Dusting off the cobwebs

[Mac]

Would it be wrong to rivet the straps on the inside of the maille? I believe it would give a smoother appearance to the collar? The strap could perhaps even be sewn to the lining and held in place with a rivet..

Xt,

The straps and buckles have to be on the outside so you can get to them. Take a moment to make up a little diagram and you will see what I mean.

If you wanted a smoother look, you could use one of those hinge-like fasteners, but there would be not adjustment.

Mac

[Mac]

Nice to see you back on track, Mac. I have a question regarding the hook, does it hold the collar together just by friction?

Thanks, Nick!

The hook keeps the underlapped part of the collar from sagging. Think about it. The mail is under tension from the rivet of the strap, all the way around the neck to the rivet of the buckle. If these attachment points were right at the edges of the mail, than the whole collar would be under tension. However, that would not give you any overlap. Indeed, the edges of the mail would end up some distance apart. In order to get an overlap, one of the fastening elements (either the strap or the buckle) must be located a couple of inches in from the edge. That leaves a couple of inches of mail with nothing to hold it up. Left to its own, it will sag, and the whole thing will look bad. The hook keeps that from happening by hanging the weight of the underlap on a section of mail that is under tension.

Does that all make sense?

Mac

[Mac]

Mac, regarding the fabric, I wouldn't have thought to have it done without a liner; even with a dense weave that could stand on its own, bare rings against skin (aside from the acidity of sweat on the metal) is at best not enjoyable (hot or cold) and at worst unbearable.

JJ,

I expected to put in a liner, but thought that it would be illustrative to show how much good came of it beyond just the creature comfort.

Mac

[Mac]

I have a question about the maille at the elbow. I once saw a maille sleeve ages ago at the MIA that had a pronounced pitch to the sleeve, by which I mean if you look at the arm from the side below the elbow the wrist tilts forward.
_ (top of sleeve)
| | (upper arm)
/ / (Forearm)

I would imagine the pitch was achieved by having more rows over the back of the elbow and fewer at the interior of the elbow. I can't find a picture of the one I'm thinking of, but it was child sized and gold edged which makes me wonder if there is any evidence of sleeve pitch in maille elsewhere that you have noticed?

Considering the extreme allowance for elbow movement in 14th century sleeves, I wouldn't think it unlikely to find similar technology in patterning maille.

Estervig,

I'm sorry I missed your post. I hope you are still out there....

The "built in" elbow is pretty typical of mail sleeves. This will get you to a thread where I reconstruct a sleeve from authentic examples. forums.armourarchive.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=157253 and here is a thread where Tom B does the same. forums.armourarchive.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=171813&

Mac

[Mac]

That's an exciting looking hook! It has a liveliness in its lines. Are you cutting and filing it out of a scrap of thick sheet, or taking the time to smith it out of a piece of barstock?

Thank you, KI!

It turned out that 14ga., with the ends forged a bit thinner was heavier than was needed. I guess I would try 16ga. the next time. Even that might be more than is necessary. I'll bet that 19 or 20ga would do the job if hardened.

Mac

[Nicknizh]

Thanks, Nick!

The hook keeps the underlapped part of the collar from sagging. Think about it. The mail is under tension from the rivet of the strap, all the way around the neck to the rivet of the buckle. If these attachment points were right at the edges of the mail, than the whole collar would be under tension. However, that would not give you any overlap. Indeed, the edges of the mail would end up some distance apart. In order to get an overlap, one of the fastening elements (either the strap or the buckle) must be located a couple of inches in from the edge. That leaves a couple of inches of mail with nothing to hold it up. Left to its own, it will sag, and the whole thing will look bad. The hook keeps that from happening by hanging the weight of the underlap on a section of mail that is under tension.

Does that all make sense?

Mac

Yes, it does. Somehow, I thought it was the other way around, tension wise. Thank you for clarifying it.

[Kristoffer]

The straps and buckles have to be on the outside so you can get to them. Take a moment to make up a little diagram and you will see what I mean.

I was thinking that you just put the strap end on the inside of the maille and make sure the distance to the buckle is far enough. Buckle stays where it is, strap attach at the same point as now, only on the other side of the maille. Am I misunderstanding this then I would appreciate the diagram

[Mac]

Xt,

OK. I see what you mean. That would work just the same. I don't think you would do well to sew it to the lining, though. It's probably better to let the mail bear the tension. In any case, it looks like the most common thing is to have both the strap and the buckle riveted to the outside of the mail.

Mac

[Mac]

Mac,


As always I do have a question:
It looks like you have chosen the overlap direction to be the opposite of the majority of our slim extant samples.
It looks like most of them have the buckle and hook on the wearers left.
Obviously you have not permanently attached anything yet so it could easily be changed.

