[Low-Tech]Question about silk horse armor

[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.