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posted: 2023-01-28

Chainmail B3 Unit

Overview

Today I found a weave submission on M.A.I.L. by beeslayer for a weave called B3. This weave is a great-grandchild of the byzantine weave. This weave is also a unit which means it is intended to be joined to itself or something else as part of a larger pattern. Though this does also look nice on it's own. This can be a difficult and complicated weave to make. I highly recomend learning how to make byzantine before attempting to make this weave to learn concepts that help with understanding this weave.

As the M.A.I.L. page for this weave has no tutorials I thought I will try to make one myself. You can find it below.

Materials

The rings used for this peice are 16 SWG with a 1/4" internal diameter for an aspect ratio of 4.03 made of Bright Aluminum that I bought from the Ring Lord.

If you plan to follow along with this tutorial I do recomend that you try to find larger aspect ratio rings as that may make the weave easier to make.

Tutorial

  1. Start by opening 9 rings and closing another 12 rings. I find that a helpful firststep is to set up all of the open and closed rings you need. The result is shown in the image below:
All open/closed rings grouped by future use.

  1. Take one open ring, put it through 4 closed rings, then close the open ring to create one unit of 2-1-2 chain.

  2. Repeat step 2 two more times to create a total of 3 units of 2-1-2 chain as shown in the image below:

  1. Take one unit of 2-1-2 chain, keep two rings together at one end of the center ring, take the other two to the end as shown in the image below:
  1. Continuing from step 4 take the two right-most rings and fold them backwards so that they are on top of the two left-most rings while still touching the right end of the single ring. When this is done it shuold like like the state from the images below.

Side View:

Top View:

  1. Take an open ring and place it through the two rings you can see in the top right corner of the Top View image from step 5.

  2. Repeat steps 4 and 5 on another unit of 2-1-2 chain then take place attatch it to the open ring on the other folded 2-1-2 chain from step 6 such that the open ring goes through the two rings in the bottom left corner of the Top View image from step 5 and close the ring. After it should look like the image below.

  1. Repeat steps 4-7 with the last non-folded 2-1-2 chain, then add one more ring between the two unconnected folded 2-1-2 chains to close them. If done correctly your piece should look like the image below.
  1. Finally double-up the rings holding the folded 2-1-2 chain sections to get the final product shown in the image below.
    • One thing to note is that the final ring can be quite difficult to add if you went with a smaller AR like I did.

Notes

B3 is a fairly interesting derivative of byzantine. This weave has a lot of potential in that it can be patterned with itself in addition to allowing for splitting or joining of byzantine strands. However, this weave can be quite difficult to make, I would suggest trying to make sure you use a reasonably large AR for making this and that you try making one or two of these before starting a full project relying on this weave.