How to Make Chainmail - Part 3

How to Make Chainmail
"The Basics" - Continued

Part Two: Making the Pieces

This part is where you'll start putting the rings together. After making the coils, cutting them to make the rings, and deburring and preparing the rings, you're ready to start building.

Step One
Take your pliars and close one of the now-deburred rings, then loop it through another (you may need to open it slightly.

Step Two
Close the rings by twisting them shut. Some people like to solder, braze, or even weld the rings shut to give them a seamless appearance, but old-fashioned chainmail, to prevent one of the rings from opening when struck by a weapon, was overlapped, the overlap flattened, then closed permanently with a small rivet of iron. But we'll just make the chainmail butted for now. This is Aluminium, for costume or decorative purposes only.

Step Three
Add more rings. Put three more through one of the two rings, keeping all of them on the same ring, and close them using your pliars.

Step Four
You should end up with something like this. There should be four going through one. This is called 4-through-1, meaning that four rings attach to one, as pictured. There are other patterns, such as 6-through-1 and 8-through-2, but we'll focus on 4-through-1 for now, which is the simplest of all patterns and is easy to work with and repair.

Step Five
Repeat the process four times and lay them flat. Notice that the rings in the middle are slanted. Align them so all of them are in a uniform direction. This is critically important for the next step.

Next up, putting them together.
[link]