The Armour Archive

Boza wrote:

Konstantin the Red wrote:I just hit links with a heavy hammer -- about 1,5 kilo -- to flatten them between the hammer and an anvil. I flatten cut links, overlap them, then flatten the overlaps more to finish flattening the entire link.

Konstantin, so in other words, you cut then overlap. Do you have any pics related to this? I'm cutting the links already overlapped, with small chisel. Btw yesterday I tried flattening by hammer/anvil only, it works fine after some practice; open question to me is whether I'll be able to punch resulting 0.9 mm thickness with tools as of now, but will try

I find it easier to cut, flatten, overlap, flatten again. When they are overlapped after getting at least the link ends flattened, the ends don't slip off each other the way leaving the links' wire round will do. Without that first flattening there was an awful lot of slipping off and other defects. When I started flattening the ends quite flat, the defect rate went to just about zero. Almost the only links I couldn't use were the ones I lost in the lawn from hitting them the wrong way with the hammer and launching them off the anvil too fast to see them go. They would just vanish!

The process takes two mandrels, the initial mandrel and the final diameter mandrel. The initial mandrel is about 1,5mm larger than the final one. Other tools are a hammer and anvil (or substitute for an anvil), a wire cutter or 200mm-size bolt-cutter, a hard surface such as concrete or a steel plate, and either a large plank of wood or a needlenose plier.

The overlapping methods I use depend on whether I want to do something else along with overlapping or not.

1. Roll With Pressure. Put some pre-flattened links still at their original coiled diameter onto the smaller final-diameter mandrel. Roll the links and mandrel back and forth on a hard surface -- I use the concrete of my patio -- with a length of thick wooden plank, pressing down quite firmly. The pressure and the rolling back and forth squeezes the links down to the final-mandrel diameter, which is the links' finished diameter. Inspect the links afterwards, as some of them may not quite be squeezed down far enough and will need adjusting.

Some links will be either too large or too small after adjusting, from variations in hand cutting them from the coils initially, or else from poor cutting. Cull these out of the batch and use them for other projects. Markings on the nose of a needlenose plier make a good gauge. I use three marks: next-size-smaller, just-right, and too-large/next size larger.

For adjusting links that need help, I correct their overlap to the desired amount, and then see if this has made the link too small or too large. The desired overlap is about 3/16 of an inch, or about 7mm.

After all this, back they go to my anvil to flatten out the overlaps as thin as the rest of the link is, so the overlaps spread out nearly twice as broad as the rest of the link. A controlled blow with a heavy hammer works better than hitting the link hard and fast with a lighter hammer: the link needs a few hundredths of a second to spread out properly, so the overlap takes on a cross section like =, rather than one of two triangles, which is something you can't rivet.

2. Squeeze With Pliers. This one's simpler to explain: take the pre-flattened initial-diameter links and squeeze them down on the end of the final-diameter mandrel with pliers. I use needlenose pliers for this. I inspect each link as I squeeze it down, culling out links of the wrong sizes. The right size links just accumulate on the mandrel until I take them off and put them in their container, awaiting normalizing/annealing and piercing for rivets.

This method works well while watching television or reading The Armour Archive on your computer.

Boza wrote:Erik, have you examinated this mail? I must say the local literature is lacking this level of facts, hence any further details will be welcome.

Two years ago. The reason details are so lacking is because the church will not allow it to be examined except under the most extreme circumstances. The helmet has received far greater attention than the shirt ever has, or most likely will for that matter.

The riveted links do show a good deal of wear and as such could have been in the range of 1mm thickness when new. The solid links were punched from a sheet. There has been a lot of repair work done to the piece over the years as well. This is easily identified by noticing the numerous links in the shirt that were never riveted. Nor were they pierced for that matter either.

In any event it really is a very interesting piece.

J.Junco, Konstantin - can you please post picture(s) of your punching tool(s)?

Over the weekend I attempted to convert my process to wedge rivets, using sharpened 2 mm HSS drill bit; however results are - umm - questionable. I got only some 20% success rate for making right hole and link waste is simply tremendous; although I'm considering mounting of punch into tongs, I'll welcome any experiences.

I'm trying masonry nails -- the kind of hard nails you can hammer into concrete with a big enough hammer -- with their points reshaped by filing or grinding from the pyramidal form they come with to something more like the blade of a screwdriver -- a very small screwdriver. It's easy to make up several, and masonry nails don't cost much.

I would use these with a small hammer to drive them, on either the end grain of a hardwood block or similar dense but not too hard sort of backing, or else a piece of thick steel with a small hole drilled into it for the piercing drift to be hammered into.

Technically, a punch is a tool that makes a hole by removing a piece of metal, or knocking out a slug. A drift makes a hole by pushing metal aside -- hence, what we're using for this is a drift. We certainly don't have so much metal there in a link overlap that we should lose any of it.

Thank you very much, Konstantin - now I know I'm using drift.

