Loop in Loop Chain Process

Here's a quick little photo tutorial on forming the links for loop in loop chain. There are several good YouTube sources for this, but these are my own photos, and thoughts on the process. 

Step one is to solder or fuse your links. I made mine on a half inch diameter mandrel. This was slightly larger for my project, but it took getting the chain together to figure that out. I'll probably make another one of these with slightly smaller links. Like on a 3/8" mandrel.

I used round nose pliers to stretch each link into a rough oval. I tried to keep the solder joint to one side, not in the middle of anything.

I used stepped bail making pliers to round out the ends of the oval. 

Back to the round nose pliers, I pinched the center of the oval to make a figure 8.

Last step, I used the bail forming pliers to fold the figure 8 in half, curving it over the pliers. 

Linking the things together is a tiny bit fiddly, on occasion. But you slip the open spot where your two loops are almost touching through the two loops of the previous link, and then sort of twist. Rinse and repeat. 

This is 6" of chain. I started with 32 links. I had to re-solder three, which was pretty good, and I didn't lose any to the soldering process. However, I popped 5 of them while forming. So this is 27 rings. Interestingly, almost all of the failures happened in the final stage of forming.