8-1 I'm impressed. But to achieve that you're usually using low quality materials, like scraps as you said. I managed 10-1 but that was with like 1/2" rings, very poor quality and very heavy. Good thing galvanized steel is cheap!
(Note, I'd just appended, on my original message, after seeing your reply...)
The copper rings I used were made from totally anacrhonistic enamelled copper wire (of a gauge I forget, but maybe a tad over 1mm diameter) sourced on spools from a popular electrical outlet, wound on my own (scratch-built) ring-making rig and cut from the resulting spiral with tin-snips (which easily break, I find, when doing the same thing with galvenised steel garden-wire of roughly the same cross-section!). This cutting method gives a diagonal cut to the rings which means that you get sloped-overlapping ends on the rings that somewhat mitigate some of the problems I found with rings that I carefully cut to have
straight adjoining edges. I've
never attempted rivet-closed rings, it looked too much like hard work when I later went to a local Arms and Armour museum and watched the local craftswoman assembling a piece in this way.
I've never had much luck with already 'separate' split rings and washers, but I found I can manipulate my own varieties quite well. They're quite malleable, the copper ones, yet hold their shape reasonably. The galvenised steel ones are far tougher to open and close, but thus also stay much more firmly as rings, under the greatest stress. The 'practice rings' (so far unmentioned) that I made of standard green-plastic-coated garden wire (slightly thicker on the whole, but a lot of that being the plastic, the metal wire being thinner) that I mainly used to work out discontinuities (and various none-Euclidean features in early attempts to construct chainmail) are actually good enough to stay together under static conditions (i.e. while prototyping), but I wouldn't trust it for wearing "out and about", even if the end result of having virtually noiseless 'camo-chainmail' (for a forest environment) has some sort of
very anachronistic style point to it, for those that aren't sticklers to medieval reality. (And those that
are wouldn't have accepted the galvanised versions, either, but I've never made this stuff to be true-to-life authentic, just for fun.
I've also heard good things (when viewed at a distance only) for rings made of UPVC pipe of the right size cut into rings (and then either all, or a proportion of them, split, to later be plastic-glue re-welded), and then sprayed silver/whatever. Very light-weight. But hardly something that'd pass muster close-up.
Oh, and somewhere at home I've an (as yet incomplete) attempt at something
I'd consider micromail! Copper wire (as above) of a
much finer gauge, formed by wrapping around a random tool that has a diameter of not much thicker than the wider pencil-leads and (painstakingly!) cut into rings with two loops-worth (the only way I can get the ring to hold together!) and being put together as a
very fine mail mesh which I had
orignally planned to be the same area as (and maybe even masquerade as a chainmail version of!) a common-or-garden men's handkerchief. But that's so fiddly that I keep putting off its construction.
And that's while only 4-1! I doubt I'll even get near the more lady-like hanky size, within the foreseeable future, especially as I haven't even touched it for best part of a year, now, and actually started it off half a dozen years back!
(Urgh, smiley overload... cutting some out... Still too many, but anyway.)
- Not
intentionally derailing, BTW, but I could see me being accused of sending us rather off-topic despite this.
[1]] But, apart from the fact that I'm highlighting the fact here, I feel that it would be sexist to pointedly use "craftswoman" or "craftsperson" in this case, as I would never dream of even going gender-neutral if she hadn't been a 'she', and so want to treat the term as per the nominal term of "Actor", to which the "Actress" variant is considered by some as being derogatory. And now I'm confused over whether I'm being too PC, or the polar opposite of being bad-old-days misogynistic... edit: I obviously had a brainfart, last night. It's totally right to say "Craftswoman" (and amended/removed footnote link, as such), although "Armoursmith" would have covered it. Surprised no-one commented.
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