My husband has been making a chain mail shirt from coat hangers for about 15 years now. The chain mail shirt has been in the works for so long because his interests are varied, and this is just one of his many projects. But it is usually the one that comes up first at the dinner table when we are feeding the missionaries for our church. Usually while we are heaping the hot steaming food on the missionaries’ plates, we make small talk about our lives. The missionaries joke with and tease the small children, then begin with the usual questions. What do you do? How did you meet your wife? Where did you get married?
Not halfway through dinner, my husband is going back to the bedroom and pulling a large sweater box from underneath the bed, where he keeps his masterpiece. The mail shirt is well-constructed and very heavy. It lacks sleeves, but already weighs over thirty pounds and reaches to my husband’s waist. He is a trim man, about 6 feet tall. The shirt has literally thousands of links, all completely handmade—from coat hangers.
Making Chain Mail from Coat Hanger Wire: The Technique
Table of Contents
There are several methods for making chain mail. My husband’s method focuses on ease and the tools he has on hand. The most time consuming part of his hobby is making the metal rings that he later links together into a suit pattern. To make perfect round rings, he has developed his own clever and straightforward technique. I don’t know if his technique is similar to medieval armorers, but it really seems to work for him.
First, he unwraps the coat hanger, and straightens the wire as best he can. Next, he uses a metal rod he got from a cast iron fireplace cleaning set we once owned. We kept the base and rod from that set, so it stands up vertically, and is heavy enough to withstand the twisting and turning that comes next. Next, using a pair of pliers and plain elbow grease, he tightly wraps the rings around his metal rod, creating 30 or more perfectly circular rings of a uniform size. Then he uses a pair of wire snips to cut the wire into individual rings.
He keeps his completed rings in a plastic box with a tight lid. When he is ready, he links them together using the common 4 in 1 pattern that is often found on armor from knights in western Europe. This pattern links four rings to one ring together. You could think of the armorer’s craft as a sort of extreme knitting.
Now dinner is forgotten, and the missionaries move with my husband into the living room, while they take off their ties and reach high into the air so they can try the shirt on for themselves and get a photograph to send home to their girlfriends (or mothers, if they aren’t so lucky). Usually their missionary companions joke around and take snapshots with their digital cameras.
My husband isn’t a prideful man, but he enjoys drawing out the fun, so usually, due to my husband’s overdeveloped sense of modesty, I’m the one who then says, “Go on honey, bring out the sword and shield AND helmet too.”
And they leave full of good food uttering the now familiar words, The folks at home are never gonna believe this!
My husband has a degree in medieval history, and has an avid interest in heraldry, medieval warfare, and arms and armor. He is the kind of guy who does things not because they are useful, but to see if he can. He isn’t a member of the Society for Creative Anachronisms, but between you and me, I think he’d join, if only he had enough time.