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This shining population center is considered the jewel of The Sylira Region. Home of the vast majority of Mizahar's population, Syliras is nestled in a quiet, sprawling valley on the shores of the Suvan Sea. [Lore]
The shop was quiet now, what bustle there had been in the area was now quietened down and Eanos felt that he could relax. In many ways it was his favourite time for others had sought the sanctuary of their homes and families and he had none, nor felt the need for any, none other than his forge in any case. That he was single with the companionship of few others of his race merely meant that he was more driven for there was little else that he desired to do with his time than to craft and learn.
Recently he had been working on his Shielding studies and it had brought to mind that he’d not been paying attention to his armour crafting as much as he should do. It was never a main feature of his attention and he never intended it to be otherwise, but the Shielding studies had revealed that it might have an interesting use at least for his own training.
Mail could come in many forms and be intended for many uses. The cost of the mail tended to follow the need for effectiveness. Of course mail wasn’t as strong as plate but it had other advantages such as flexibility and weight which meant that often it was a better choice and nearly always complimentary.
From a smithing point of view, excluding the sort of rings sewn to backing sort of mail, most mail sold tended to fall into two categories, the butted rings most commonly used for decorative parade armour especially where that involved precious metals and effectiveness was not a factor, and the riveted sort which was far more time intensive. There was a far more unusual type where the rings were welded which was the most effective but the hardest to make, hard that is for anyone but an Isur or perhaps a mage. The problem with welding was that a small ring, especially one attached to the heat sink of other rings lost heat very quickly and without just the right heat the welds tended to fail. Of course then too it probably wasn’t obvious to the average smith just which welds really had taken properly.
On balance Eanos concluded he had the potential to produce mail which was far more effective than most of the smiths in the city, second only to Ros perhaps, and that without adding in the potential for magical enhancement. Armour still didn’t excite him, but it seemed that it was probably time that he invested some more time in working with mail.
With that thought in mind he scanned his workshop and moved onto the workbench some of the tools and wire that he would need for the project. Finally he pulled out a ledger and flipped the pages until he came to the weave that he wanted. This would be no fancy piece of armour, he knew that he lacked the skill for that, but it would be a student exercise in developing his basic skills and for that he needed just to make a flat sheet which would have no military use at all, but could be useful later in the shop.
Last edited by Eanos on September 24th, 2013, 10:08 pm, edited 3 times in total.
At the back of the workshop was stored the metal which had been delivered from the mines that Ros controlled and paid for by the Knights. There were different ways of making wire depending on the metal involved and it seemed to Eanos that it should be possible to move away from the standard method, standard that is to a forge such as this, what Ros managed to do with the power available to him was another matter altogether.
Precious metal wire was cold formed which had it’s advantages, but was only possible with metals soft enough to be formed that way, and even then there was the issue of getting the metal into the right form that it could be fed into a drawplate. Iron and steel were simply too hard to even contemplate such a process with.
For a human smith that was. Isur had two advantages that humans didn’t in that they were stronger and could tolerate the heat of a forge. It didn’t overcome the problem of getting the metal into the right form in the first place but then again he wasn’t looking to stretch the metal out into such fine wire as he would with precious metal. That gave him pause for thought. This wasn’t going to be chain used for armour, it was chain to be used as a screen and as a training exercise, so he could use finer wire if he wanted.
First though he needed a new drawplate because the only one he had was designed for softer metals. He ran through the process in his mind so that he could anticipate what he needed and decided that he had everything, though there would be some degree of experimentation. The starting point was his scrap metal box and he dug through it then checked his stores of wire and punches until he was happy that he had the sizes that he needed. The wire he had in stock for making chain was cut off the small reel and straightened and the ends filed to shape then they were heat treated to make them hard enough to punch through hot steel and then to polish out the holes. Sizing was the issue, even for an experienced smith but he had a fair eye for the amount that the plate would shrink. However the wire itself would be running through hot and would shrink after so the number of variables was huge and even he could only make an educated guess as to the result. But, and it was important to note, he wasn’t making wire to use elsewhere so exact sizing didn’t matter, and if later it did then he could remake or adjust the plate anyway.
