Riveted maille is a go

[Armourkris]

Today i made my first successful attempt at riveted maille from scratch. YAY

Of my original 16 test rings, 12 came out with "good" overlaps. Of the 12 with good overlaps, 8 were ok and 4 were passable, just. When it came time to punch them 8 punched good, 4 were off center enough that i would normally have discarded them. Since this was just a test however, i opted to rivet them all anyways. My set tongs worked perfectly but 3 rings failed in the riveting. these 3 were from the ones that I would have otherwise discarded. the rings failed where the expanding rivet caused the side of a hole to tear out. even with this failure the rings are considerably stronger than 14ga. 3/8id butted rings. I'm especially happy with that since my initial test rings were 16ga 1/2" id.

For my second test batch I made 18 rings in 16ga, 3/8" id. Of these 18 rings 14 came out with good overlaps, 4 failed utterly. of those 14, 5 of them were even pretty, the rest were only ok, and they were almost all better than the first batch. When it came to riveting these rings 3 failed, but only one failed ring was catastrophic. the other 2 have visible rips where the rivet caused the hole to tear out, but were still strong enough that when i tried to twist them apart the ring failed before the rivet.

all in all I'm quite happy with my first successful attempt at this.
I think that the single biggest thing i can do to improve the quality of my rings and generally speed things up will be improving my flattening technique. right now I'm just smacking my rings with a hammer and an ASO. In the next little bit i plan on rigging up a piston and trying to make a flattening bit for my Whitney punch. we'll see what works best.

[Benedek]

I'm very interested in seeing what you are able to make of this.


Just an idea from someone who is not an expert. Would it be better to use a piston or a lever action to flatten your rings. Think along the lines of ferriers nippers but with flat portions on the jaw part. Something big enough to be hard mounted to a work bench.

Put in your ring, close the jaws, whack with a hammer or mallet?

Just trying to think outside of the box.

Best of luck and keep us updated.

[Armourkris]

I have a couple ideas for flattening my rings.

firstly, I've got a spare set of punches and dies for my Whitney knockoff. I'm going to grind just a little off one of my 9/32 punch and put in a... I guess anvil is the term instead of a die. then see if a ton or so of leverage is enough to flatten my overlaps, if not I'll try a length of pipe on the handle. hopefully that will work.

Plan B is to rig up something like a spring fuller, so i can just place in a ring and mash the top of the fuller with a hammer

and lastly, plan C is to go with the old fashioned piston approach. I've got small chunk off a hydraulic ram that would make a damn good piston if i can just find a chunk of metal to fit around it.

[Gryffinclaw]

Hmm interesting, post some pics so we can watch the experiments. Keep up the good work.

[Armourkris]

SO, i spent the day out at my old shop.

first thing i did was try and modify a 1/4" punch for my Whitney knockoff to flatten rings.
it did a beautiful jub of flattening my rings about half way. so no go there. maybe it'll work with 18ga rings.

next i built myself a spring fuller like device.
it falttened my overlaps beautifully, but also un overlapped the ends more often than not.
then my shitty welds broke.

after that i used the remains of my spring fuller to give me a pedestal to hammer onto. that let me put just the part of the ring i wanted to flatten onto a small anvil and hit it with a small hammer. it actually worked ok, gave me an 80% success rate or so.

then at the end of the day i found a hunk of steel with a hole that fit my bit of hydraulic ram.

now i;m using a piston, it's by far the most consistent, fastest and easiest method so far.

I should be getting my camera back tomorrow, then i can give you all some pictures

[sha-ul]

there was an older thread where Doug Confere was making what he called "snake head" maille, you might try to dig it up& have a read

edit, here are the threads I came up with


http://forums.armourarchive.org/phpBB2/ ... hp?t=97632
http://forums.armourarchive.org/phpBB2/ ... hp?t=98120
http://forums.armourarchive.org/phpBB2/ ... hp?t=92303
http://forums.armourarchive.org/phpBB2/ ... ?p=1365303

you may have seen all of these already, if so please feel free to ignore me

[Armourkris]

Alright, It's been a couple weeks, but I've finally got some pics and some progress.

first off, here's the tools I'm using.

the knockoff whitney has a 1/16" bit in it. I'm planning on buying a couple more to experiment with making a drift to pierce rings instead of punching them.
The set tongs started out as a pair of carpenters nippers, and the piston is made from a big ass brake caliper and a couple chunks of steel I scrounged up. The mandrell is a roller off a garage door.

Here's a couple pictures of what I'm turning out. So far I've made about a square foot in the last week and a half or so. I'm glad I'm only making half length sleeves and not a whole shirt.