Why that’s just riveting
Published Tue, Feb 12 2013 4:59 PM
I arrived home from work today to see a large cardboard box by my door. Well, O.K. it wasn’t that large but it was heavy at just over 38 pounds. Finally, after over a year of waiting I can begin my next maille project. Opening the box I found… paper. But underneath the paper were 24 plastic bags and an oblong plastic wrapped gizmo. They were coated in machine oil so I took a couple out and set them on my small work tray.
I unwrapped the bag (yes, the bag was still wrapped) and the gizmo. Now I have a rivet set tool a large bag and a small bag.
The small bag contains rivets, the large bag contains overlapped rings of 16 gauge mild steel. And they’re all coated in oil (mild steel does rust after all). I went and grabbed my hauberk (made of 16 gauge stainless steel butted rings with a 5/16” inner diameter) for comparison and pulled out a rivet and a couple of rings.
Here’s the comparison. You might notice that the new rings have a somewhat larger diameter than the stainless rings I used in the hauberk. They’re also not as shiny, and if you click on the image you’ll see they’re coated with gunk. There’s also an area where the ends overlap and have been flattened and a hole punched through. One thing I’ve noted already, the hole is not uniformly positioned. It’s right on the edge of the flattened area in some cases, in others it’s right in the center. In this case, the hole in the two pieces doesn’t quite line up. That will make setting rivets fun (he said with his tongue stuck so hard into his cheek that it’s a wonder anyone understood what he said, including himself).
So now what? Well, obviously we’ve got to set a few rivets and start making chain. But first how about just a ring and its associated rivet?
And the first closed ring with set rivet.
Finally, a single unit of European 4 in 1 riveted maille.
The fun has begun. I have 24,000 rings and rivets to put together to make my next hauberk and coif. I may end up needing more rings. We’ll see as I get closer to project completion. The last one took me 100 hours to build. A good part of that was purely mechanical as I got the hang of opening and closing rings fairly quickly. Setting the rivets and joining the rings into maille seems to take a bit more time (these 5 took me about 15 minutes, but I was taking pictures too), but it has been a couple of years.
Maybe I’ll be done in time for the Renaissance Festival this spring. We’ll just have to see.
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David responded with:
 | Looks like more fun than setting rivets using a hammer and anvil. :-) |
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