Posts: 793 Location: Stockholm, Sweden
Tue 16 Feb, 2010 12:26 am
As I'm making reconstructions of Birka type
maille at the moment, it's pretty obvious to me that using
wrought Iron or even very low carbon steel closer to iron, produces a darker color maille than the often high carbon steel rings we see in almost all modern produced maille today. Wrought iron can be polished to a shine of course, and some polish will occur naturally from wear, but in time it'll darken again. This won't be exactly black like the japanese mailles, but semi dark.
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Here's one of my rings, this one is made from very low carbon steel, close to pure iron. It's obviously still metal that could take a good shine, but somewhat darker and duller than high carbon steel. This is taken with natural sunlight and a minor flash, compare how most steel looks in a flash, it's darker to the eye than it seems in the picture.
The high slag content found in archeological finds of iron age maille can, somewhat depending on composition of the impurities, also give a rather better rust resistance than steel. You can see this effect in antique wrought iron anchors, plate roofs, crosses and nails. Not 100% proof against rust but far better than anything steel except quality stainless.
The easiest way to make both steel and iron really dark and at the same time added resistance to rust is to use burnt oil technique on them, this lasts surprisingly well against wear and gives the metal a dark color. I expect that if you're alrady using a dark metal like wrought iron it's fairly easy to make it black as a mullberry. All you need for this is a hearth and some oil, grease, fat or even butter. Just let the maille lie in the fire for a while and then coat it lightly. Then repeat a few times to give it full coverage.
Butter coating becomes almost jet black but is thicker and may not be as durable to wear as some other types. I prefer olive oil when I make armour or knives, more of a dark bluish antique "iron" look and better even coverage.
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Here's a simple knife I made for a friend a while back. It's simply an old file grinded to shape in a way so as not to lose the edge tempering and it turned out pretty well and functional for a "McGuiver" knife. It has burnt oilve oil in 3-4 layers that I polished to a smooth dark shine. It's very durable, basically only intentionally grinding the surface will remove it.
Now if you have a maille of wrought iron, like just about all mailles before the Reneissance would be, then oil burn it you get a rust resistant black maille. Using butter, it'd be jet black. And fairly rust resistant low maintenance.
So did they use it? -I don't know. But it's an easy way to do it that uses common iron ang & medieval household items and gives fairly good and durable rust protection.