Making Chainmail

[Buster's Uncle]

Eh.  I was born to entertain in those stupid things.  I'm good at many things, not least waiting on customers, but if I go back, it's as an entertainer, or not at all.  Anything else is a waste, notwithstanding that I'd run a very funny booth.  I've done that, as shop help in faires.

And besides, its one of those things I do the work for the sake of wanting the end-result, and never learned to love the process; tough to make what your time is worth at all, and not a job, knitting mail 40-or-so hours a week, that I'd want.

I am sure the anal b*tards at the SCA may have a few things to say. But, then again, the SCA probably has a 10 page subcommitee rules on how a 17th century whatever should use a toilet to be "in period" and you can not use the cool toilet to begin with. But, your work is good enough you could vend at a lot of venues like Dragon+CON, Ren faires, etc. All you need would be a van that won't leave you stranded on some interstate and you would make some change. Plus, I would imagine vendors get treated MUCH better than volunteers or roadies.

Only thing is, you go to a lot of shows where you end up spending more than making. My parents do gaudy fused glass that only suburbanite trophy wives like and many times they break even. Though, these cons, Burning Man, Rens, etc are becoming more and more yuppified.

Not that many SCAdians know more than I do about chainmail, I daresay, beyond remembering more of the period names for armor parts (they don't usually know how to make without black leather) - and if they can't process that I'm playing with fantasy designs in this thread, they can go climb a (leather) rope.

P.S.  I don't think those cats do 17th century anything.

[Green1]

Eh.  I was born to entertain in those stupid things.  I'm good at many things, not least waiting on customers, but if I go back, it's as an entertainer, or not at all.  Anything else is a waste, notwithstanding that I'd run a very funny booth.  I've done that, as shop help in faires.

And besides, its one of those things I do the work for the sake of wanting the end-result, and never learned to love the process; tough to make what your time is worth at all, and not a job, knitting mail 40-or-so hours a week, that I'd want.

You do have a point. My parents used to make pine furniture in a process similar to the Pennsylvania Dutch. In the 1970s to 1980s, it was okay money. I used to show up at school with stain on me and HATED all the sanding, staining, sanding, vanishing, sanding, more varnishing, sanding and even more varnishing up to 8 times!

But, 40 USD for a fern stand was an okay profit. But, the same 40 USD you could ask for today is peanuts compared to the time it takes to be worth it. It is the reason my dad got a kiln and started doing glass. Less weight to pack and unpack and less work.

I could see chain mail being like furniture.  BUT... even if it IS tedious at least you would not have the tediousness of an abusive boss!!!

[Buster's Uncle]

I had plenty of those in the renfairs - the worst director I ever worked with, in fact, looked so much like the drummer for Hootie and the Blowfish that I still can't watch a Hootie video w/o getting mad - and that was 18 years ago.


I was shooping a shot wearing the small-link shirt today for the heck of it, and just as well save the part with the armor cut out and silvered to share here.

[Buster's Uncle]

Genghis Ken



-That, or prehistoric Kilnzhai's prettiest warrior...

I do not remember making this round camail at all - but it didn't knit itself.  Gotta untie it and lay flat for closeups to share here - and for my own study of how I did it...

[Green1]

But, we all know Ken's secret. He has nothing to protect. Barbie just takes off in the pink 'vette she bought as a teacher/doctor/socialite/astronaut/nurse and shrugs his head at Ken hanging in the mancave doing cosplay.

But seriously, if those kids aren't dying out due to geek culture becoming mainstream and not getting new blood (even the Yippies and Beaniks died out), there could be a very niche market for full scale ones. But, it would not be cheap and VERY niche.

[Buster's Uncle]

Full scale chainmail?  What kids dying out?

-There's a thought in there about the downside of geek culture going mainstream worth taking about..

[Buster's Uncle]

-Also, what's wrong with Ken's mancave?  You can SEE he has a fifty-gallon can of cashews behind him, and the biggest home wireless receiver evah.  He does look like the prettiest Klingon.  I'd say he was set, at home or the LARP...

[Buster's Uncle]

Here's Genghis Ken's Camail laid flat.  the innermost two rows look a bit pinched in because they are - the rows outward from them have random expansion links, but those two rows are collar, thus cylindrical.

That it's a semi-circle flat is interesting; I need to think more about what that means to making a lady version with the diamond chest hole.

I can't really spot the expansion links, and I know what to look for.  I need to go get Buster's camail back out and photograph it laying flat, because I put the expansions in a regular pattern of neat rows, and they're easy to spot - did very much the opposite on this one precisely to make them hard to spot.

[Buster's Uncle]

Here's the camail/ventail shown on a person in the very first picture in this thread laid flat:



Chainmail likes triangles or rectangles with very regular straight rows in the basic pattern I previously diagramed, so round pieces like this require the expansion link trick.

If memory serves -I can go count if anyone cares about a precise number- I did the expansion links in 10 or 12 rows, and you can see a little, done that way, that it's really a decagon or something instead of an actual circle.  -Definitely looks fine, worn.  If you zoom in close, it's easy to spot along the visible rows of radial discontinuities in the pattern where I regularly added a third link in between the two regular ones at that point in the row, which hung off a single link in the proceeding row -making the above link linked to five instead of the regular four- and linked to two in the next row as usual -making it linked to three instead of the regular four- and thus making the row one link wider and introducing that much curve and the concentric-row shape.  One expansion link is very difficult to spot; many, if they're introduced randomly enough to prevent a pattern from emerging.

I concentrated the radial expansion rows slightly towards opposite ends to give it a natural oblong-not-circular shape, as shoulders are wide and it fits better that way - which makes it harder to count at the long ends, but the photo appears to me to show twelve sections/expansion rows.

