Stage 2: Chain Linkages — What It Takes to Make a Ring Move

This week the bicycle chain ring became real.

After spending so much time with a bench full of small, separate parts, I finally reached the point where the chain started coming together link by link in my hands. Better still, it articulated. Up to then, the project had mostly been a long exercise in marking, cutting, drilling, shaping, and checking. Useful work, necessary work, but still work on parts. Once the links began assembling and moving the way they were meant to, the piece stopped feeling like a collection of parts and started feeling like a piece of jewelry.

That matters even more with a piece like this, a piece of jewelry that moves — kinetic jewelry. A static piece only has to look right. This has to behave. It has to articulate cleanly, hold its structure, and move without binding. That is what makes kinetic work so compelling, and also so demanding. You are not only shaping form. You are shaping function. The piece has to earn its life.

Bench notes from the week: drilling the link plates at the bench, the bicycle chain beginning to come together in assembly, a small jig holding the links for shaping, and the paired parts lined up before final refinement.

Most of the week went into getting to that point. The real fight was precision. That lesson landed hard when I realized that more than half the original links were not up to standard and had to be remade. Frustrating, yes, but also revealing. The second batch came together faster and more accurately than the first. Later, when I discovered I still needed four more links, that third round was faster again. Same task in principle, but not the same hands doing it. That is one of the clearest signs of progress I can think of. The process itself improved.

And in my studio, remaking a few links is never just a matter of cutting a few more parts. It means going back to scrap silver, melting it, pouring an ingot, rolling out fresh sheet to the correct dimensions, and then starting the whole sequence again: marking, cutting, drilling, shaping.

One thing that became clear this week is that the slow, methodical preparation paid off. Once the links were right, the assembly itself was relatively straightforward. That was satisfying, but it was also instructive. It confirmed something I had been thinking about all week after listening to Ian Bernard’s Setting the Standard podcast, in his interview with goldsmith Simon Finlayson. They were talking about microscope work, but the point reaches much further than magnification: better work often takes longer because the closer you look, the more there is to fix. Once you see more, you become responsible for more. That felt exactly right at my own bench this week.

There is still work left in the ring. The links need final shaping, the rivets need to be refined and secured, and the chain still has to be closed, sanded, polished, and tumbled. But the important thing is this: the project moved forward in a real way. The chain is assembled. It moves. The process is tighter. The work is better than it was a week ago.

That is the lesson I am carrying out of the studio this week. High-quality craftsmanship takes the time it takes. There is no shortcut around that. People tend to see the finished piece at the end. What they do not see is the long, solitary road behind it — the mornings, the evenings, the quiet hours at the bench where mastery is not displayed, only earned.