The group I'm a member of here in Australia, has a deal with a local spring maker. We order about 50000 -100000 links (they come in bags of 5000), at a time and resell to local re enactors. The spring maker sets his machine to cut after 1 turn to produce a link. So when I say spring steel I really mean SPRING steel. Then comes the fun of linking together the 4 in 1 mesh, and tailoring the chain.