[Low-Tech]Question about silk horse armor

[Pursuivant]

Originally Posted by Anthony

Well, the main historical reason is that for most of TL 2 and 3 large iron or steel plates simply weren't available and mail compares well to the various armors that are made of small plates linked together.

The virtue of mail is that it's easier to get relatively pure iron by forging and drawing wire. You can start with small initial iron billets and wire drawing tends to remove (or at least homogenize) the slag inclusions. If you're lucky, all that forging and drawing gets some carbon into the matrix. Wire drawing is also something you can do with relatively little fuel and very simple tools. It's even easier if you can use a swing to gain mechanical advantage as you draw the wire.

Beating lumps of bloom iron into iron plates to get the slag inclusions out requires much bigger chunk of metals to start with and much more human and thermal energy.

[DanHoward]

Originally Posted by Pursuivant

Beating lumps of bloom iron into iron plates to get the slag inclusions out requires much bigger chunk of metals to start with and much more human and thermal energy.

Mail requires the metal to be highly refined so that most of the slag has either been removed or finely distributed throughout the metal. Otherwise it can't be pulled through the drawplate. Plate can be made from poorer quality iron.

[Pursuivant]

Originally Posted by DanHoward

Mail requires the metal to be highly refined so that most of the slag has either been removed or finely distributed throughout the metal. Otherwise it can't be pulled through the drawplate. Plate can be made from poorer quality iron.

Exactly.

The wire will break when slaggy bits get drawn into the die, which means that the wire that didn't break as it was drawn is good enough to make mail. 2-3 failed attempts to draw wire from a given billet mean that it's not good enough to make armor. That makes quality control easy.

Cut the slaggy bit of wire off near the break and use the rest. Even if you just have a few inches of usable wire you can still wrap it around a mandel to make mail links.

Making mail that way would have been time consuming and inefficient, but it would have allowed people to work with smaller billets of metal (cheaper and easier to work with) using very simple, portable tools.

[DanHoward]

Originally Posted by Pursuivant

Exactly.

The wire will break when slaggy bits get drawn into the die, which means that the wire that didn't break as it was drawn is good enough to make mail. 2-3 failed attempts to draw wire from a given billet mean that it's not good enough to make armor. That makes quality control easy.

Cut the slaggy bit of wire off near the break and use the rest. Even if you just have a few inches of usable wire you can still wrap it around a mandel to make mail links.

Making mail that way would have been time consuming and inefficient, but it would have allowed people to work with smaller billets of metal (cheaper and easier to work with) using very simple, portable tools.

Except they didn't. The guilds were very strict about the quality of iron that wire drawers could use. If it contained too much slag, it was sent to the plateners instead.