Roman Mail, how thick the rings?

[arklore70]

Folks,
I have a question for the modern reconstruction of mail armor/hamata.

While there is a lot of information here as far as proper internal diameter and outer diameter of the rings, whether they be punched or rivetted, I have not seen much discussion that I can find on the thickness of the rings.

The only article I saw that addresses the thickness is here at this link off the Legio XX website
http://home.armourarchive.org/members/a ... %e4rvi.pdf

To sum it up, it pretty much states that the ring thickness of mail in four sets discovered varied from our .95mm to 1.27 mm in thickness. Which would give it a gauge thickness from 18-20. 18 gauge is about a thick as an American dime/10 cent coin.

Where I get a bit confused is that 18 gauge flat rings would still have quite a bit of weight to it, exceeding 24 pounds.

I recently examined a fully riveted mail shirt, thigh length, with full sleeves that weighed about 25 pounds. The rings had a ID of 10mm and a OD of 13-14mm. The flat rings had a thickness of about 1/32 of a inch, or .03-.035 dec or about .79mm. The shirt was so light that I did not think it was steel until I had a magnet put to it, to confirm it.

Doing a bit of scientific wild guess, if I were able to trim it up, and convert some of the trimmings into a doubler this would get me to around 20-21 pounds for hamata. Which seems to be the ideal weight in previous forum discussions.

Now the rings are bigger than we like, but waivering that, would something like this being even remotely protective? Would it even stand up to the not so hardships of reenactment? I would think the rings would get bent by simply just wearing it and running around in a simple needle-felt fight.

Is there any other evidence out there that suggests that the thickness of rings was thinner than in the article posted on the Legio XX website?

Has anyone here had any positive or negative experiences with mail rings of this thickness?

Love to hear any thoughts and comments.

Cheers!!
Mike

[arklore70]

Well,
not sure if there is a precedent or not for answering at least part of one's original question, but I thought I would in case a few of us out there were wondering and scratching out heads, or perhaps some were laughing at what should be an obvious answer like tunic color, I mean we all know its red right?...ok just kidding.....

It seems, that a 18 gauge ring, flattened to a 1/32nd thickness will do the trick.

This link here addresses a lot of my concerns to include the test.

http://www.forth-armoury.com/faq.htm

So despite evidence only showing .9mm to 1.27mm thickness being discovered, 1/32 of a inch, which is about .79mm, or 20-21 gauge in thickness is pretty durable.

Enough to take a pretty darn good sword whack.

Any thoughts or additional evidence or information out there?

Cheers!
Mike

[WillMH]

Hi,

Its generally accepted that original hamata seems to have been made from both punched rings and rivetted rings in alternating lines.

This of course makes the construction of the Hamata's so much faster because you are placing four punched or solid rings onto one rivetted ring.

Hope this helps,

Will

[Dan Howard]

Actually you are really only placing one punched link into one riveted link. You are effectively taking half the time to assemble the mail because you only need to rivet close half the total number of rings.

[Jozef W]

Salve comrades,

new to the site, thought many of the faces and names are certainly not strange to me! Hope to learn more from all of you and share what I have!

The thinnest rings that I'm aware of were from a find in Leiden, Holland. These were made of bronze and to an average thickess of 0.57mm (based on a sample of 10 rings, each measured in 2 places). These were for the solid rings, however, and I do not have the data on the rivited ones.

For iron rings, there is a find of which I cannot remember the provenance, but that, again, 10 rings were measured in 2 places, and there was an avg thickness of 1.1mm. These had an ID of 4.8mm avg and an OD of 6.9mm avg, so Matthew Amt, on his Legio XX site, is quite within the ballpark of typical Roman maile sizes.

If you check out Britannia, Vol XXVIII, 1997, p.359-371. "Roman Chain-mail: Experiments to reproduce the techniques of manufacture" by David Sim, you will see the information posted above and further detail.

[Dan Howard]

The only samples that will provide useful measurements are those links with little oxidation.

[Erik D. Schmid]

Dan is quite correct. The Leiden links were thought to be from a plumata rather than a stand alone hamata. One thing to keep in mind when measuring these original links, or using the data obtained by others is the fact that the effects of wear and corrosion may have decreased the size of the link substantially from its original state.

[Jozef W]

Thanks Erik, I was not aware that the Leiden find was from a plumata. Strange that it was not mentioned in the research article.

The only samples that will provide useful measurements are those links with little oxidation.

Yeah, unfortunately we can only go from inference and corrosion patterns to figure out what the original sizes were. At least the saving grace here is that in several cases, the rings, despite an unkown amount of corrosion (or perhaps as a result of little corrosion) the ring diameters have all remained relatively the same for a sample of rings. This either shows consistant corrosion through all surfaces of the rings, or little overall corrosion.

[Erik D. Schmid]

Not really that strange. There are actually a few mistakes in it, but this is not the place to go into that.

Some of the best examples for links are to be found in the pieces from Arbeia, St. Albans, Newstead, Saalburg, and Carlingwark Loch to name a few.

[marsvigilia]

I think there are potentially two different measurements that could be considered thickness or gauge. In the descriptions I have read only one of these is generally given without clarification as to which is being given.

The first is the Width Laterally (WL) the thickness of the ring material side to side. If you know the outer diameter and the inner diameter, then calculating the thickness of the rings in it least the lateral direction is trivial.

WL = ( OD - ID ) / 2

The second is the Width or Depth from front to back. If the ring is formed by a drawn wire then the width laterally and the depth will obviously be the same. But if the ring is from punched sheet then the two could and probably would be completely different.

Unless there is some very specific evidence that the width laterally and the depth are not the same, I would tend to think they should be made approximately the same. and can be easily calculated using th ID & OD.

It all depends on the geometry of the cross section.