The light bulb has gone off in the old nogin' again. I plan to recycle used steel bicycle chains by making door mats out of them. Actually, the first prototype will be used as a "heavy duty workshop floor mat". To my suprise, I couldn't find anyone else doing this on the web.
How can I create a steel chain mat out of an old bike chain?
I'll first try to use thin spokes (hopefully thinner than the rivets in the chain) and thread them together forming a 2D mat. If that doesn't work, I can always buy a few metres of cheap steel wire and thread them onto that instead. But it'd be nicer to manufacture this from 100% re-used materials.
There's two or three ways to do this. I could simply line the sections of chain up so that they are parallel & string them altogether. Or I could offset them by half the chain pitch, making a
slightly nicer design. The tedious thing to do would be to create a meshed, open chainmail structure similar to a woven crochet weave. That obviously involves a lot more work but might prove to be worth the effort... leaving alternate gaps (for example one 5cm gap for every 5cm length of chain).
I just have to wait about 6 months until I can accumulate enough chains to complete a decent-sized floor mat. I already have 3 well-worn chains in storage.
A full length chain is usually about 1.5 metres long. Each chain is ~7mm thick, so assuming that I want to make a mat that is 75cm wide, one chain will add 15mm of width to the mat. I estimate that I'll need about 30 chains, giving a mat with a final dimensions of 75 x 45cm. If I use the open pattern shape, I'll only need half the number of bike chains to complete this project.
