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With the huge variety of chains I make, every one has its nuances. Some characteristics are shared while others are for a particular weave, wire diameter, and ring diameter. Talk about unique!

It's been a while since making this loop in loop weave. With an aspect ratio over 19 - absolutely obscene as far as chains go - and a micromaille-size wire diameter of 0.50mm, the best eyesight will still need magnification to nail those closures and weld them fully and cleanly.

I drawed (drew, drewed, drawned - what's the correct verb here?) the wire and headed for my coil winding machine. Not so successful. Hair-thin wire behaves un-normally from regular-size wire. The wire bound up and ruined the whole coil. Into the scrap pile. I then made an adjustable spool holder to permanently solve the problem.

Attempt two made it through all that. Now it was time for the ring cutter to screw it up, and it didn't disappoint. It flat-out destroyed about 1/3 of the rings. The remainder were marginally better but not good enough so the whole batch was scrapped. Zero for two, FFS!

Third time's a charm. Wire drawing - check. Wire coiling - check. A few added steps - check. Annealed 0.999 fine silver, which is how the coil had to be, has no structural integrity. Thin wire and a relatively large inner diameter are an even worse combination.

Pushing a naked coil of especially tiny rings like this into the ring cutter is a death sentence. The saw blade will pull and tear, deforming rings along its merry way, and maybe cutting a few cleanly here and there. I always fully tape these coils to prevent it. This time I taped it more than before and that shall be my new benchmark. Bingo.

It took more than 20 minutes to separate the rings. Fusing those spindly monsters was a bear. Rings this small heat up real fast and melt into a blob. There weren't any blobs but all the rejects kept the scrap pile well fed. I made a new ring holder, tweaked the torch, and finished strong.

The stats: 471 total rings cut, 52 were destroyed cutting (11%), 34 of the remainder were bad fuses (8%), several broke during assembly (2%).

The bad fuses weren't a total loss. They started the weave and dialed in the assembly process. While totally unsuitable because they are ugly, deformed, and weak, they are usually better than what appears on other people's finished pieces! I could have used them by hiding the bad sections within the weave but then I couldn't truthfully say I cared.

Which brings me to another critically important point. Welded chains are only as good as quality control. I scrap a single ring as easily as a batch or a $2000 completed piece if they don't meet my standards. Let the results speak for themselves.

Posted by M: June 24, 2025

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