Wouldn't it be cool to go toyour
SCA conventions wearing your very own handmade piece of chain mail? Well:
To make your very own
hauberk of chain mail you will need:
- An electric drill
- Two small blocks of wood
- A LOT of 14g granulated steel wire (it takes about 1/2 of a mile or so..but dont worry granulated steel wire isn't very expensive at all)
- A metal or wooden dowel thats 3/8" in diameter
- Two pairs of needle nosed pliers
- Something to cut wire w/ (a small rotary saw works pretty good, wire cutters are second best, and you'd be crazy to try anything else)
Procedure:
1. Drill small holes into opposite corner on the blocks of wood(so theyre diagonal to each other) and glue pegs as big as the holes onto the corresponding side of the opposite wood block. Put the blocks together locking the pegs into the holes.
2. Drill a hole through the combined blocks of wood 3/8" in diameter.
3. Drill a small hole on the top of the block to move the wire through when drilling and a corresponding hole on the end of the dowel.
4. Now put the dowel into the wood blocksand close the blocks up, place the wire through the hole in the wood and into the dowel rod hole. Then place the dowel into the drill like a drill bit.
5. Now drill the dowel through the block of wood and what you should get is nicely made uniform wire rings
6. This part is very easy but incredibly boring and time consuming. What you want to do is get the rings weaved together in a 4 in 1 pattern which is like this:
##### #####
# # # #
# # # #
# 8#8888 #
###8# #####
8 8
###8# #####
# 8#8888 #
# # # #
# # # #
##### #####
In other words for every one ring you should have four rings in it. This is very easy once u get into making the mail.
Start by taking one ring and wrapping two more into it, then wrap one ring through both those rings you just added and take two rings and wrap them onto the one ring you just added and so on and so on, until you have a line that is about half the width of your chest(for instance my chest is 40" around below the armpit so id make a line that's 20", you may want a little extra room for comfort however so keep that in mind). Now close up all the rings using the needle nosed pliers by grabbing one half of each ring in each plier and pulling the butts of the ring together.
7. Well now that you have one line you're gonna want to make as many as it takes to reach a little bit shorther than length of a
shirt youll want (ill tell you why that should be later), well get to it! But before you make a buncha lines try connecting the first two lines you make by:
Take the first part of the chain that has two rings hooking through one on each side and hook the top ring of the two to the bottom two rings of the other line, like this:
##### ##### #####
# # # # # #
# # # # # #
# 8#8888 8#8888 #
###8# ###8# #####
8 8 8 8
###8# ###8# #####
# 8#8888 8#8888 #
# # # # # #
# # # # # #
##### ##### #####
Make sure that if the ring ur using to connect two lines goes under the two rings its connected to on that line that it goes over the two rings it will connect onto in the other line. Or your pattern will be
FUBAR
Now I realize this is pretty
confusing...with practice it will be easier, and I hope my
illustrations cleared it up a bit
8. Ok so now that you've made a sheet of chain mail thats as long and half as wide as you want it, make another identical sheet, this is that one will be the front and one will be the back.
9. Well after all this work on making those two sheets you are now ready to make the top of your
hauberk, just make a sheet as wide the other sheets but barely longer than the your head, except the catch is that in the middle of this sheet leave a triangle big enough for your head to fit through.
10. Now that you have all three sections done just piece them together, and leave holes on each side(seam between the front and back pieces) for your arms, and if everything went right ur done!
Now if this tutorial wasnt as helpful as you needed it to be, just look up chain mail making
tutorials on the net, there are plenty of them out there, and most of which have waaaay better illustrations than my crappy
ASCII art. --- Strike that crappy ASCII art comment, I can't remember who but *somebody* gave me the current illustrations, and I apologize for the lateness of his generous contributions.