Chain maille made easy

[Zombie]

just go to wal-mart get some 14 Gage metal coil from the home improvement section, and a dowel rod, wrap the metal coil around the rod creating a spring looking thinger and then take some tin snips to it and vwall ah, you have chain maille rings

[Lord Wilhelm Arngrimsson]

Wow, that's legal? I'd contemplated it before, but wasn't sure if it would be. That's a great idea though... I might use it for sleeves between my pauldrons and bracers.

[Lord Wilhelm Arngrimsson]

Question for that, how would the rings stay together? It seems you'd have to do something to prevent them pulling apart

[Krayth the Forum Uruk]

Weld the ends of the rings together once they're placed.

[Lord Wilhelm Arngrimsson]

Dag rules state that it has to be 16 gauge wire to be legal though... bummer.

[Lord Wilhelm Arngrimsson]

Nevermind, just found this:

5.2.4. Acceptable Standards for 4:1 European Weave Chain mail

Gauge 12 14 16 18 Etc
Butted Link Maximum Ring Diameter 1/2" 3/8" 5/16" 1/4" **
Non-Butted Maximum Link Diameter* 1/2" 3/8" 3/8" 3/8" **
*Non-Butted = Riveted, welded, punched, etc.
**At the discretion of the event organizers


so yeah, for 14 gauge you'd need 3/8" diameter ring/link

[Danoth]

5.2.2. The minimum thickness of non-plate metal armor is 16-gauge.

Chain maille is extremly easy to make people....you can also put a hole in the dowl rod, attach a hand drill to the one end and spin it all up like that. Cost effective, easy, strong( if you do it right) But very very time consuming if you dont knwo how to do it.

[Danoth]

btw 14 gauge is thicker than 16 jsut so you know...gauges in everything the smaller the bigger it is.

[Lord Wilhelm Arngrimsson]

Ya'know... I kinda knew that, but then after all the leatherworking I've been dealing with, leather size was imbedded in my head and for some reason my brain flipped gauge-size-difference.

Oh, by the way, I had a dream that we had an impromptu dag party, and you guys were the only ones who showed up. Yay divvy 8! lol

[Kristof]

I was looking at the Dagohir rules and I couldn't find any mention of using split rings for chain mail. Wouldn't it be easier to use split rings to make a mail shirt? Or is it because split rings are illegal in some way...i.e. they aren't "period"?

Look at these websites:
www.worthco.com/rings/spltring.html
www.worthco.com/rings/pdf/heavyweightrings.pdf

.040 diameter is 18 gauge
.045 diameter is 17 gauge
.051 diameter is 16 gauge
The split rings are only "single" thickness in one area for a small length of the ring. Otherwise the ring is twice as thick as there are 2 wires laying on top of each other.

The prices aren't bad either at $17.50 per thousand in either zinc or nickel finish. You can get finer wire rings in brass.

Thanks for taking the time to answer my question.
Chris

[Kristof]

Oh I forgot to mention that I used this converter to convert the wire diameter in inches to guage thickness.

www.66pacific.com/calculators/wire_calc.aspx

Thanks,
Chris

[Aldvarg Egilsson]

By split do you mean butted? If so then yes butted mail is legal.

[Kristof]

No not butted at all. Take a look at the web site they have a picture of the split rings. If you fish...it is the rings that hold the hooks to the lures and they come in bigger sizes too.

[Aldvarg Egilsson]

oh i get what you are saying now. I do not know for sure if that is legal or not. Might be to "modern" of a look, but again I don't know.

[Drængr Ironhawk]

I think using split rings would be much harder to work with than simply butting them yourself. Each ring will have to have at least 4 other rings connected to it. When you have a couple long chains made and are tying them together, I bet it would be very difficult to weave twirl that last ring around the other four.

I believe someone in the group bought a ringinator, www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gl54XoTSfIQ . And I have access to lathes if you want to coil some wire to make springs.