Many years ago I decided I was going to make my own chain shirt from. I got just a steel threaded dowel and some wire cutters and started to make rings by hand… many hours and blisters later, I had enough to make a small, awkward dice bag and a vow to never do this again 
I was using galvanized steel wire.
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Yeah I don’t have the hand or wrist strength to work with steel at all, I occasionally use very thin steel rings but I inevitably cut myself. The largest steel piece I’ve made is a rubber and steel ring guitar strap with very thin small steel rings.
My favorite rings are copper. Copper has an extremely pleasant texture to work. Most of my stuff is aluminum because of the weight and color choices. I use either aluminum or acrylic scales for scalemaille.
If I started making rings I’d want to use a set up that mechanically winds the wire onto the dowel. I’ve read plans for devices to do this as well as anodizers. And I’d want to saw cut. I’m trying to switch to only buying saw cut rings. Ringlord is discontinuing most of their machine cut rings anyway. But it is easier to mess up a batch with a saw even though they are so much better when done right. You can get a nearly invisible close with good saw cut rings.
For real serious armor some people weld each ring closed, that stuff is intimidating.
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Or rivets. Tiny hand-hammered rivets. But you can use solid rings for the other half. Sim and Ridge suggest that the Romans may have used punches to make the solid rings.
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Another sign project – except for the drawback. In the old days, when cigarette ads and billboards were everywhere, there was a famous (I guess) billboard in Times Square which featured a guy actually smoking:
They used some sort of smoke generator (though the rings in the picture may have been added). I first became aware of this kind of poster through a funny movie I once saw, where IIRC someone opened a window right onto a poster like this, and got smoke in his face.
Model steam locomotives sometimes have smoke generators, which dates back to old Lionel systems in the middle of the previous century. Today’s models are sophisticated, with sound and pulsating fans to blow the smoke out in synchronization with the drive wheels turning.
You can get smoke generators and tiny fans separately, so I built a box to collect smoke, then blow it out in a puff. The smoke is really a petroleum oil of some sort that isn’t due to combustion, but rather heated to form a fine mist that looks like smoke.
And there lies the problem. I generated some smoke in experiments on Monday, and have been coughing ever since. 
Breathing oil droplets is Definitely Not A Good Thing. So that project is dead.
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a reproduction of the Times Square billboard is featured in the Woody Allen movie Radio Days. I can’t find a pic from the movie but there’s plenty of the real one. no smoke rings, just a big periodic puff. they changed the ad several times but looks like they always lined the picture of the man with the permanent smoke generator.
I could swear there was a scene with a window opening on a sign painted on a building in From Russia With Love but can’t find it by searching that or James Bond. I don’t think it was a smoke-generating sign, though.
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Thanks for remembering that!
For my version of the billboard, in reaction to the Virile Man in so many cigarette commercials, I photoshopped an ad from this picture:
Looks like I’ve already started to disappear the cigarette. Anyway this is what I came up with, which I will spoiler because I can’t figure out whether it’s offensive or not:
ETA: maybe I can add a smoke puff from a piece of cotton or polyester fiber-fill coming out of his mouth.
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It’d be a lot less convenient and not ready to go all the time, but it might be possible to get something similar, but without as much inhalation hazard, using a bit of dry ice in water. Though the fog would have more of a tendency to sink, too.
There’s also the possibility of using pure glycerin with a vape atomizer, or “fog juice” (though I don’t know if you could use the same kind of atomizer with that). Stumbled on a project for that in a quick google: https://www.instructables.com/id/An-Inexpensive-Smoke-Fog-Generator/
(There’s also the problem of the jury still being out on possible inhalation problems with the vapes, but with pure glycerin and tuned to only generate small puffs in an area with ventilation I wouldn’t think there would be much danger. Don’t know if there’d be any unpleasant smells related, though…)
…and now I’m wondering how hard it would be to combine one of those methods with a very-scaled-down version of the classic smoke ring launcher toys, like this but smaller, maybe actuated by a small servo or a clockwork mechanism.
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Both of those links are very neat – thanks! I like the dry ice method, with the smoke rings, and it’s just water. One problem with the smoke generator method I tried is that it can eventually coat everything with a film of oil. I’ve read about that being a problem in the model railroad magazines. Glycerin may be less of a problem, but it is one of the stickiest substances on earth, I think.
I think my lungs are almost back to normal . . .
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New album release. Gloomy, snarly ambient
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All the pieces I’ve done with acrylics on packing cardboard (you can see that three of them were not made using egg cartons, lol.). Gonna try and sell 'em.
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I think in theory there wouldn’t be a lot of it in each puff, and a lot of the “fog juice” recipes you dilute it further with water (though as I noted, I’m not sure if that’d work with the same atomizer). But, now that you mention it, I see that could be a possible issue with that path. I’m not sure how gunky those vapes get. The “fog juice” pages I briefly looked at also mentioned that you should clean it up and not leave the stuff in a fog machine unused for any length of time as it could quickly grow stuff, so it wouldn’t be something that could just be ready to go whenever either.
With the dry ice/water method, there might be a possibility of moisture issues since it’s straight condensation, but if everything’s sealed up really well that might not be as much of a problem. Would probably want the water vessel to be easy to empty/clean out when it’s not in use, but it’d be a lot easier to clean out than glycerin and if distilled water was used would probably last longer without growing issues. Bigger downside is that dry ice is difficult to store for any length of time, so there’s a little bit of a cost/convenience issue.
I’m not gonna try building one, I’m not gonna try building one… darn it, I don’t have the free time for tempting ideas like this.
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A nebulizer would avoid the necessity of CO2. IIRC they use ultrasound to convert water to mist.
Gee, you can get one for $50 on Amazon.
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A completed beanie.
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Imagine this with clear glass and everything else a sort-of eggshell shade of white:
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Nice! But where’s the fluffy ball at the top? 
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Not enough cotton yarn.
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Two purses/bags made from old jeans (the Gap one is from the 1970s, junior size 7 - and I couldn’t fit into them at 125 lbs - they HAVE messed with sizing women’s clothes since then!) and the latest neck gaiter (made with yarn for baby clothes):
And the strap was knitted by my mom for a different jeans purse, which got repurposed into a clothespin bag for my ex-best friend.
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