With the punches made, polished and set aside he moved onto the drawplate. This would sit in the hardy hole of an anvil so needed a square shank while the drawholes would sit across the main plate. He pulled the bellows and brought the forge up to heat and slipped a bar of steel into the coals and waited. Hammering the end out into the plate was simple as was reversing it and fashioning the handle. The steel was normalised for no particular reason other than good practice and then he brought it up to heat and punched the holes. He didn’t need lubrication grooves on this but he did create a dish to allow the hot metal to feed into the hole. Cooled, he used a combination of files and the punches with abrasives to smooth out the holes then hardened the plate and did the final work polishing the holes so that the plate was ready for it’s first test.
With all the tools and equipment now in place Eanos was ready to start his first attempt on making iron wire. He’d shifted his anvil closer to the forge and had a small pile of iron bars to hand. Length of the bars was less of an issue now that he had given it some thought as there was only so much wire to be wound onto the spindle at any one time. While it would mean more waste it was a manageable solution for the test and if things worked as he hoped then it would be easily corrected.
Slipping the first bar into the forge to heat he dropped the cutting plate into the hardy hole of the anvil to avoid any damage to the face and double checked the edge of the hot cut chisel. He could have reduced the bar down in a number of ways but to make the work quicker he’d decided to cut it and then use a reducing swage before the final shaping with the hammer. That final stage would be after a last anneal and would serve to remove any last forge scale before the final heating.
The end of the bar had reached a workable temperature and he pulled it off the heat, locking it down to the anvil with the hold down so that the end rested on the cutting plate. A swift cut with the chisel and the end was free, so then he changed angle and worked his way carefully back up the bar, splitting it apart, working too and from the forge as he did so.
One day, he reflected, he would not be limited by these human designs for working and would instead be able to work directly with the heat without worry that the anvil would warp, distort or soften. Until then it was a compromise and one he could live with while his studies progressed. He split the bar again so that the dimensions were closer to what he wanted. He’d reached the point where splitting the bar had become harder to do with the fine accuracy needed and at the same time splitting was keeping the bar at the same length, which he didn’t want.
He changed then to a manual process of reducing the bar by hammering, and in this he experimented with different techniques including straight hammer work on the anvil and using swages. None of them were entirely satisfactory in his mind, but the swages produced the most even sizes for they did not require the use of a gauge to confirm an even size along the length. They were however somewhat trickier to use, needing less skill in some ways but a different technique overall. Eventually however he had a thick if rough wire, the end of which he hammered into a tapering profile that would fit through the first and largest of the holes in the drawplate.
The anvil was shifted a little closer to the forge and the drawplate set into the hardy hole with a pair of drawing tongs set next to it. He created a channel in the coals for the wire to run through and set it to heat. He smiled as he watched the colours change purely for the pleasure in seeing how it would work out. Satisfied it was hot enough he grabbed it with his left hand and fed the tapered portion into the drawplate while the remainder of the wire now started to heat. He pushed with his left and used the tongs to tug through with his right. At first it was stiff but then became easier, and then became too stiff.
It took some experimenting to get the wire right before it could be fed into the drawplate. Not even the strength of an Isur was enough if it was too thick or had become too cold as the result was a broken wire. Eventually though he was better able to judge and then it was simply the familiar task of working down the drawplate holes, slowly reducing the width of the wire down to what he wanted. Done, it was reheated and left to cool at it’s own pace ready for annealing and working.
The difficult stages had been done, at least as far as finding new solutions went. Now the wire simply needed to be rolled around a mandrel, cut and a decision made as to how to proceed, but before he did that and while the wire cooled Eanos gave some thought to future solutions.
The process so far had been fairly labour intensive even with the short cuts he had been able to make by working directly with the forge. For the little use he’d had in the past for chain the process made sense, yet if he were to change that then a new solution became much more important. That solution would be a rolling mill, which would be useful for all sorts of wire, especially the precious metal ones that he used more often for decoration. Yet none that he’d seen in the past suited this setup so he would have to improvise his own solution.
That however was a problem for another day and it was time to return his attention to the task in hand. He roughly coiled the first wire and set it on the forge to heat so that it would bend more easily. Whilst it heated he took the mandrel that he’d set aside earlier and using a holdfast clamped it down to the anvil so that it overhung the edge and would allow him to wrap the wire around it.
