Lorica hamata / segmentata

[Erik D. Schmid]

In what way are they innaccurate, Erik? David Sim is normally very careful about recording the times it takes for him to perform every manufacturing process - he is, after all, a very experienced blacksmith.

In your post you stated that he said it would take one man between 12 and 15 months to make one suit from butted links. I simply said it wouldn't based on my own calculations. Blacksmithing is a far cry from mail-making. Mail-making is more closely related to jewelry making than anything else. It requires years of constant practice in order to get a decent rhythym down with which to draw conclusions relating to construction time from.

I'm not trying to downplay his work, but his calculations just do not jive with what I have found in my own experiments.

The only thing that I can see is a possible error is his summation for the time it would have taken to equip an entire 5,000-man legion with a hamata suit, where he assumes that there would be a suit for every man and a spare suit in the stores - and he comes up with an estimated time of some 29,000,000 man-hours for the entire job! Five thousand spare suits of lorica hamata would have taken some storing!

That time is not far off from what it would have taken based on my calculations. I figure it would have taken around 20,000,000 man hours. This is based on a shirt having 20,000 links and a person being able to weave around 1,000 per day. So, in a little over half a century the legion would be ready to go. Now, add another person and the time gets cut in half and so on. It doesn't take many people to really pump out product.

100 people should be able to put out around 100,000 links per day. This is approximately five shirts per day. Increase the link size and you increase the output of finished garments. Bear in mind that this is just an estimate. Actual production may easily have been double this figure.

He does tend to overestimate links I have found though. It was something I brought up to him several years ago. He calculated a ratio of solid to riveted links of 4/1. This is incorrect. An alternating row garment will almost always have more riveted than solid links. Generally it is a 1/1 ratio. He was not very enthusiastic to hear this.

Do you think that perhaps he was also factoring in actually making the sheet iron as opposed to the thin wires required to make the mail rings? I would think that flattening a chunk of iron, either by hammer or mechanical would be quicker than making enough wire to complete a mail armor suit.

Possibly. But, the wire drawing would not really add that much more time to be honest. I have a friend who draws me wrought iron wire by hand periodically and it doesn't take him long at all to create a decent amount. But, this is all idle speculation. This is an area that needs more research.