The Armour Archive

Hi, I'm very new to the construction of maille. I understand how to link basic 4 in 1's but I haven't figured out how to connect them in order to form the circle. Any advice or links on construction would be appreciated.
Thanks, Nikolai

Hey there! Welcome to the Armour Archive!

I'm no master at maille weaving, but everything I've learnt has come from the link below:
http://www.britishplate.org.uk/chainmail.html

It's a nice essay with pictures explaining how to make a mandrel (for turning that wire into the rings you need!) the basic principles of weaving, which you seem to understand already, and expantions.

Expantions are what you'll be needing for a camail, aventail, coif or hauberk/haubergon. Hope that helps somewhat.

The math changes a bit depending on what ring size your using.
hears a decent one for the top.
http://www.teamsaber.com/john/chainmail/round.html

I use 14 guage 3/8 rings and start with 6 in the first row with the queen ring the same size as the rest but it concept is the same.
If you have any quesitons you might try cross posting to www.theringlord.org/forum or http://www.mailleartisans.org/board/index.php
both have a number of people specializing in chainmail for armour, craft, and jewlery applications.

I'm off to take a look riiigghhttt....now!

Nikolai, welcome and well come to the Archive!

A good Search word for this site is "camail". Should get you a lot of what we've got here. Construction, attachment to a bascinet, refinements, they're all there.

Good instructions for making expansions, which your intended manner of camail construction seems to be, can be found on Trevor Barker's excellent page Butted Mail. It has diagrams. A camail is much like the cowl portion of a mail coif.

About 4 expansions per linkrow of the camail seems to give plenty of expansion sufficient to allow the camail to lie evenly upon a flat surface, which is plenty enough. Cutting it back to 3 per linkrow yields a camail built in a shallow cone, which accords with one's more or less conical shape at the shoulders.

I appreciate your guy's recommendations. I already know more than I did before.
Thanks again, Nikolai