I was de-gunking some newly arrived mail today and got a shot of the three most common types of mail from India
as I have a little bit of each of them. These are - butted 3/8ths, riveted mild 6mm and riveted stainless 9mm


The 6mm (middle of photo) is probably the closest thing to historical of the lot but it is mild so does rust, the large number of rivets and ring overlaps cause a lot of wear to garments underneath it, the riveting tends to be a bit shoddy, its quite heavy but reasonably protective
The 9mm (top) is stainless, is much lighter, more kind to undergarments but when you look at it up close its obviously flat punched rings, and I would not want to actually rely on it to stop any penetrative thrust with a sharp weapon
The butted (bottom) does not necessarily look right closer than about 5 feet and is weaker than either riveted but is kinder on undergarments, and easy to tailor. Its the heaviest

again - as Dan stated - none are historical, and there are various advantages/disadvantages to each

In my opinion the Ulfberth maille is starting to look very nice for the price. Even starting to close in on the high grade stuff and major changes are happening fast. Let’s see where this is in a few more years. Hopefully they’ll also incorporate more authentic riveting and iron wire matimatierals the roman type maille.

Concerning weapons’ testing, I read that Professor Alan Williams has actually tested modern reproduction maille and found it slightly less resistive to weapons compared to the strongest maille rings he could find at Wallace. I expect this was quality maille made by Erik, or the same quality, so yes it should stand as the current standard to go for and then translate the results to how it would have been with something slightly stronger.
However, to really settle this I’d be very happy if he also found time to test some of the less expensive maille brands so others less lab equipped and unable to obtain Eriks quality of work can make inexpensive field tests and extrapolate the effect on true historical maille. I.e for the 120-180 pound Warbows with the long arrows you draw to the ear once more coming in use in the UK.

I could wish that Erik made maille out of proper soft iron with basically no carbon and no hardening though since that's what the Roman maille is supposed to be made from. But then no modern made maille I've seen so far is perfectly authentic.
I'm working on it though. I just figured out that we (my local armourmaker guild) actually can reproduce the Thorsbjerg maille faithfully. Some in the group have been making riveted maille for the last 12 years or so now, I started with it seriously myself last year, and we've been having issues with the material acquisition of the "poor quality" high slag content iron used in viking age maille as it requires real bog iron. But what just occurred to me is that the earlier roman type including the Thorsbjerg would be fine with the purer iron wire we can easily obtain. The trick is to get the metallurgy to match and we can do that with low carbon and low slag content iron wire.

I have a few qestions about the riveted mail for im planning to buy one and want it to be as "real" as possible...

In 12th century northern europe were the rings wedge riveted or dome riveted or perhaps something else?

Also how large would the average ring diameter of have been?

That would add up with the fact that no wire drawing tools for iron have been found at Birka so far, just gold and silver drawing tools.
Granted only a few percent of The Black Earth has been excavated so far, so no one really knows what else is down there and Geo radar scanners can only get so much detail.

There were anvils with series of small grooves of varying sizes. (I don't have a source handy, but have read of it as a period method of making wire the difficult manual way.) Wire could have been hammered out by forging using that type of device. (Its debatable if the grooves resulted from use and came to be utilized after the fact, or if they were put there for that purpose to begin with.) We can't prove that it was done this way, but at least it is possible to do it with slag contaminated wrought iron and things found besides drawing type devices in period era.

what evidence do we have that the historical is indeed stronger.. has smeone hacked at a piece of eriks maille???
second.. you point out GDFB and other riveted maille examples commercially available are often not following aspects that make them more susceptible to attack.. ok so that is an indicatoras well.

think of it this way if someone thrusts at maille using a spear over some light cloth and it fails to penetrate,.. then why would it go through supposedly stronger historical maille exactly?? youve automatically determined that maille isresistant to pear thrusts or sword thrusts.. woohoo.thas a result in itself.. if your trying to see if historical mail woul save your life..

Where can I buy bloomery iron?
I don't believe that they take so much care when making an armour. Could you imagine a piece of iron an they say they want a mail out of it? Damn lot work. I guess they had the material and made it, especially in times of war, who cared about slag? Who has known that it exist? How the rivet looks like? I think they sad: Be happy that there is. We have only less examples of armour and just think about it: everyone could not afford the same quality as kings or counts, there must have been lower quality armour, its an other thing that we have never found it.
So I say hit the iron and be proud of it. Yours will be lower quality and you can proudly say it that yes it is lower quality, but because I can't afford more.

surely theres a way of doing this process alot faster. in a semi industrial scale. producing the wound coil and then flattening/ producing the rivet hole of the right shape is, i imagine, easy.

dan you mention a drift rather than a punch is used to make the rivet hole. what IS a drift. the only result i have for a drift is a tool designed to widen existing holes.
ok http://www.mailleartisans.org/articles/articl...i?key=9883 based on that my understanding of a drift is that your saying historical rivet holes were made by merely piercing the flattened section?
isnt that what most people do?
so what do the indian manufacturers use instead???

So, assuming you can get bloom iron, have the time/tools, what are the pitfalls to making a test piece?

Questions:

1. The bloom iron used for the rings should have a low carbon content, right? From reading about some modern bloom iron productions, a single bloom can be both high carbon steel and low carbon iron on different sides of the bloom.
2. If it's able to be drawn through a plate into wire, should be considered good bloom iron for mail?
3. What should the inner and outer diameter of the wire be for the bloom wire rings?
4. If using low carbon rings, should the rings be round or flat?
5. How wide should the overlap be in the flattened area?
6. How tall should the watersheded rivet be after peening?

This list of questions might help someone make a test piece. I was thinking about trying it as I can get low carbon bloom iron, am going to be getting a forge, I can make a draw plate (easy enough), and I would be interested enough to sink the time into it.