crafting chainmail armor

I have been thinking that most crafting recipes for a chainmail armor are kind of hard or illogical for what it is, so I came up with a crafting idea: If you craft 9 chains, you could place all of them in the 3x3 grid of the crafting table, as a result you'd get one chainmail pad, the chainmail pad would behave exactly as an iron ingot, placing them in armor-order forms chainmail armor parts. This keeps the rarity of the armor very up because the cost in iron is incredibly high, but not so in vain, because much like real life chainmail armor, it could have a trait that makes it handle sword and Axe attacks differently, say -3 points of damage instead of the original damage it would do WITHOUT it. Or maybe higher resistance than an iron armor.