I did it arbitrarily. I may change it in the final version. As it stands, you get you use your right hand to manipulate the fastening, and that may be better for most folks. Of course, that presumes that one does up the fastening behind the head. I have not played around with it yet, but it might be easier to do in up in front and then rotate the mail.

There are two things to consider, really. The first is the overlap direction, and the other is which side the buckle goes on. Which ever side overlaps laps must have its fastener on the edge. That's usually the strap, but in at least one extant example it's the buckle. The hook must be on the underlapping side, regardless of whether that side has the buckle or the strap.

I will make a more careful study of our examples before I rivet it together for real.

Mac

[Mac]

OK.

I have just put the standard on and off a couple of times. First of all, I misremembered about what hands I used in fastening the buckle. This is what happens when a lefty tries to remember what he did to something behind his head. Perhaps switching the buckle and strap is a good plan...

Second... I tried putting it on with the fastenings in front and then rotating it all around to the back. The fastening part of the exercise went very smoothly, but the rotating part was very troublesome. All in all, if one has to put it on by one's self, it's probably best to do it up in back. The very best thing, of course, is to have an assistant to put it on for you.

Mac

[Kristoffer]

With the strap on the outside of the maille, I would place the buckle at the edge and overlap front to back. With overlap back to front, I would put the strap inside the maille.

Where is that great painting that show a collar like this in detail again?

[Mac]

Where is that great painting that show a collar like this in detail again?

This one? It's on Tom B's site. https://www.pinterest.com/tbiliter/medi ... nt-in-art/



Mac

[Kristoffer]

Ah, right. I remembered it differently. That lad has it in the front, then all you need is a mirror.

[Mac]

While out in the shop checking into what punches I needed to get to make solid brass mail rings, I took a quick pic of my handvise collection. I'm not obsessed, but I buy them when they are affordable.



I'd really like to have more of these old bench vises, but they are usually too expensive for me. I would guess that this one is probably from around 1900.



Mac

[RandallMoffett]

Those are neat. Neat you have found so many of them. I bet they are useful for all sorts for things!

RPM

[Mac]

I need about 420 solid brass rings, so the first step was to punch 1/2" discs out of .030" brass shim stock. The stock is 6" wide, so I cut off four approximate squares. Each one should yield up about 120 discs.



Next, I needed a jig to hold the discs in the right place while the centers are punched out. I had a similar jig for a different size of ring, so I made a template of that and cut it out of 16ga.



Here is where the jig will bolt onto the punch. I have drawn in some crosshairs to help figure out where the hole has to go.



I started my hole with a #30 punch, because that is the size that I use for my rivets, and it's as good a pilot for the drill as anything.



Here's the jig bolted in place, and the hole being punched.



Now we switch from .500" to .375"



The discs are fed into the jig, which gets them into approximately the right position....



...But it's the prick on the punch that really gets the discs centered nicely.



Here I'm bringing in the stripper. It will fetch up against the body of the tool while the punch is being withdrawn.



Here, I have turned the stripper over to show the little hook on one corner. Sorry about the bad focus.



That hook is used to grab the ring and flick it into the bucket.



You can see that the rings on the right are a bit "round" from the punching. Two smacks with a hammer gets them looking better.



And here are my rings!



Mac

[Kristoffer]

Are they just for the edge so you don't need any with rivets? I use my #5 JR punch to make washers but I really need to get one of those bench mounted punches with some different dies. It appears they are very practical for a lot of things.

[Mac]

Every other row in the dags will be solid rings. That will minimize the number of rings I will need to close.

The bench mounted Roper Whitney #17 has been with me for quite some time now. I bought it new back in the early 80s for punching the breaths on greathelms.

Mac

[Mac]

The punched brass rings are destined for the skirt. I bought the skirt as a skirt, and found the size and expansion were reasonable once I gathered it a bit into the waistband. It's current dagging was made by cutting stuff away. The convenient number was thirty dags.



The skirt fits OK. The dags are a bit small and a bit too numerous, and I would have just left it at that, but we decided that we really ought to have brass dags. This will be an opportunity to correct their size and number to accord better with our interpretation of the statue.

As far as I can tell by counting the visible ones and guessing about the ones under the tassets, the statue suggests a skirt with a total of 24 dags.




The dags that are on the skirt I made begin with six rings. If I make the new dags begin with seven rings, there will be room for twenty five and a bit. There are no bits of dags, so it will have to be twenty six. So... I've been making dags.



The dag making started off slowly, but then started experimenting with linking the rings without opening them first. Wade says he does them this way, and I have been looking for an opportunity to try. There are some counter-intuitive manipulations of the rings that make it all work more rapidly, but once you get the hang of it, you can really fly. I had a bit of concern that snapping the rings into one another would damage the fragile punching burr. That turns out to be no problem at all. In fact, it's the punching burr that makes it all hold together during the joining phase. I am anxious to see it this same technique can be used on round wire rings. If so, I am confident that it is "the way they did it".

