armor

How-To:  Make riveted chain mail

How-To: Make riveted chain mail

There are scads of tutorials flushing through the tubes that will show you how to twirl old wire coat hangers into rings, cut them up, and link them together with pliers to make the ubiquitous “butted” chain mail, in which the individual rings are either unjoined, soldered, or glued together. But this recent Instructable from armourkris, for the truly dedicated, shows you how to make a much more serious–and to my amateur eye, authentic–mail, in which each ring is flattened, punched, linked, and then riveted closed.

Virgil England’s fantasy-land

Virgil England’s fantasy-land

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about Virgil England’s life-size dragon skeleton installation in Alaska’s Chugach National Forest. A lot of readers were curious about the elaborate back-story that England has created for his fantasy armory work, so Virgil himself pointed me to Debra McKinney’s article from the Anchorage Daily News of last May that explains more: