveted maille armor as accurately
as possible, without making to many shortcuts with modern implements. Unfortunately the web seemed to be almost lacking
in this sort of knowledge, but thankfully the few sites and articles that described the techniques were well designed, had
excellent pictures and great advise for developing my own techniques and maille. Those fabulous sites will be referenced
in my links page, so I will only briefly discuss them and then go into detail about how I make maille. Most of those
sites deal with how to modify hand tools to produce riveted maille with thriangular wedge rivets which was the most common
sort of maille in medieval times in Europe. I found the task of making the piercing tongs for that type of maille too
difficult and so I developed my own set of techniques and tools to make maille with round-rivets.
While there are places that sell kits or modified tools to make maille, I felt that that was a cop out, and I didn't
want to spend to much money. Additionally I had read that few people if any living today know exactly how maille was
made authentically, and because of its simplicity of structure, there are only guidlines to be followed and one can make do
with special tools by modifying hardware store tools, as some of the armoring tools had evolved into modern hand tools.
I use 16 gauge annealed (heated so that it was pliable) steel tying wire from TSC for the rings and modified #2
steel carpet tacks from Home Depot for the rivets. I made a mandrel from 2 by 4 pieces and a 5/16" diameter 4' cold-rolled
steel dowel, which I use to wind long coils of wire to precise size. I then cut rings off from the coil using modified
12" bolt cutters that have a groove in each cutter jaw so that I can cut rings with a small overlap. I then take two
needle nose pliers to open the ring up into a U shape and with a 2 lb hammer flatten the whole ring just enough so that the
whole ring can touch the ground and it has a flat edge on both sides. Then I take a 1 lb hammer with a square head and
flatten each edge of the U with the hammer, taking care not to flatten the middle. I then punch a hole in each
side of the ring with a Roper-Whitney style hand-operated punch bit that was filed down from 1/8" to 1/16". Next I take
the pliers and close the ring so that the holes line up; it is important that the middle of the ring is not too flat, otherwise
it is very hard to bend the ring back into shape.
I clamp the pointy end of the carpet tacks in a Vise Grip and file the shaft into a smaller round section from a rectangular
cross section. Then I snip the pointy end and a little bit more (which takes practice to perfect) off the tack with
regular end nippers to make a rivet. I then place the rivet through the hole in the ring and squeeze it through with
modified pliers with a special hole in them. Finally I peen the rivet by holding the edge of the ring opposite the rivet
with mini pliers, sticking the rivet end into a circular depression in my 15lb anvil and hammering the rivet end with the
2 lb hammer. When making a sheet or garment of maille, I weave the rings before riveting and just after punching the
holes.
I will add pictures of my tools and some of the processes soon, but you can currently view a few of my maille pictures
at my picture gallery. There is a coif in the making, and a small rectangular sheet of maille that was made while I
was still developing my techniques. The rivets in that picture are pieces of 18 gauge steel wire and are much easier
to make, but a little uglier than my current method.
Move on to the instruction page for more detail and the beginning of a riveted maille primer.
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