I have been working on a shirt of chainmaille for about 4 months now, the linking is the easy part I'm just having trouble with the cutting of links. I've been using aviation snips to cut the wire, but these have proven ineffective, the blades separating and the wire getting wedged in between them.

I'm thinking about buying some bolt cutters and then machining them down so they can fit into the coils, I'm not sure if this is the best way to go. Does anyone else have any suggestions?

The wire is about this thick ( made of coat hangers)

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Hey C. My experience with aviation (sheet metal) snips is that they can be tightened to where they will cut the wire and not separate. The Maille Artisan's International League ( M.A.I.L.) is easily found on the net and they are free to join. They have many articles that deal with tools for making chain links as well as all other aspects of this craft.
Hope this helps,W

I've tightened my snips but its the steel that bends. Thanks for the site though.


P.S. The wire thickness is about 1/16" thick

http://theringlord.com/cart/shopdisplayproduc...re+Cutters

The first ones on the list are what I used to make my mail shirt. They burned through 14 ga. steel with no difficulty. As for that, I'd recommend getting coils of steel from a hardware store. It might be easier than using coat hangers. Good luck! Making a mail shirt is a rough and time consuming hobby. If you have any other questions don't hesitate to ask. There are a number of people here who have undertaken similar projects. You may also want to search past forum posts. There were a number of posts on that subject only a few months ago.

The fastest and least authentic method is to cut a line down one side of the coiled wire with a separating or abrasive cut-off disc on a dremel or grinder. This gives you nice square ends on your links, too. For wire of 1/16th inch, I think you'll like it, bolt cutters would be slow & awkward compared to zipping them off.

If you go with that, be sure you don't use a disk that's too thick, otherwise your rings will not be shaped properly when you close them.

Using hand tools, one of the best ways I've heard of for cutting links is with a jeweler's saw - set up a jig and you'll be able to cut multiple links at a time. Advantages: relatively fast, quiet compared to power tools, cheap, and you get a good square end on the cut for making very tight butted links. Another trick I've heard about using the same tool is to make the cut intentionally at an angle - the complimentary angles of the cut ends of each link butt together very nicely.

Check out www.armourarchive.org and do a search on "mail" or "maille" and the first few pages should get you in good shape.

Good luck and have fun :)

If you have access to a drill press, the easiest, most efficient, and inexpensive way I found was to make a saw and chute for this. I posted the details here:

Cutting rings for butted maille

Piece of cake... cleanly cuts about 100 rings a minute.

If you don't have the tool, it isn't cost-effective to buy it just for this purpose, but I won't ever cut another ring by hand.

Thanks for the tips guys, but I just received some new high-carbon steel snips and a 3lb club hammer. When I strike the handle with the hammer it snaps off up to 3 rings at a time. It may be a bit slow, it may not be high tech but at least its working. :p

That's a pretty cool gizmo, Aaron..

What someone needs to design is a machine for making and knitting rivetted maille :p

Aaron I wish you had come up with that out sooner! It would have saved me lots of time! :D
That is about the smartest low-tech thing I have seen in awhile! Much better than what I did below!

What I did to cut the rings was to place one handle of my small bolt cutters in a vise. Then tie a bungee cord to the top handle and connect it with the roof of my shop (low ceiling) I did that so it would open back up automatically. I then attached a rope to that same handle. I put a loop in the dangling end for my foot and left just enough space between my looped foot and the floor for the downward motion to close the bolt cutters. Worked great! No sore hands and it left my hands free to correctly align the coil for 45 degree cuts. I could cut pounds of rings in a fairly short time.

Figured I would throw in my method(s) as well. I've been making maille for a number of years now, more as a hobby then anything else. I started out with a set of aviation snips but just never seemed to have much luck with them. From there I moved up to a set of bolt cutters that have worked well for several years. Like a few others mentioned you can make a pretty effecient setup with a table vise or by screwing one handle to a table. Slide a bar over the other handle for some added leverage and you can cut several rings at a time.

I had tried using the Dremel cut-off wheels but either burnt through a lot of wheels or removed too much material when cutting. So at a friend's suggestion he pointed me to another site where I found a picture and some information about a tool someone had created to cut rings. A Friday night of drafting and a Saturday afternoon of construction yielded me this nice jig.

The blade is a HSS Jewelers that are real cheap to pick up and replace. Currently I just wax the blade between cuts, but I'm working on (and almost finished) a slow oil-drip to keep the blade lubricated. The little basin underneath can be swapped out for a piece of angle aluminum that acts like a chute and leads off to a 5 gallon paint pail for when I'm cutting a lot of rings.

Credit for the design certainly goes to the original inventor.


~Dominic

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Overall picture of the jig. You can see that the block is held on by a clamp. I have blocks cut for various diamters and gauges of wire and just swap them out depending on what I'm cutting.

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Front view. The block here is for 14ga 5/16" diameter rings. You can see a clamp on the trigger which means the drill is always on. I have a control switch mounted on the back that turns the whole unit on and off. Avoids me having to reach my hand in

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Top down view with the catch basin below. Have to make sure that the blade comes in far enough to cut fully through the ring but not the other side

an easy, safe and quiet way is to get 8 inch spring loaded bolt cutters. they have red handles and are usually black or silver in color. makes cutting coils easy :) might cost 10 bucks from lowes or walmart

My method is extremely low tech. When I was 15, that was because I had no money. After I started getting money, I found that I enjoyed the Zen simplicity of making mail with a minimum of tools.

I use a regular metal rod of the desired inside diameter with one third of the length bent so it forms an L. They're about $1.00 apiece in any hardware store. A hole is drilled on the longer segment, about ten inches from the end. The wire goes in the hole, I brace the end of the rod on the floor with my leg and I turn it using the shorter L segment as a crank handle with my left hand guiding the wire. With good bolt cutters, I can coil and cut a 100' roll of 14 ga. wire in about two hours.

There's something almost meditative about the work when there are no power tools, but I'm certain it takes longer that way.