Imagine wearing homemade chain mail armor to your school’s formal dance. Adam Tohn ’10 can tell you all about it. Instead of wearing a traditional suit and tie, he went to the last formal dance of his eighth-grade year clad in only the finest chain mail armor. This humorous, gutsy approach to the ever-popular middle school formal caught the attention of many of his classmates. They were even more impressed when he told them that he had constructed it from scratch. However, as the evening progressed, things got a little complicated for Tohn. “Before the night was over, my hair ended up getting caught and extremely tangled in the chain links, because it was back when I had long, braided hair. It took two people to eventually get it all out,” said Tohn. Tohn began this uncommon, exceptional hobby in seventh grade. Inspired by handcrafted chain mail he saw at the Renaissance Festival in Colorado several years before, he went back home and immediately decided to make one of his own. “I went online and tried to find the links [the little metal rings that make up the armor], and I bought a book on how to make it. I soon found out that making chain mail would be extremely time-consuming. However, once I got it started, it turned out to be pretty simple. It took about an hour or so to figure out the basic pattern, and then it was all just repetition from there on out,” said Tohn. After over 120 hours of meticulous crafting and constructing, Tohn finally finished his masterpiece; its impressive detail and raw strength struck his curiosity. “Once I finished the shirt, I wanted to see how strong it really was, since I was using aluminum instead of steel. I’d previously bought a 50-pound Plexiglas recurve bow with carbon-fiber arrows, and I shot a Styrofoam dummy with the chain mail on. The arrows broke through eleven out of twenty times.” Tohn’s chain mail has now become something of an urban legend at Phillips Academy. It has even made an appearance at several social events here, the most notable being the Winter Term pep rally. However, it turns out that his remarkable talent does not stop at medieval chain mail armor. Among other paraphernalia, Tohn has created and worked with aluminum ring hackey sacks, gauntlets and even jewelry. He is currently taking on a project geared towards school spirit: a beanie wearing black chain mail with an ‘A’ for Andover on it. Despite how intricate and time-consuming it may sound, the creation of chain mail does not dominate Tohn’s life. Outside of this unique expertise, Tohn enjoys other activities such as rock-climbing, for which he placed first in the intermediate category at an interscholastic climbing competition in New England.
