Chain making is a wonderful way to nail those soldering skills!
In this quick blog post, I want to share with you how I use these handy reverse action ring opening pliers to quickly create paperclip or elongated oval shaped links. It’s crazy easy, I promise
Start with a round jump ring
Here I have a round jump ring made from 16 gauge round wire. The inside diameter of this is 8mm and the jump ring is soldered closed.
The great thing about making your links this way, is you could absolutely shape the links once the entire chain is soldered together. If you wanted to – but we’ll get to that later.
Grab yourself some reverse action ring opening pliers
I bought mine from Gesswein, just click the button below for a direct link.
Rather than the jaws opening when you open the handle, these pliers open up when you squeeze the handles together.
As always though, we need to do a little modification to our pliers to make sure they don’t leave any marks on our work.
Modify those pliers so they don't leave gouges
If you look at the edges on your brand-new pliers, you’ll notice that they’re super sharp. If we use these as they are right now – guess what? You’re gonna get some gouges! So, before getting started, we’re just going to make a little modification using a medium / fine rubber wheel to take those sharp edges off the recesses in our pliers.
Place the jump ring on the pliers
I like to have my jump ring resting in the first set of notches on the pliers so I can make my chain links as narrow as possible at the ends. But you can experiment here depending on the look you’re going for.
Squeeze the plier handles
Squeeze down on the handle to elongate the jump ring.
As with all pliers that aren’t parallel action, the force applied will not be even on both sides of the jump ring. So, simply rotate the jump ring and repeat the process.
Told you it was easy!
As always, there’s more than one way to do everything. But for me, I find this is the simplest way possible. And I like the fact that this can be done even after all your links are soldered together.
If you have any favorite ways of your own for forming links, leave me a comment below!
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