Wood Chainlinks

2013

While looking for woodworking projects on YouTube I came across a video by Steve Ramsey from Woodworking for Mere Mortals on how to make wooden chain. It caught my attention because I was curious how it was made with one piece of wood. When I watched the video I learned that the chain was not made from one piece of wood, but instead the links were made individually and every other link was cut apart and glued back together around two other links to make a connected chain. Still, I had to try it for myself.

So I followed Steve's instructions and made two jigs and cut blocks for the chain links. I found Steve's method sufficed, however, after making half a dozen or so links I discovered a few tricks in order to yield a greater ratio of successful links to failed ones.

You can see by looking at my jigs that there is masking tape around the vertical surfaces where the chain link comes in contact with the jig. Not all the links turned out the same size so I sometimes had to add and remove masking tape to fit the links in the jig. This was crucial because if the link moves too much, it is much more likely to split.

I also found that when routing the outside of each link, the front left and back right corners of the block are much more likely to split than the front right and back left corners since the router bit spins counterclockwise. This is because when the bit is spinning and the blade is turning into the grain it is much more likely to split. To split less chain link blocks, I routed the front left and back right corners and then flipped the block over and again routed the front left and back right corners to route all the corners.

By using these two tricks I was able to go from finishing about two links out of every three I started to successfully completing eight or nine out of ten. Overall I made about 40 links. It was most efficient to build each link in an assembly line rather than build each link one at a time. It took me between five and ten minutes for each link.

-Erik