The Armour Archive

What gauge of steel is needed for a historically accurate maille haulberk that is flat ring riveted and also what should inside and outside mm be.

I have made butted maille before but I am attempting to make my first set of riveted.


Thanks,
Michael

I think the sizes varied. I have some original riveted links from a hauberk and it looks like it was around 16 gauge with an inside diameter of around...(im guessing off the top of my head) maybe 10 to 12mm.


Mike

extant examples in the local museum (most of them 17thC) look to be more in the 6mm ID range (that's 1/4" for the metrically impaired)

I think that 6mm is about the most common id for rivetted rings. There's a chart floating around somewhere out there with a bunch of examples, but I can't seem to find it right now.

My impression, which may be very wrong, is that an awful lot of historic maille roughly corresponded to a modern size of 18g wire, pre-flattening. I don't know what the mm's would be, but an 18 g 3/8 inch ID ring, flattened is waht I remember hearing an awful lot. That ID, by the way, is AFTER the ring has been overlapped.

metow2 wrote:What gauge of steel is needed for a historically accurate maille haulberk that is flat ring riveted and also what should inside and outside mm be.

Mail varies a lot and will depend on what time and provenance you are trying to emulate and what type of garment you are making. It even varied withing the same garment sometimes.
Most of it is not all that flat, and the inside:outside difference will depend very much on how much you flatten it.

As has already been said, about 6mm ID is good. It does not need to be very thik wire. 16 ga is too think. It seems that around 1-1.2mm was common.

Erik

Trying to find 18 gauge non-galvy baling wire is difficult these days. The solution may be to get reels of .045" or so MIG wire for welding mild steel and use that. It's a pretty fair approximation of 18 gauge SWG.

I initially coil wire around a 3/8" mandrel, clip and flatten, then squeeze the cut and prelim-flattened links down around a 5/16" mandrel, then flatten the resulting overlaps. An ID of 5/16" puts you right about the middle of the bell curve of the known historical diameter range, which ranges from 1/8" to 1/2".

P.S.: Any idea why people stick an L into the middle of "hauberk?" I've seen this more than once.

17g electric fence wire is easy enough to find. The only prob I have is my wedge-rivet punch is too big for that gauge of wire and I'm too inept to make some new punches myself.

Try this:
http://www.wallacecollection.org/i_s/publications/mail_construction.htm

Also, there is an essay here on AA that details what mail was used in various periods and cultures:
http://www.armourarchive.org/essays/essay__maille_timetable.shtml

David Blackmane wrote:17g electric fence wire is easy enough to find. The only prob I have is my wedge-rivet punch is too big for that gauge of wire and I'm too inept to make some new punches myself.

Try grinding the piercing drifts from masonry nails. A box of these is pretty cheap and you have a lot of hard nails to play with -- and they are not so darn big, either. Nothing to the shaping but filing or grinding them on a carborundum stone -- nothing adept about it.

15th-16th century maille used under armor was pretty different from amateur riveted maille of today.

5 - 6 mm external diameter, wire is round far thinner than 1 mm, maybe less than half in some cases, rivets are needle size.

I spent a good hour yesterday in my town's armor museum (Brescia's MArzoli, my favourite walk after work), observing swords and maille with a critical eye.

Modern reconstruction are perhaps good for the high middle ages, but rings in the renaissance were really thin, I wonder how much patience was necessary to make them.

I saw in person the mantova's Xv century maille sabatons (Grazie's armors), they too are as thin as above stated, round rings, verey little rings with riveting made by using possibly lenses (water filled glass bowls).



Only the place where the rivets goes is flattened, but in a tapered way.

All in all real renaissance maille looks like the work of patient jewellers.

a pic (from one side only)