The heated wire wrapped easily around the mandrel once he’d managed to get the always slightly tricky start done, which he managed by slacking off the holdfast a little so that he could trap the end of the wire under the mandrel. He wrapped it quickly before it could cool too much, using a light hammer to ease into a tight curve and a close coil. With the wire wrapped fully around the mandrel the metal still glowed a dark and dull red so he released the holdfast and repositioned the mandrel along the anvil and reclamped it. He worked swiftly up the bar cutting through the coil with his chisel so that individual rings were created. With the holdfast released he slipped the rings free and set them aside.
He inspected the rings critically, noting where flaws in the wire had marred them and made a mental note to change the wire making process in future as he’d been too busy concentrating on the new process and had failed to concentrate well enough on the quality. It was a failing that he shrugged off however since it was a problem that was inevitable to some degree and should be corrected in due course by simply being able to return his attention to quality once the need to focus on the process diminished.
Still though he inspected the remaining wire and put aside some pieces which were flawed beyond redemption, others could be used in part, but most were adequate for the next stage which in itself was slightly experimental. The next piece of wire was placed on the forge to heat and he gave more thought to the process so that wire would be heating while he worked on the last wire and so would be able to work without interruption.
Eventually the wire was exhausted and he had a series of rings which had by the nature of the process now set into their new form.
Eanos now had a collection of rings, each comprising most of a circle but with an open cut and the cut ends were still slightly offset as a result of them being made as a coil. He picked one up and sat one the stool by his bench and examined it closely, that inspection however was purely visual for he saved his personal djed for the experimentation with welding rather than for a relatively mundane piece of smithing.
Normally he would have closed the ring so that the ends overlapped then struck the overlap with a hammer when heated so that the ends flattened out and mated neatly. A fine hole punched and riveted completed the ring and that last stage made assembly of chain relatively simple since with the holes punched and most of the rings finished only the joining links needed riveting. The latter was a little tricky with the more complicated weaves but simplicity itself compared to attempting to weld the join.
The assembly of chain was often made faster by linking on a number of closed rings onto one open one but even if he welded the closed ones and riveted the open ones then the chain would be limited by the strength of the open one, and in any case it would be a compromised solution that gained him nothing.
The welding required a fine control and normally would be difficult to achieve. Difficult that was for a human or any one of the other races who were not descended from gods. Eanos smiled to himself at the proof of divine intent and the blessing inferred by the gnosis. Still though there was the test and for that he once more used the holdfast to clamp down a mandrel to the anvil. This one was narrower than the one used to create the ring for the internal diameter of the closed ring was smaller because of the overlap. It wouldn’t work for the closing of the rings which contained other rings but it would be good enough for his test, and one step at a time!
”Izurdins blessing be upon this,” he said quietly to himself as he laid one of the rings in the forge. As it heated he quickly laid out several small hammers suitable in size for the fine work ahead. It took very little time indeed for the ring to heat through and he lifted it out and slipped it onto the mandrel with his left hand. There he squeezed it closer around the mandrel with his fingers. Though he had only the single gnosis mark which all Isur carried, it allowed him this benefit, that he could manipulate steel when it was heated. With the ring bent to size and overlapping he used the hammer in his right hand to knock off the forge scale and then to weld the ends together to form a single and solid ring.
He repeated the process a number of times and then repeated it once more but just overlapped the ends without welding to create some open rings. Strength was key here, for otherwise it was no better than riveting and a potentially it was worse. With that in mind he closed his eyes for a moment, diverting his attention inward and detached a small amount of his person djed which he then transformed using the auristic filter which was so familiar to him.
With it he inspected the welds of each ring which lay upon the anvil checking each weld for how well the metals had fused and if there was any slag or similar which might weaken the weld. He discarded a couple of rings where he felt that the weld had not been made well enough. Not that it really mattered perhaps since this was a test, but there were principles by which he ran this shop and some were automatic no matter how much extra work they might create.
He still had the vision and he used it whilst an open ring was placed to heat along with four closed ones, though these were placed in a cooler part and a smaller mandrel clamped the anvil. The heated ring was removed and the cooler rings slipped on it. He’d heated them all otherwise the other rings might have drained the heat from the ring to be welded, dropping its temperature. He slipped it onto the mandrel and quickly closed the weld, inspecting the join in his mind as he did so to be sure that it was done.
The small section of linked rings was now joined in a way that he was happy with, the test was done, and the rings, aside from needing to be cleaned and polished were ready to be used as part of a larger work.
by Eanos on August 22nd, 2013, 9:02 pm 
