chainmail bernie ....45 degree design question

[BjarkiTheBear]

I have been doing chainmail for the past 13 years or so, this is my first shirt, I'm using 16 g 1/4 ring all stainless steel, on a 45 degree pattern( just the yoke) is it suppose to lay flat when all connectedim using the blade turner 45 design .... Any help would be greatly appreciated .....thanks. bjarki

[Konstantin the Red]

I wouldn't use the Bladeturner, but the Trevor Barker/Farisles. Historical, tailored, livable too. Straight off the screen, the BT lacks forward sleeve bias, which is wanted to give full arm mobility with sleeves, forward and across, where the freedom is needed.

[BjarkiTheBear]

That's what I was wondering .... Do u kind sir know of a site where I may get the specs for it ? Or is it a start T design ?

[wcallen]

The authentic shirts I have played with are all made with a straight T design to the arms. No 45 degree stuff in the yoke.

For any good one the arms are cocked forward, and often they are tailored to provide additional space where needed and eliminate bagging where the material isn't needed.

The ones I did are wider in the back than the front, taper from about the bottom of the shoulder blade to the top and toward the waist and then flair a little over the hips. Much of the taper is in the back - which mimics the shape of the human body.

I didn't work from a pattern, just did it.

You can at least get a little idea of overall form looking at these shirts and sleeves:
http://www.allenantiques.com/Armour-Mai ... ction.html

They don't provide any good hints on tailoring, except the sleeves.

Wade

[Konstantin the Red]

Here ya go: http://homepage.ntlworld.com/trevor.barker/farisles/guilds/armour/mail.htm. A Google search would have gotten you the same, I'm sure.

It is more or less a tailored T if you want to call it that. I differentiate mailshirts by their shoulder sections, as there are a good many ways to build shirts of mail that all seem to work quite well. Trevor Barker doesn't call it this, but I call his pattern of shoulder the European Modified Square, as the shoulder is a rectangle across the shoulders, shoulder point to shoulder point, with a neckhole offset to forward, and expansion zones inserted into slits to give ease behind the shoulder (hence, the Modified) for arm mobility in sleeves.

Practically every extant historical mailshirt that has come down to us was made in this way. A bit surprising how narrow they were about it. It looks like they got a lot more experimental, even radical, with constructing coifs. But not shirts. Funny.

Constructing a mailshirt shoulder as a Barrel & Straps ends up being an unmodified rectangle by the time everything is filled in. Just different assembly steps.

The Bladeturner is the simplest kind of what I call a Yoke-top shirt. I also call it a 4-Trapezoids, as when you assemble all the bits they instruct you to weave, you end up with four truncated triangles mitering together like the sides of a picture frame. You can assemble a yoke top out of just four such pieces or you can break the whole affair up into an array of triangles and rectangles in alternation. When assembled, a Yoke-top's linkrows make concentric polygons: a linkrow will go straight for a bit, take an angle, and go on in a straight line again until the next angle.

Using expansions instead of 45-degree joins gives linkrows in the shoulder sections that curve. This is what I call a Mantle-top. It is like the cowl part of a mail coif. The linkrows are in circular curves and make concentric circles. Makes a nice round neckhole naturally, too. A variation on this is to make the mantle top as an oval, where the linkrows trace out lines like those of a hooked rug. This accommodates the fact that you are wider shoulder to shoulder than you are chest to spine. It doesn't take a lot to ovalize such a top -- just a handspan of straight-weave Euro-4-1 mail center front and center back, with the lion's share of expansions now more concentrated towards the shoulders.

Both Mantletop and Yoketop naturally give sleeves with the mail in closed hang, rather than the open hang of Barrel&Straps or Euro Modified Square. Closed hang sleeves work easiest as half or short sleeves. In contrast, open hang sleeves are easier to make elbows in, using the regular kind of expansions to give a bit of a bagginess there. Looks a lot like the heel of a sock, and socklike, the long sleeve takes a bend at the elbow.

[BjarkiTheBear]

I have most of all the pieces constructed for the 45 degree angle .... All I need to do is finish connecting the small rectangle pieces to the already done front and back yoke pieces ....I was hoping for 3/4 sleeves .... How would the 45 degree design handle that instead of short sleeves ...? Thanks for the further knowledge konstantine

[Konstantin the Red]

Not as easily, the expansion-out of the elbow being the question. You'd use the "Whole row expansion" method from the Trevor Barker page, which is a bit clunkier in final result than the "column" regular expansion. I call these the "column" expansions because what they expand is riding vertically upon the wearer when they are incorporated in body and skirt of a mail shirt/hauberk. Vertically in the case of closed-hang sleeves like yours too.

