i am very interested in making riveted maille out of your flattened overlapping rings. Do you happen to know how i would punch holes so that I may rivet them closed. What would I need to do to prepare the ring for riveting. Please help, I have been wanting riveted chain for two yrs, but just can't quite afford to have someone else make it. Plus, I would like the satisfaction of putting on armor that i made. Thanks.

Well, this is fairly big.

First, the flattened rings need to be annealed or normalized. Normalizing -- heat to red, cool in air -- is a partial anneal, not as soft as full annealing with its much slower cooling (hours!) but soft enough to work. Museum-level mailler Erik D. Schmid up in St. Cloud MN normalizes his links in a hibachi full of charcoal. Heat-soaks 'em in red-hot coals.

Piercing the overlaps takes a piercing drift. Some grind and reshape nail sets into something like the point of a 1/16" precision screwdriver. Others shape the same sort of thing by grinding down the point of masonry nails -- lots cheaper, and you can make several of them so if you break one you can just grab the next one.

The drift may be driven by hammering. Someone recently told me about driving the drift with a one-ton arbor press, said it worked great. A one-ton doesn't flatten whole links though -- it might flatten link-ends, India-link style.

There are several ways to make the rivets: flatten some of your mail wire into a ribbon and cut triangular bits from the ribbon like so many 1/72 scale pizza slices, or cut up a ribbon of sheet metal the same way -- |/////etc. Some like to use heavier wire than the link wire and flatten that out to cut up. Steve Sheldon's Forth Armouries offers punched-out triangular rivets, factory made, bags of a thousand or something like that.

Some mail suppliers, notably Joris Sutter (De Liebaart) over in the Netherlands, can sell you an entire tool kit for making riveted. Joris charges about $250 US for the kit, and there'd be shipping too. It includes sample links at varying manufacturing stages to compare to, and apparently the kit is popular.

Joris's tool kit:

http://home.tiscali.be/klauwaer/malien/engels.html

Pics and how-to.

I was also considering a "pin" rivet as well. Is there anyone out there who might be able to help with a punch set for it?