The Armour Archive

Is it possible to have a haulberk made? If so, who can do it?

Could spring steel chainmaile chauses be made to?

I normaly work in weldwd spring stainless. Check out my website ( http://www.weldedchainmail.com ) A hauberk and chausses are no problem.

What is the weight of your Haulberks?

(I am thinking that spring steel chainmail will weigh less then normal mild chainmail. Reason: You can use less metal to make the rings and have the same durability.)

Talan: I am thinking that spring steel chainmail will weigh less then normal mild chainmail. Reason: You can use less metal to make the rings and have the same durability.

The differentiation is more between the joining mechanism than the type of metal. Butted mail is nominally 16ga round wire (.062 dia); and for greater durability, many work in 14ga. Knuut's welds his rings shut, and Forthcastle uses rivets. In Knuut's case, I believe the wire is nominally a .030x.060 rectangular cross-section. If you do the math, this is almost half the mass of a comparable 16ga ring, so the weight of a similar hauberk would weigh about half. How much that really is depends on the finished piece. My hauberk from Knuut is knee-length and very full; the total weight is ~ 30lbs. I have an 18ga round wire haubergeon from him, also, that comes in at about 18lbs.

Hope this helps... AoC

It also depends on your size. My hauberk from Knuut is knee length with long sleeves and a coif and weighs in at about 21 lbs according to the shipping label. I am 6'2" tall and weigh in at 200lbs.

I want chausses for christmas.

Sounds like I found what I am looking for. Thank all of you for your help.

Just to illustrate that I sometimes wind up talking out my *ss and need a periodic reality check, Thaddeus post inspired me to get off my fattening backside and check on my own statistics (I'm a little smaller than Thad).

Using the bathroom scale and a small, canvas army-surplus tool bag, I came up with the following weights:

Knuut flat wire full hauberk, long sleeved: 24.5 lbs
Knuut round wire haubergeon, demi-sleeves: 12.5 lbs
Forthcastle riveted hauberk, demi-sleeves: 18.4 lbs

Yes, I have a lot of mail, including chausses from Knuut ... AoC

I have haubergon of maille made from individvual "open" and "almost closed" spring steel links (16 gauge, 5/16" ID, galvanized) I managed to convice a Connecticut spring manufacturer firm to make for me back in the Fall of 1998--for about $375 shipped (and I got 3-4 quotes from elsewhere). I could literally not cut the links with the wirecutters I had used to build 2 shirts of butted 14 gauge maille in the 80s and early 90s. I had to use 10" linesman pliers to close the links and once shut--I NEVER threw a single link and I fought in that shirt a lot. The shirt weighs 20 lbs vs. my equivalent 14 gauge butted shirt which weighs 27 lbs--a noticable difference. I even have apic somewhere of me susupending the entire shirt by a single link. Fun stuff. Of course, I recently purchased some wedge-rivetted maille that I'm looking forward to tailoring--once I drop some damn weight (the medievalists' lament).

It was pretty damn unique in 1999 and prior to the recent proliferation of rivetted maille, I saw lots of butted stainless maille which still threw links at an alrming rate. So, I have a seeming one-of-a-kind shirt of spring steel, butted maille. Hope this helps.

Sorry, man , but the first hauberk I ever made ( finished in the early 1980s ) was of cut-up doorsprings. It is just as cohesive as you indicate, too, despite only being butted.

However, as real mail it wasn't very protective. I can thrust a Jaeger dagger straight through it without much trouble. It's fine for rattan, though....just a bit too inauthentic for me any more.

My early efforts may even predate Marshal's. With five other contributors, I organized an ordered in the late 70's for 100K 16ga, single-turned, butt-joined springs from a local manufacturer (Chicago). A shirt of 6-in-1 took ~14K rings (the rings were a little too large for 4-in-1; a designer error ). I don't remember the weight, but we could ask the last known owner (a Midrealm knight of my acquaintance).

This was not an original idea. I was inspired by a similar effort by Marc Rengarth, who I understand may still be active somewhere in Ohio.

That said, I would not compare even this work with either Knuut's or Steve's. Nor would I invest the effort in making it myself when products of this quality are so readily available today. I guess I'm just getting old...

Alfred of Carlyle

It was on the heigh side of 30 pounds as I remember.

For any given wire type and link geometry, a closed link (welded, riveted, punched or silver soldered) will be at least 10 and possibly more than 20 times as strong as an unclosed link. links with a large ratio of inside diameter to wire cross section tend toward the larger values

I had an e-mail from Mark about 2 years ago . He was still living in the far western 'burbs of Chicago and trying to draw mail worthy wire from the last of that batch of real wrought iron we got in 1977.

'Old age" gets worse every year!

Hey, my apologies if my post was read as claiming any sort of "originality" in the spring steel butted maille department. But it WAS pretty unique in my experience, in that I managed to get a spring manufacturer to make me individual links...perhaps not though. I cut my SCA teeth (and then left them) in the Barony of Black Diamond in 1985-1986, when (now Count/Sir) Thorbrandr of Atlantia was 19 (soph) and I was an 18 year old freshman! Dirik (sp?) of Black Diamond (also knighted?) also at time had made a shirt of maille using cut springs and he used to "pay" fellow dormitory residents to help cut and close links by buying the pizza in the TV lounge. This predated me by a year or so.

I'm looking forward to using my rivetted maille in the coming months...

No worries. It's just that the pedant in me insists on reading the word "unique" in its original sense of "the only one in existence".

I myself got the idea of cutting up doorsprings from a written
source---maybe the "Hammer" or the SCA's "Known World Handbook". So undoubtedly the idea of using spring steel goes a good way back.

It's realy not difficult to get spring manufacturers to make mail links. You just have to order realy large quantities and be willing to pay (on time and without whimpering) what they ask. Before I got my own spring coiler I used to have three different suppliers here in the Phoenix area and two more in L.A for backup. One had a 250 pound minimum order (and the lowest price per pound) and the other two had $200 minimums.

I contacted for or 5 springmakers back in 1998 (7 years ago; time flies!) and all were willing to do it but 2 had steep prices. I went with a CT-based co. because their costs were in the ballpark of what I was willing to pay and they could make two kinds of links: mostly closed and just opened enough to do the linking without difficulty and for the same price. Oh, they were also very nice to deal with, had no minimum order, and they got the links to me in less than a month. I was quite pleased with how it all turned out in the end.