Butted Mail Shirt

I started this project as a part of a larger costume build that frankly was a huge bust but this shirt of mail turned out great. I wouldn’t ever make a shirt of mail out of 14 gauge steel wire. The whole shirt of mail is  about 40 pounds! But, that doesn’t detract from the skill and the end result. Next time I’ll be using aluminum wire. Anyway, the main technique of making mail is to create a tight coil of wire. Like a spring. I drilled a hole in a rod, inserted wire into it and then put the other end of the rod in a drill and used its torque to coil the wire. Then it was a matter of cutting about 10,000 rings out of the coils, then splicing them together into a shirt.