There was a minor setback when I noticed somewhere in the middle of dag number ten that I was not doing "exactly" the same thing every time. It was then the I noticed the I had produced six dags which started with "right slope" and four with "left slope". It was not as bad as I feared. I only had to sacrifice five riveted rings on each of four to convert them over to the "majority party".


There are two ways to deal with the part where we need a whole number of dags, and not "twenty five and three sevenths" or what ever it ends up. The one way would be to gather a bit of the skirt into each of several dags in the back. The other is to add a bit of mail to the skirt to make it come out even. It never hurts to have a bit more fullness in the front of a skirt, so that's where I will add it.

Mac

[Tom B.]

The dag making started off slowly, but then started experimenting with linking the rings without opening them first. Wade says he does them this way, and I have been looking for an opportunity to try. There are some counter-intuitive manipulations of the rings that make it all work more rapidly, but once you get the hang of it, you can really fly. I had a bit of concern that snapping the rings into one another would damage the fragile punching burr. That turns out to be no problem at all. In fact, it's the punching burr that makes it all hold together during the joining phase. I am anxious to see it this same technique can be used on round wire rings. If so, I am confident that it is "the way they did it".

If you get this to work with the 6mm round rings I would be very interested.
Wade described it to me before and I got it to work on some 9mm flat rings but did not have much luck with the 6mm round.
Things were just a bit too crowded.

There was a minor setback when I noticed somewhere in the middle of dag number ten that I was not doing "exactly" the same thing every time. It was then the I noticed the I had produced six dags which started with "right slope" and four with "left slope". It was not as bad as I feared. I only had to sacrifice five riveted rings on each of four to convert them over to the "majority party".

I think that everyone who has worked on making mail in sections has done this a few times at least.
I know I have become sort of paranoid about this and check and recheck.
There is little worse than working several hours on a piece of mail only to find that the slope is going the wrong way so it won't match up with your previously made sections.

[Tom B.]

I am curious to see how you decide the mail skirt will be worn over the brayette.

[Mac]

I just installed nine of the dags using the "no pliers" technique. It's fast, but rough on the flesh. If you did this all day long since you were a kid, your fingers would be tough, and it would probably be not trouble at all. I'm going to give it a rest so I don't hurt myself.....

Mac

[Tableau]

Mac, I'm happy to see that you're back at this. I'm sorry the winter has been so hard on you. It was a tough one for me too. I hope the spring finds you soon.

[Mac]

I finally got all the brass dags installed last night. Strangely, when it was all said and done, I only needed 25 of the 26 I made. I checked the math, and it still does not make sense to me, but that's OK.

At the end, there was an overlap between dag 1 and dag 25, and some expansion would be needed. Rather than trusting to any math...I figured I would do this the easy way. I started by sliting the skirt up a bit to let the dags come together properly....



... and began filling in the mesh, beginning with the brass, and adding iron rings more or less to taste.



It turns out that I needed two more columns than I originally had. Since I began by clipping one column out, I would need to replace three columns. That meant I would need to have two expansions. The first one is here, four rows up from the edge. I did not want it too close to the edge, because that would not look good.



I put the other expansion a few rows above that, and closed things up.



It's going to look pretty good, I think. That stainless ring in the pic marks the front center. It will get removed when I am through with it.



My thanks to Dave Rylak (Cet) for kindly sending me some 9mm rings and round rivets for same! In the end, I had to reclaim rings from the offcuts to match what was already there, but the rivets were essential.

Mac

[Keegan Ingrassia]

That looks awesome!

What leather are you using to hold it 'round the waist? Also, I like that you've tied it shut, rather than using a metal buckle.

[Mac]

Mac, I'm happy to see that you're back at this. I'm sorry the winter has been so hard on you. It was a tough one for me too. I hope the spring finds you soon.

Thank you, Tab!

It's surprising, how many folks here have some sort of depression. It seems to come with the territory somehow.

Mac

[Mac]

That looks awesome!

What leather are you using to hold it 'round the waist? Also, I like that you've tied it shut, rather than using a metal buckle.

Thank you, KI!

I am trying to decide what to do about the closure and the waist band. Our only "surviving" waist band is/was the one on the missing breyette back from Churburg (Ch8) . It is said by Graf Trapp. (who called it a skirt) to have been a "fastened to a double strip of coarse canvas, on which is is stitched with a lace". Scallini includes a tiny picture of it, but the band is incomplete, and there is no trace of what might have fastened it.

I currently have the skirt mounted on a strip of 6 or 7 oz chrometan. I may switch over to a linen or hemp tape folded over, with the mail sandwiched between at the edges. That's my best guess about what was happening in the lost Churburg mail.

