Lorica hamata / segmentata

[Caratacus]

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.

Sorry if you took my remarks to be some sort of a criticism of your original comment - this wasn't my intention, I was simply asking for some information there!

The quoted time of 12 to 15 months came from Sim's paper in the Britannia journal - nothing to do with me! Yes, I can see that blacksmithing is rather a crude term for what we are talking about here. My remark was rather more about the methodology David Sim uses to establish a possible/likely time period for any particular task.

My reason for putting the quote above is that, if the links were to be riveted, would this not further increase the time to complete a suit, as it would involve several more operations that just butt-joining the connecting links? I am sure (it's been a while since I looked at the paper) that Sim was trying to produce an estimate of the shortest time that would be required to produce a ring-mail suit.

I would have thought that it was obvious that in an alternate row system, the ratio of solid to riveted/butted rings was bound to be 1:1? However, if you examine the actual links, then an open ring will be joined to two solid ones in the row above and two in the one below, hence the 4:1 ratio. Maybe we are talking about the same thing from two different viewpoints here?

I can quite see where there would be a decrease in time required if there were to be a whole group of armourers working flat out on the project! Sounds to me like the perfect job for a bunch of soldiers who were on "jankers". :lol:

Caratacus/Mike Thomas