These Links May Fail: Thoughts on Chain Making

Rita tells me I am ready to move on to Project Six in the core curriculum of Italian goldsmithing academy: the Indian Chain. Rita is from Sao Paulo and speaks Portuguese and Italian but very little English. Most of the words directed at me involve the word bruto, the corners of my box ring (Project 4) are very bruti, my solder seam is bruto but I am learning at a glacial pace how to move metal.

Start by pouring an ingot of pure silver. Coat the iron ingot mold with soot from the torch, a fuel-rich flame with little oxygen. Preheat the mold so that the metal is not shocked when it enters, like you preheat the pizza stone before it meets the dough. Metal and dough are more similar than you might think. Melt the silver in a crucible…as in, that place where everything goes to be recast, reconfigured, reborn. Keep the flame steady, the metal will pool and gather and the flame will be like the magician’s hands guiding the cane up into the sky. When the metal is molten, it will look like mercury/quicksilver. Take the flame away and it will dull. That is how you know it is ready. Bring the crucible and the torch to the mouth of the mold and pour through the flame, like you are pouring a cup of coffee. 

Release the ingot from the mold. Forge it on the anvil. Check for cracks. File any hard edges away.

Begin to roll it. Reduce its diameter. Stretch it. As one dimension increases, the other decreases.

The metal will become worked and brittle from passing through the jaws of the hardened steel rollers over and over again. It will need to be annealed. To pass through the fire, held below melting to soften it again. Annealing is like adding more mortar between the bricks, like the metal taking big inhale. Then it will move again. 

When you have exhausted the rollers, you are ready for the draw bench, that medieval-looking tool in the center of the studio. File a taper on one end of the wire, feed it through the 4-gauge slot in the steel plate, grasp the end of the taper in the jaws of the draw tongs, turn the handle, watch as the metal becomes smaller and longer and smaller and longer. When you have drawn your ingot to 22-gauge, you are ready to begin making the links of your chain. This will take several days. Many of your links will break in the weaving of this chain. You may melt the whole thing. Or maybe you will succeed in making something that isn’t ugly. Maybe you will love the bruto, the flaws, the irregular weave. Maybe you will wear this ugly creation each day to remind yourself that once you spent seven days crafting a chain, in a time when time was as long as you could imagine.