If you're willing to accept a slightly shorter sleeve and a bit lighter-weight shirt, you might use 5/8 sleeves, coming down just a little past the elbow, and you might put expansions in the very end of the sleeve to bell it out slightly for ease about your elbow.

Summing up: short sleeve no problem; half sleeve no problem; 5/8 sleeve might need to get fancy, 3/4 same thing; long sleeve you'll have to be clever about the elbow and you're not likely to manage the gentle banana-bend that is usual in mail sleeves without whole-row expansions/contractions about the point of the elbow, but contracting the lower arm to taper the sleeve some towards the wrist to lighten this part and to keep it from slopping about will present no difficulty at all, just use regular contractions and remember to leave enough final circumference at the wrist that you can get your hand through.

Mid-fourteenth, it was known from artwork of the time that a short slit might be used to really free up the 5/8 or even the 3/4 sleeve. The depictions of such sleeves show hard vambraces coming out of them, and gauntleted hands.

My other drop o' wisdom about the European Modified Square, or Rectangle if you will, manner of shirt construction is it suggests to me mail shirts were built modular: that the mail maker, the Ringharnischer, not so much the lord of the rings as the jack, constructed mail shirts to size or to order from prefabricated squares and rectangles of various sizes and proportions, and probably prefabbed expansion-contraction arrays too, all of which could conveniently be zipped together in a final assembly, from inventory. Even the triangular expansion/contraction zones zip in in the regular E4-1 joining-up, as their edges are in good regular weave; all the funny stuff went on inside the expansion zone. Other expansion and sometimes contraction might go on between the various rectangular pieces, but seemingly never within them -- about their edges only. You might in this way account for an isolated expansion or two in the middle of a large area that is otherwise without anomalies, but which could use a bit of flaring out, for expansions occur more often this way than contractions, and show up in useful spots like haburgeon skirts.

I've been pushing this theory for years, and the eminent Erik D. Schmid, mail's Ph.D, seems to regard the idea with favor. He may be eminent through rigorous scholarship about mail, but mail ain't made him rich, I can say that. And he charges about a dime a link too; his work is museum-grade stuff, very meticulously matching historic models in all particulars.

[BjarkiTheBear]

I'm in always pursuit of more knowledge the more the merrier..... So with few expansions rows for the elbows it might just work with what I have ..... I shall test it out and post some pics later of what I do I have so far....like my uncle always said their always some one smarter than me that wrote a book about it.... Thanks again sir

[Konstantin the Red]

Oh, yeah... say "Bernie," write byrnie -- a quite old word that seems simply to have meant "armor." Used commonly nowadays to denote a torso-only mail shirt that doesn't go much below the beltline, and sleeveless or very short sleeves at most.

Likely the obscure and ancient Frankish "broigne" may have been the same thing. There was a notion going around among Continental armor authorities that it was something other than mail, but the notion appears quite unsupported. The word itself seems exactly like a Frenchification of "byrnie" in any case, or even more of something that sounded like the Slavs' bronya. Every language across the northern tier of Europe from Britain to Russia has a word for armor, in all available senses though of various vintage, with a B-R-N root inside it.

[BjarkiTheBear]

I have noticed some of the names having that similar sound ...its rather intriguing that the same sound is within the same name in so many different dialects and languages.....dut when a yoke with a 45 is laid on a flat surface. Dose it lay flat ..... Like the strap and barrel type with out the sides being connected ?

[Konstantin the Red]

Yes, it would or should lie flat, if by flat you mean it doesn't hump up or stretch out way extended anywhere, but just looks like a really fat picture frame, with those mitered joins extending from neck to each corner.

Frankly, at that stage it can be much improved by inserting a handsbreadth more of mail in the center of the back trapezoid, right down the spine. Makes the whole thing come out a little crooked now, unless you push the back trapezoid together into a rather compressed state. This gives "forward and across" freedom to the arms in the sleeves. The original BT scheme doesn't plan for this and that's too bad. Mucks with the fit and the livability.

If the stretching-out is really around the neckhole and noplace else, that's not really bad or anything, as your shoulders from your neck to the points of your shoulders is really just a potato-chip-bent shallow cone shape anyway. So a shallow conical shape to the shoulder section isn't bad. Extra mail on the back trapezoid is actually good.

But all in all, I'd build shirts more per Trevor Barker's Butted Mail etcetera than by Bladeturner/Colluphid/Area-51 (all the same) plans. BT is rather better for first-attempt plate pieces.