Basically from your description it looks like I took the same approach: hammer and/or piece of steel with drilled hole to hold the piercing drift. Only difference is masonry nails vs. pyramid (better say, rectangle) sharpened drilling bit.

OK, i'll give a try yet to mounting piercing drift into thongs for better control over drifting; and hopefully post some pics this week.

I'm still using 1 mm wire and overlapped place width is around 1.5 mm, so really not much material to remove . For rivets, I just flattened same wire and cut into bunch of triangles, easy stuff.

I use pliers with the punch ( sometimes I punch too) or drift.
Too I use drill bit HHS for hard steel. I sharpen the tip round or like a little screwdriver ( but with 0'7-0'8 mm width), according to round or wedge rivet.
The overlap width is 1'8-2 mm before the punch.
I´ll put photos with the tools, the drill bit and mail, up and back of the rings.
Regards
Julio

Really nice links, Julio. Compared to those in MRS Journal vol. 1 - Wallace collection), they look pretty close!

Here are some pics of my today's session. Rings are freely flattened by two heavy hammers (one in static position, 2nd hitting 1st one). Drifting tool is using same modified nippers as pre-flattening one posted before, I just exchanged the bolts with one as holder of 2mm drill bit and 2nd with small hole just in right place.



Up of rings:


Up of rings, different view:


Back of rings:


Result after bit of playing with rivets - finding the right thickness. Note one ring is missing it's rivet, I do not yet final version of tool to finalize "head", so the triangles go to parallel space sometime...

I gotta ask...what's stronger, welded or riveted? (and don't get started on historical authenticity, that's not my thing...I'm just here to make armor, not to re-create. I fully respect those who do, it's just not what I'm into.)

I gotta ask...what's stronger, welded or riveted? (and don't get started on historical authenticity, that's not my thing...I'm just here to make armor, not to re-create. I fully respect those who do, it's just now what I'm into.)

For reenactment purposes they are about the same. You might lose a few poorly riveted rings over time but welded and riveted are both very strong.

Now, if my life depended on it, I would wear welded maille rather than riveted. One can use spring steel for welded maille while with riveted you are pretty much stuck with softer wire and quality control is a little harder to maintain.

Do your part in the fastening, Infectious -- welcome and well come to the Archive, by the way! -- and either will be every bit as strong as you'd need it to be. They will, link for link, show strength of ten or twelve times that of butted easily, which will do anything you expect of mail. To elevate the strength of a mail fabric further, use smaller links and the same wire.

If you'd rather have really light mail, well, eight or nine times the strength is still pretty good, right?

I made some progress on round rivets and punched rings too:

one side:


another side:


What's great that whole hauberk ~AD 1100 would weight some 9kg if made from these rings... but hardly anyone would pay it as it will take me some 1 year to make it

Looks pretty good Boza. Can you tell me what kind of steel you are using and maybe post a pic of the rivets themselves. I recently got into making maille and jumped in headfirst with riveted. Just getting some ideas what other people do, their techniques and whatnot.

The steel is the weakest one I can buy in form of wire commercially, with carbon up to 0.03%. Closest US standard I guess is SAE 1006. In fact it's hard yet too much for me, so annealing required.

The rivets are cut by tongs or chisel from 0.8mm wire.

Just a short message, the maille from Boza will be available that can be added to the armour you want on my webpages. Just working on some details to put it there over the weekend.

Jiri

A word about the common difference between modern reproduction mail and period mail.

Modern attempts commonly flatten the overlap to the same thickness as the flattened wire.

In period the overlap was flattened less than the wire. It was thicker than the wire pre-piercing. This was so that in setting the rivet a swaging pliers with wells for the overlap could compress and shape the overlap into a rounded or pent roofed form. This had two effects.

1) It made for more thickness and strength at the rivet point (weakest spot)
2) It compressed the metal of the link around the rivet and shaped the link ends smoothly into the mire making less to catch and a stronger joint.

If you really want mail that looks period ( and going to all this trouble to make the stuff, you should) then make a final swaging pliers and do not flatten the overlap down to the wire thickness.

By the way this also holds true for mail with round link wire.

Hope this helps,
Mark

Latest progress: ID ~6mm, wire ~1mm.

Hi, Boza! Long time no see!

If your wanting to get into mailing; try the jewelry weaves in something "affordable" (something from Micheal's or Home Depot) till you get the hang of the weave, then get into something a little more expensive.

One thing to think about is using some of the solutions to give a patins to copper and other metals, not to mention some colors of metals look better on some then others.

If you make a set of ??? for say a dancer, you may be able to use the set or items to barter for something else that you may need/want.

Don

Don, keep in mind this thread started in 2008 and that Argyle has made much progress since then. This one's kind of a ressurect-o-thread.

Sorry, working a night shift

Anywho, not bad info for anyone doing a search I guess.

I seem to recall one of the archive members armouring to stave off the bordem from healing some description of a service related injury.

After taking a second look at the thread, I realised it was a rehash (I was wondering why some bastard would hijack a newbie's thread)

Don