TitaniumMithril

i'm got a preliminary commission for a titanium chainmail shirt in 16ga 5/16" id links. i'm going to need about 31,000 links (155 bags) of machine cut links, and i'd like them all from the same batch, so i'm not dealing with shiny/matte issues with the titanium wire. how should i move forward?

i second that, rob. people were posting my stuff on the facebook group (usually half-crediting me, but that's a different discussion) so i thought i should join to respond to questions, etc., but i quickly had to turn it off because it was just a newsfeed headache. i'd rather frequent a well-organized forum like we've got here, where i don't have to sift through a hundred images to maybe find one interesting post.

haha - yep! 403,788 (759x532) to be exact, but who's counting. ;-)

this was discussed just a bit ago. check it out here: Matte vs. Shiny Titanium

i've had some rings "come" this way. not sure what in the manufacturing process causes this, but it does take an obnoxious amount of extra work to get them lined up. regardless: it may not be you.

here's the post from here: http://www.theringlord.org/forum/index.php?/topic/17961-tapestry-project/. even this one is blurring details from the original image that would have been nice to get in. without seeing the picture, there's not a lot i/we can do. simple, clip-art style images and logos with block colors usually work well, but photo-quality [almost] never will - it's just the name of the game. usually the only thing you can do to make it look better is increase the resolution, but any increase in size has a 2x affect on the amount of work.

that's... way too big. a 2.5 mb image will require 2.5 million links. and as someone who just finished a 400k link inlay (the largest on record that i'm aware of), don't go there. igp just translates a pixel into a link, so you need to make the image as small as possible. if this is your first, i'd probably set the max at 10,000 links (or a 10k bitmap).

i'm guessing (hoping) you mean "european" not "persian" - i don't know if you can even do a sheet in persian 4-1 and certainly not at that link size. the smaller AR ("aspect ratio", i.e. the ratio of the inner diameter of the link to the size of the wire) the less empty space between rings there will be and the inlay/image will look a little better, but often you just choose by what size you want the end product to be. 1. I don't know what you mean by "saddled". If you're marring the links in the process of opening and closing them, you may want to grind down any teeth on your pliers as much as possible. Even 16ga aluminum is pretty easy to handle with smooth pliers of average size. 2. "Bright" aluminum on TRL is non-anodized, so you're not going to make any inlays just with that, and really shouldn't use it at all, even for the "white" parts. Anodized links are the colored links you want to use, and you even want to use the clear-anodized links instead of "bright aluminum" for the extra protection and consistency. 3. The defacto tutorial on making a historical chainmail shirt is the Trevor Barker, and is still available here: https://web.archive.org/web/20160508055350/http://homepage.ntlworld.com/trevor.barker/farisles/guilds/armour/mail.htm

i've got no stake in this claim, but i thought i should note for your sake, zgreen, that K'Z'K said he used 20g for both sizes but you said you used 18g for the larger and 20g for the smaller - NOT the "same sizes." that should theoretically make his even looser than yours, but maybe ss is that different. just fyi!

that should work if you are doing your inlay the "wrong" way, want it at its natural stretch point, and drill the holes in the pipes to match the links at their natural stretch point. if any of those are not the case, you'll need side supports too.

piece of cake - especially with titanium!

that makes a lot of sense. i just planned on using the old until i was near the end and then switching to the new, but this piece took more than i expected. i liked the shinier better, but it is what it is.

i actually had the opposite problem in that my older ti links were shinier. it's more than oils - there can be a dull layer on the outside of the links. even tumbling doesn't help much. i tumbled a piece with both types for four days with no real effect. then i did it with some rock-tumbling media for two days. it wore a few of the links half way down, but other parts were unscathed. check out around the 12" mark here (this is AFTER tumbling).

built a wood frame such that i could whip-stitch the outside row/column to the frame with fishing line. if you direct link to the finished image you can zoom into the image, or you can go to my website here and the image has a magnifying glass, and you can see the stitching along the edge.

thanks guys. jon gave me a lot of retail support back in the day (discounts and custom products and whatnot), so a lot of thanks to TLR is in order. if you guys want to post any images to your social media (or elsewhere) be my guest.