(As the laid-flat small link shirt suggests, there are design possibilities involving patterns of different-colored links; you could even do crude words and/or images like on an old dot-matrix printer, if you want to do the work of wrapping your head around what goes where in the pattern, and I actually have.  More on that in the future.  Protip: copper is a LOT more expensive, if you didn't scavenge like me, and not as strong - but a few rows of border out of something like brass is completely period-accurate for a wealthy/vain-enough noble/king, and I need to take a picture of my mail hood...)

Note the larger flat copper ring on the outer right edge; that's a period accurate detail, if it should have been brass; it's the armorer's ring - the smith signing his work with a ring stamped with his name.  I go to the trouble sometimes.  Branding mattered for smiths, too sometimes, and an artist should be proud enough to sign work...

-I think I'd better draw a diagram (or two) of how the expansion links are worked in, for more clarity.  Stay tuned.

[Dio]

Here's the camail/ventail shown on a person in the very first picture in this thread laid flat:



Chainmail likes triangles or rectangles with very regular straight rows in the basic pattern I previously diagramed, so round pieces like this require the expansion link trick.

If memory serves -I can go count if anyone cares about a precise number- I did the expansion links in 10 or 12 rows, and you can see a little, done that way, that it's really a decagon or something instead of an actual circle.  -Definitely looks fine, worn.  If you zoom in close, it's easy to spot along the visible rows of radial discontinuities in the pattern where I regularly added a third link in between the two regular ones at that point in the row, which hung off a single link in the proceeding row -making the above link linked to five instead of the regular four- and linked to two in the next row as usual -making it linked to three instead of the regular four- and thus making the row one link wider and introducing that much curve and the concentric-row shape.  One expansion link is very difficult to spot; many, if they're introduced randomly enough to prevent a pattern from emerging.

I concentrated the radial expansion rows slightly towards opposite ends to give it a natural oblong-not-circular shape, as shoulders are wide and it fits better that way - which makes it harder to count at the long ends, but the photo appears to me to show twelve sections/expansion rows.

(As the laid-flat small link shirt suggests, there are design possibilities involving patterns of different-colored links; you could even do crude words and/or images like on an old dot-matrix printer, if you want to do the work of wrapping your head around what goes where in the pattern, and I actually have.  More on that in the future.  Protip: copper is a LOT more expensive, if you didn't scavenge like me, and not as strong - but a few rows of border out of something like brass is completely period-accurate for a wealthy/vain-enough noble/king, and I need to take a picture of my mail hood...)

Note the larger flat copper ring on the outer right edge; that's a period accurate detail, if it should have been brass; it's the armorer's ring - the smith signing his work with a ring stamped with his name.  I go to the trouble sometimes.  Branding mattered for smiths, too sometimes, and an artist should be proud enough to sign work...

-I think I'd better draw a diagram (or two) of how the expansion links are worked in, for more clarity.  Stay tuned.

How does an individual squeeze his or her head through such a small hole?

[Buster's Uncle]

It's JUST the size I can push my head through without a struggle IF I turn it longways to make room for my nose.  The hole's a bit bigger than it looks laying flat.



I DO have a big head - but a neck thick almost like a football player.  You don't want a lot of extra space, or it doesn't look like good armor.

[Dio]

I DO have a big head

I concur with the above statement  .

[Buster's Uncle]

Jokes are a lot funnier when you leave something for the audience to work out for themselves. -Wicked burn if you'd stopped at the comma.

[Buster's Uncle]

AHHH!  Did an edit under the deadline to make my last post not make sense!  Double burn.



Back to business:

The basic pattern again.  I redrew the first three rows to space them wider to make room for what I'm showing in the next.

A thing you'll discover about chainmail handling it and wearing it, is that it has a kind of stretchiness, a little like knit cloth, but gravity-driven, instead of coming from give in the yarn; the rigid links move relative to each other, hanging as long as they can, averaging out  the spacing and pulling as close together as possible, making the armor denser where it hangs loosest and making it easier to move in - it can be hung the direction I've drawn it twice now, or turned the other way - but you don't want to do that latter direction, because the links hang as open as they can, exposing maximum openings for arrows and blade points to find a way in, even forcing a link or two open.  Also, the armor gets stiffer, not more flexible and denser, as when hung the direction I've drawn and shown in photographs.  There's just no upside to hanging it in the stiff hang-open way; it's plainly the wrong direction.



In the bottom row here, extra links have been added in two places, as indicated above.  To give you an idea of how that works out in subsequent rows, I drew a little more.



I brought up the business about the right and wrong direction to let the pattern hang this time because it's related to how and why this works - the links pull on each other from the sides as well top to bottom, and where a discontinuity is introduced, as this technique does, something somewhat counterintuitive  happens; you'd think the link that only interlocks with three others, instead of four, would be a weak spot - but it's actually stronger because it's extra, and the links naturally hang closer together at those points where the links smooth out the change as the regular  pattern resumes.

Those places are hard to spot in various photos I've posted because chainmail hung right hangs pretty dense everywhere, not naturally spacing nearly so wide as drawn on any piece of mail that fits.

Note that the first diagram has eight links to the row, and the last still does - it's the same drawing each time, with some links added in the next two.  In the third illustration, it's still eight at the top, but ten links in the bottom row, and the increased width/density makes it hang potentially wider and pulls the latter rows into the beginning of a curve, where the top of the piece is still straight.  Chainmail is very forgiving of the shape of the wearer because of the same tendencies when hung in the right direction.

[Buster's Uncle]

Any questions?