Individual Liberty — Individual Responsibility 

Chain Maille

I’ve finished my first piece of chain maille. It’s a ten by ten square of maille made from galvanized steel rings that came in a kit provided by Horse ‘n’ Round. Altogether it took about four or five hours to make, in the idle moments between other tasks. This is how things looked when I posted yesterday.

Working with the rings while the maille is in this state is a constant battle trying to get them to lay right so you can see what you’re doing. When you pick the piece up to add another ring, it flops about and some of the rings flip over. Untangling that can take a bit of time. It gets easier as you go along though. After a couple of hours of work, this is how things looked last night.

This morning, I spent another hour or so at it. I finally finished the piece at about 11:30 this morning. I think it came out fairly decent for a first effort. The finished size of this piece is about 4½ inches by 3½ inches, and 181 rings went into its construction. To make a full set of chain maille as armor would take about 10,000 rings, and you’d want to use smaller and stiffer rings to make the material stronger.

As I went along, I got faster at the process. I also spent a little time online looking at a few resources that provide materials and hints for how to do this better. One site that I found,  The Ring Lord, offers everything you’d need to make chain maille from scratch – or at least from raw wire. They sell the wire in rolls, in coils, or cut into rings. They also sell tools for working with the wire from mandrels for coiling it, saws to cut it with, pliers to knit the rings together, and welding equipment to fuse the ends for extra strength.

My next project will probably be another piece like this one using stainless steel rings. The Ring Lord sells these (SS12716) in bulk for about $8.25 a pound. Two pounds of these would make about three patches of maille the size of this one, a decent size for a coaster. If I can work with those and manage to make a good quality piece then I’ll get more ambitious and try for something a bit larger.

The pattern I used for this first piece is called a four in one pattern, because every interior ring in the pattern has four rings linked into it. It’s fairly loose and flexible and it’s the pattern most commonly associated with chain maille. Another pattern that’s used for armor is the six in one pattern, so named because every interior ring in the pattern is linked to six other rings. It’s somewhat denser and less flexible than the four in one pattern, but it’s good for areas that you might want more protection. I had enough rings left over from my kit to make a small (very small) patch of this.

This is turning out to be a lot of fun.