>
>Wire;
>Forget most of the older works that refer to ancient drawing etc. No doubt
>the odd bit of wire produced by smoothing a strip of metal by pulling it
>through a stone bead will turn up, but the development of true drawing as a
>standard wire production method dates to somewhere around AD 800
>(unfortunately the very period from which surviving gold and silver objects
>are scarce). By the ninth/tenth century drawing appears to have been
>universal across the ‘Old World and the Orient – from Ireland to Java. At
>present the earliest surviving examples of true drawn gold wire appears to
>be the links in some Korean jewellery of the 6th – 7th centuries AD (noted
>by several observers).
>
>Gold and silver are fairly easy to draw by hand (up to 2mm or so in
>diameter, anyway). Possibly fine iron wires (such as those described by
>Theophilus for binding organ pipes during soldering) could be drawn by
hand,
>but wires suitable for mail links would need substantial power. The
earliest
>major advance might be supposed to be the draw bench where a lever-system
>permitted much greater force and thus the production of larger diameter
>wires. There is little surviving evidence for draw benches that I am aware
>of before the sixteenth century when we have both illustrations and at
least
>one surviving bench (that now in the Musée National de la Renaissance at
>Chateau d’Ecoven - for gold and silver wires.).
Thank you for the interseting feedback Jack. I would like to correct one
piece of missinformation though. Maille is typically made from wire of
between .080 and .030 inches in dia. From personal experience I can tell
you that .1 in dia rod can definately be drawn without to much trouble by
hand even when it is iron or steel. Iron strip in this range is even easier
to draw until it has been through enough passes to have assumed a full
circular cross section. All of my experimentation material is currently
hand drawn, no levers, just a plate and a pair of drawing pliers.
Regards,
Mark
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