Armor: How effective was Chainmail

[Dan Howard]

Erik reckons that, once you get up to speed, that it takes about one minute per riveted link to do it properly. If you are using 6mm OD links then you'd be looking at 30,000+ links for a sleeveless hamata. That's a minimum of thirty thousand minutes or 500 hours plus materials. Even at $5 per hour you need to charge more than $2,500. You could cut down the time by about 1/3 if you used alternating rows of solid links rather than all-riveted because you are inserting two links at a time and only have to rivet one of them..