Pro tip: that old Geocities site about making chainmail still works

I got curious about chainmail after seeing a cosplay video last week and remembered this old GeoCities page from like 2003 that a friend showed me in high school. The site is still up somehow on some mirror host, no updates since 2005. It had this wild guide on using coat hangers and pliers to make butted rings, which I figured would be garbage advice. But I grabbed some wire cutters and an old hanger from my closet and tried it out over the weekend. The rings actually held together pretty well and I made a small patch in about 2 hours. The guy running the site even had step by step photos from a flip phone camera that were super blurry but still helpful. Has anyone else stumbled across an old niche site that turned out to have legit hands on advice that still works?

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the_miles3d ago

Wait, did the site actually explain gauge differences or did it just say "use hangers" with zero context? Because there's a huge gap between a standard wire hanger and the 16 gauge galvanized steel that most butted mail patterns call for. That old site might have stumbled onto something real if the hanger wire had the right tensile strength for holding shape without snapping. Also curious if the jumps you made were closed tight enough to not catch on fabric or if it's more of a display piece situation.