[Low-Tech]Question about silk horse armor

[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.