Oven Blued Stainless Steel Chain Mail

 Stainless, welded mail aventail from Master Knuut.  Degrease, wash well with soap and water, rinse, rinse with denatured alcohol.  Place on rack in preheated oven at 500F, set oven to self clean mode where temperature will reach around 800F.  After one hour, turn oven off (I had to shut off the breaker).  Wait about 1 hour until oven temperature lowers to the point where the oven door safety unlocks.  Remove with tongs or heavy mits, quench in metal bucket or pot contain about 5 gallons of 95% water 5% corn oil.  Observe standard safety protocols!

Degreasing Mail, Round 2

After quenching, the mail had quite a bit of burned oil and required another round of degreasing with mineral spirits, followed by a vigorous sloshing in soapy water, several rinses, and another trip to the oven at 200F to dry it out quickly. A fair amount of oil remains after this round of cleaning, but for now it is what it is. At a later time I might try wiping it down with a sponge and alcohol because whatever grim remains will need to be wiped off.

The heat coloring is not as irregular as it appears in these photos. Some of the variation is due to differences in the way different areas of the mail are stretched, and when worn the color will appear more uniform

Oven Blueing Chain Mail

After degreasing the mail shirt, I let it air out for about 2 hours and started to preheat the oven. It seemed impossible to remove all the grime with mineral spirits, so I decided to risk a soapy water bath using my trusty 5 gallon bucket. Much to my relief, after 2 or 3 water-soap-swish cycles, the water started running clear. I rinsed the mail 4 or 5 times until there were no more bubbles in the rinse water, then transferred to a towel for a quick dry.

Moments later the mail was in the oven. I figured the mail would be difficult to heat evenly through-out, and therefore color unevenly if not careful, and I was right...

I set the oven to 375F (75F below my desired temp) and let the chain mail come up to temp for 30 minutes before progressing to 450F. I had planned on rotating and flipping the mail every 10 minutes, but we had unexpected guests and I let the mail sit in the oven at 450F for an hour. Big mistake! Most of the mail turned out perfectly with a nice golden-orange hue, but the links around the neck and some others on the back obviously hit somewhere near 525F due to uneven oven heating, and turned to a dark purple color. The rings are very small and those exposed to the exterior will heat up quickly.

In a panic I pulled the mail out and quenched in water. I was able to partially repair the darkened links by using a fine buffing dremmel attachment to knock the links back to their starting state. At this point the mail shirt looked like crap.

I put the mail back into the oven, this time at 450F, and watched them carefully. The blued links did not darken any more, and those I had buffed darkened, unevenly, though not as bad. Finally, I quenched the mail shirt in an oil/water bath of about 4 gallons total, dried on a towel for a few minutes then placed back in the oven at 200F to remove the water. I am happier with the result than I was with the plain mail shirt, so I'm going to call this a success.

In the future, I would heat the oven to 415F and turn the mail shirt shirt often, every 5 to 10 minutes, by taking the shirt out of the oven (using oven mitts), place into a large metal bucket, refold and then reposition in the oven. Go slow!

Be warned: ovens may not heat evenly. If you have a convection oven, good on you. If not, be very careful about areas near the top and sides reaching +50F the median temperature.

Note: I noticed a very small amount of corrosion on about 20 links. I should be able to clean this up quickly with a dremmel & jewelers cloth polishing mandrel. In light of this finding, I would advise quenching in 100% vegetable oil.

Chain Mail Care & Maintainence

Chain Mail rusts easily and can be a pain to care for, so I set about doing some research on how to clean and maintain a mail shirt. The $114 mail hauberk I received was covered in oil and grim, apparently a result of a graphite spray applied by the manufacturer, and I really wanted to clean it before wearing it. But how?

Historically, mail was cleaned by putting it in a barrel with sand and rolling the barrel down a hill, but this seemed a bit dramatic to me so I reviewed my options. Some people recommended a barrel of sand on a treadmill, others recommended kitty litter. One person suggested using a bath tub filled with soapy water, rinsing well in a shower and placing the mail shirt in a 200F oven for 10 minutes to ensure prompt drying. Through all the chaos, one person's voice of reason rang clear: degreasing was a no-brainer: put the mail shirt in a 5 gallon bucket with 1 gallon of mineral spirits, let the shirt dry and then soak the shirt in acrylic floor polish (such as Future) to prevent corrosion. Ok, I thought: done and done.

But I was not completely satisfied with the nice shiny appearance of my mail shirt. I wanted something that looked old, and lived-in. Fresh off the success of my shield boss experiment, I figured heat-bluing a chain shirt would be a great way to add some depth to an otherwise uninteresting piece, and also protect it against the elements...

Photos: mail cleaning process with bucket, mineral spirits, and towels. Note the amount of grime removed during degreasing, and my failed attempt to filter and reuse the mineral spirits.