A certain friend of mine, who will remain nameless, recently talked me into trying to make chain mail. He thought and I agreed that if we could make some up, it would sell for a good price at the next geek convention we went to.And yeah. If we could make a few sets of some chain mail armor it would sell for a pretty penny. The full shirts go for around $350.00 each. All of the overhead cost is about $50.00 worth of steel wire.
So I spent about a week and a half experimenting on my own. Making rings and taking them apart again and starting over and getting pissed off. Getting my hands all nasty from the oil on the wire and rubbing some curious callouses into my fingers.
Finally I sought professional help.
"It's about time!" you say? No, not that kind of help.
I found a website that showed how to arrange the rings so they lay down properly. With diagrams and everything. Printed them suckers out.
And then I sat down this evening in front of my computer, put on my headphones and went back to watching "Adam-12" and "Emergency" on Netflix and started knitting steel rings together.
If you will refer back to the picture above, you will see four strands of chain mail about eight inches long. Not eight feet long. Eight inches.
That thirty two combined inches of chain mail represent three and a half hours work.
Of course that also includes all of the time I spent winding the wire around the mandrel and cutting the links before I started knitting them together. But still.
That three and a half hours represents about six square inches of chain mail and I need about 2400 square inches.
So if my math is correct (and it probably isn't) and I work around the clock I will have an entire shirt made in about..... 150 more days.
Honey! Is there any coffee made?