Mac

[Keegan Ingrassia]

Huh...the fabric tape makes perfect sense. It would be less likely to stretch out over time like the leather might. Less bulk, too, for comparable strength.

[Tom B.]

I may switch over to a linen or hemp tape folded over, with the mail sandwiched between at the edges. That's my best guess about what was happening in the lost Churburg mail.

Mac

I have not been able to find a linen or hemp tape wider than 3/4"
I have found webbing wider but I am not sure that is what I want.

[Mac]

I just ordered up some 2 1/2" webbing, so I hope it will do the trick. My concern is that it might be a bit heavy.

Mac

[Tom B.]

I just ordered up some 2 1/2" webbing, so I hope it will do the trick. My concern is that it might be a bit heavy.

Mac

That is exactly what I have been looking at.
I guess yet again I can wait and learn from your trail blazing.

How do you plan the brayette and skirt to be positioned relative to each other?
What about the arming points for the leg harness?
I have been wrestling with this myself.
Here is what I am thinking for possible configurations:

Scenario A
1. Cuirass waist high and tight right where it should be with only the arming doublet under it.
2. The top edge / waist of the brayette would be a bit below the cuirass waist.
Arming points from the doublet would need to pass through the brayette ??
(this is tough with modern 6mm mail & would be impossible with most real 15th century mail)
3. Mail skirt top edge higher on body than arming points but lower than brayette top edge.
4. Leg harness passes between the mail layers (over brayette under skirt) and is attached to points.

Scenario B
1. Curiass waist high and tight right where it should be with only the arming doublet under it.
2. Top edge of brayette and skirt colocated a bit below the cuirass waist.
Arming points from the doublet would still need to pass through the brayette ??
(this is tough with modern 6mm mail & would be impossible with most real 15th century mail)
3. Leg harness passes between the mail layers (over brayette under skirt) and is attached to points.

Scenario C
1. Cuirass waist high and tight right where it should be with only the arming doublet under it.
2. The top edge / waist of the mail skirt would be a bit below the cuirass waist.
3. Points originate from a section of doublet just a bit lower on the body than the top edge of the skirt.
4. Brayette top edge lower on body than arming points.
4. Leg harness passes between the mail layers (over brayette under skirt) and is attached to points.

I am working towards a variation on Scenario C but really am not sure if I have though all of this through.
There may be some things I have not though of or evidence that I have missed.

[Ian L]

Tom, I would just be concerned that there's only so much vertical real estate on the torso from which to comfortably belt anything that will be weight bearing. Combine that with the idea that the points for your leg harness can't be too high up, and it might be tricky to get 3 separate planes to not interfere with each other. Don't leg points usually wind up close to the plane of the insertion of the hip joint? How much lower can you belt a brayette and not have it fall off?

[Tom B.]

Tom, I would just be concerned that there's only so much vertical real estate on the torso from which to comfortably belt anything that will be weight bearing. Combine that with the idea that the points for your leg harness can't be too high up, and it might be tricky to get 3 separate planes to not interfere with each other. Don't leg points usually wind up close to the plane of the insertion of the hip joint? How much lower can you belt a brayette and not have it fall off?

You are right about the draw back there.
What I am trying right now is actually running the leg arming points through holes in the belt for the brayette.
Really both the skirt belt & the brayette belt are only about 1"-1.5" each.
So I am hoping to fit all of that into 3"-4" of space.

It seems doable but I have not gotten everything ready to give it a go yet.
In all of the other scenarios, or variations there of, there is a requirement for the points to pass through the mail of the brayette.
While I may be able to do that it just seems very inconvenient and an implausible method.

On the other hand maybe I am missing something.

[Keegan Ingrassia]

Mentally, I'm having trouble seeing the difficulty...perhaps because my mind is thinking arming cotte instead of a doublet.

From out to in...?
Cuirass || mail skirt (friction belted just below natural waist) || legs (pointed at hips) || doublet || brayette (friction belted just above hips) || hosen

Oh. Right...hosen need to be pointed to the doublet. Which means the brayette needs to treat the doublet and hosen as a single layer, and sit atop that group. That does make things more interesting...

[Arrakis]

Mentally, I'm having trouble seeing the difficulty...perhaps because my mind is thinking arming cotte instead of a doublet.

From out to in...?
Cuirass || mail skirt (friction belted just below natural waist) || legs (pointed at hips) || doublet || brayette (friction belted just above hips) || hosen

Oh. Right...hosen need to be pointed to the doublet. Which means the brayette needs to treat the doublet and hosen as a single layer, and sit atop that group. That does make things more interesting...

Any reason not to wear a separate very-light-weight doublet or sleeveless doublet under the arming doublet solely to hold up yer pants? Or do we just not have evidence of such?