Making a solid silver royal link necklace

The royal link chain is also called Byzantine link or even Peruvian link, depending on the place and time.

With a complex appearance, it is made up of simple rings fitted one inside the other following a very specific method, giving a round shape and an important volume to the necklace or bracelet made with this type of mesh.

Royal mesh allows you to create long, bulky necklaces in silver or gold with a relatively low weight, so it is an interesting mesh option for making a gold necklace with limited gold weight.

View of royal silver chain necklace extended and around a bust giving an idea of ​​how the necklace will look when worn around the neck. You’ll notice the distinctive, complex-looking geometries of the links, each made up of simple silver rings. You can discover other models of large silver necklaces in our necklace collection.

This necklace is 50 centimeters long and weighs 37 grams

Production

Like all flexible chains made up of links, it is made up of links strung together following a very specific procedure, this linking process is the DNA of the royal link chain.

The principle

The manufacture of this type of net is accessible to DIY enthusiasts since it consists of assembling round nets following the method presented below.

There are plenty of tutorials for making these links in brass in particular or in aluminium, the rings are then closed by the natural rigidity of the metal and are not welded, unlike the case of our chain produced in our laboratory and whose processing is detailed below

Royal Knitting Tutorial (source)

Silver wire construction

Obviously in our case the processing differs since it is necessary to adapt the weight of the silver (or gold as the case may be) to the budget and length desired by the customer.

We need to determine the diameter of the wire, the size of the rings and the weight of the jewelry.

Starting from scratch, our work begins by rolling a bar of solid silver into a wire which is then wrapped around a mandrel. Here we mount a metal mandrel on a micromotor, the thin silver wire is then wound onto the mandrel causing the micromotor to slowly rotate.

Photo showing the mandrel mounted on the micromotor, the taut silver wire, the silver spiral made by winding the silver rings obtained by cutting the spiral onto the mandrel

As you can see above, the resulting spiral is then sawed lengthwise into simple silver rings.

These are then assembled manually, one by one, following the assembly diagram previously reported. This step seems simple but it is long and tedious and it is easy to make a mistake.

This video shows the stitch assembly process:

Once the rings are assembled, we recognize the characteristic appearance of real links attached to each other. Note that in this photo the rings are still open.

At this point we just have to solder the rings of our assembly that were still open. This step is particularly long and requires patience.

You need to place a solder link over each of the ring openings to solder it and close it. There are hundreds of them.

Final surrender

The chain is then finalized and we still need to fit the lobster clasp and polish the necklace to finish it.

The result can be seen below:

View of our necklace on a bust

More examples of link bracelets

Here are some examples of knitted bracelets or necklaces made in our laboratory, each knitted model responds to its own production method, which you can view by clicking on the photos:

To go further: