05/29/2026
An interesting read...take a few minutes and read it, you will be aware if you encounter " the Chain" Safe Riding and God Bless.
A man I had never seen before walked up to me at Sturgis last August and handed me a copper bracelet with a folded note tied to it with a piece of leather string.
He didn't introduce himself.
He didn't explain.
He pointed at the bracelet, said — "read the note," and walked back into the crowd.
I never saw him again.
I'm 53.
I'd been at Sturgis for the better part of a week.
I was sitting outside a leather goods vendor on Main Street drinking a coffee.
The stranger walked up to me out of nowhere. Older guy — maybe 70. White hair, denim vest, gray beard.
He set the bracelet on the bench next to me, said his five words, and was gone before I could ask him anything.
I sat there for a few minutes with the bracelet in my hand.
Then I unfolded the note.
The note was a single piece of paper, folded in thirds, written in pen.
It said:
"Welcome to the chain.
Wear this on your left wrist for exactly 365 days.
Don't take it off.
On day 366, find a rider you don't know who's at least ten years younger than you.
Give them this bracelet with this note copied onto fresh paper.
Don't tell them anything else.
Don't ask questions.
You'll understand by day 365."
That was it.
No name. No explanation. No mechanism. No website. No phone number.
Just a bracelet and a set of instructions.
I sat outside the leather vendor for another half hour staring at the note.
I had three options.
I could throw the bracelet away.
I could keep it as a souvenir.
Or I could do what it said.
I'm a curious man.
I'm a regular guy in most ways — I'm an electrician, I've been married 27 years, I have one kid in college, I own a Harley Road Glide, I ride 5,000 miles a year.
I'm not the kind of guy who follows mysterious instructions from strangers at biker rallies.
But I'd never been handed a bracelet by a stranger at a biker rally before.
And the note said I'd understand by day 365.
That open loop dug into me.
I had to know.
I put the bracelet on my left wrist that afternoon.
I was at Sturgis for three more days.
It came back with me to Wisconsin without coming off.
I'm going to tell you the story of day 1 through day 365.
What I found out about the bracelet.
Who was in the chain before me.
What it means.
And what I did on day 366.
The first thing I did when I got home was try to figure out who started the chain.
I searched online for any reference to a "bracelet chain" or "Sturgis bracelet."
There was nothing.
No forum posts. No videos. No articles.
The chain was either small enough to fly under the internet's radar — or it was deliberately quiet.
The second thing I did was try to figure out what the bracelet was.
I took it to a jeweler in my town who agreed to take a quick look.
He confirmed it was solid copper.
He said the magnets in it were neodymium — strong, real.
He said the construction was high quality.
He said it had a brand stamp on the inside of the band.
The brand was something called Willis Judd.
I looked Willis Judd up.
They were a small jewelry company that had been making copper bracelets with magnets for decades.
They sold them direct from their website for about $80 each.
They had a sixty-day money-back guarantee.
There were reviews going back over ten years from riders, tradespeople, gardeners, golfers — all kinds of people claiming relief from joint problems.
There were also plenty of skeptics in the comments calling it pseudoscience.
I figured the truth was somewhere in the middle.
But none of that explained the chain.
The third thing I did was start asking around.
I have a riding crew of six guys here in Wisconsin.
I asked them at our next breakfast if any of them had ever heard of a chain like this.
Five of them looked at me like I'd lost my mind.
The sixth — a guy named Walt who's 72 — set his coffee down very carefully.
He said — Mike. Pull up your sleeve.
I pulled up my sleeve.
He looked at the bracelet on my wrist.
He nodded slowly.
He said — well. I'll be damned.
Walt pulled up his own sleeve.
The same bracelet was on his wrist.
Same dark copper. Same three rows of magnets.
He said — I got mine in 2009.
A man I'd never seen before handed it to me at a poker run in northern Michigan.
Same kind of note. Same instructions.
I wore it for the 365 days.
I gave it to a kid I'd never met in 2010 at a rally in Iowa.
I've ordered my own from Willis Judd ever since.
I'm on my third one now.
I just looked at him.
I said — Walt. What is this. What is the chain.
He said — Mike. Sit there and drink your coffee.
I'm going to tell you what I know.
But I don't know everything.
Nobody does. That's part of how it works.
He said — the chain started somewhere in the 80s.
Nobody knows exactly when.
Nobody knows exactly who started it.
There are theories. One man. A small group of riders. An old mechanic who learned about the bracelet from a Cherokee woman in North Carolina in the 70s.
I've heard four different origin stories from four different guys.
They might all be wrong. They might all be right. Doesn't matter.
What matters is this.
There's a network of riders across America — probably a few thousand of us — who pass these bracelets forward every 365 days.
We don't have a name. We don't have meetings. We don't have a website. We don't have membership cards.
We have a bracelet and a note.
That's the whole thing.
He said — the rule is you wear yours for 365 days, then you give yours to a stranger younger than you with the same note.
Then you order your own from Willis Judd.
The chain bracelet keeps moving. Yours stays with you.
That's how the chain grows.
I said — Walt. Why? What's the point?
He said — Mike. By day 365 you'll know.
But I'll tell you the short version.
The bracelet works.
It keeps your hands working long past when they should have quit.
Most riders don't know about it.
Most who hear about it don't believe.
The chain is how we get past the disbelief.
You can't dismiss a bracelet a stranger handed you in Sturgis the same way you can dismiss an ad on Facebook.
You have to wonder. You have to investigate.
And by the time you've worn it for 365 days, you've done the experiment yourself.
You either believe or you don't.
If you do, you keep the tradition going.
I said — Walt. Does it really work?
He said — I'm 72.
I rode here this morning on my Sportster.
It's 17 degrees outside.
I haven't had stiff hands in 16 years.
You're 53.
If you wear this every day until you're 80, you'll be riding at 80.
If you don't, you'll be sitting in a recliner at 67 telling your grandkids you used to ride.
That's the experiment.
365 days isn't long enough to know for sure.
20 years is.
But 365 days is long enough to know whether to bet 20 years on it.
I left that breakfast different than I came.
Over the next 11 months I tracked down five more riders in the chain.
I went looking for them.
Each one had a story.
A guy named Carl in Tennessee got his bracelet from a stranger at the Tail of the Dragon in 2017.
A woman named Rita in Texas got hers from a stranger at Daytona Bike Week in 2014.
A guy named Frank in Oregon got his at a memorial ride for a fallen rider in 2003.
A guy named Phil in Pennsylvania got his at a vintage motorcycle show in 1998.
The oldest chain member I found — a man named Bart in Arizona who's now 87 — got his at a Hells Angels charity ride in 1991.
Bart had been wearing the chain bracelet for 33 years.
He'd ordered his own from Willis Judd in 1991 and worn one continuously since.
He'd given his original chain bracelet to a young rider in 1992 and his replacement chain bracelets (he keeps ordering them) to dozens of riders since.
Bart said he'd put about 60 riders into the chain personally over 33 years.
If each of those 60 has put 30 in, that's 1,800.
If each of THOSE has put 10 in, that's 18,000.
The math gets big fast.
Bart told me he believes the chain started with a man named Frank Iverson who lived outside Lancaster, Pennsylvania in the 70s and 80s.
Iverson died in the early 90s but had given bracelets to anyone who asked about his hands.
Bart said the chain wasn't even Iverson's intention.
It just happened.
A few of the guys Iverson gave bracelets to started doing it themselves.
By the late 80s the chain was a thing.
By day 200 I was a believer.
Not because of dramatic changes — I'd had no symptoms to begin with.
But because I'd never seen so many old riders in such good shape.
Walt at 72 in 17-degree weather. Bart at 87 still riding. Carl at 69 doing the Tail of the Dragon weekly. Rita at 71 riding cross-country annually.
These weren't outliers.
These were people in the chain.
By day 300 I'd ordered my own bracelet from Willis Judd.
It came in five days.
I put it on my right wrist.
I now had two bracelets — the chain one on my left, my own on my right.
I planned to keep wearing my own after the chain one moved on.
Day 365 was August 15th.
Sturgis week.
I went back.
I sat outside the same leather goods vendor on Main Street where I'd been the year before.
I had a coffee.
I had the chain bracelet on my left wrist and the note in my pocket — copied onto fresh paper as instructed.
I watched the crowd.
I was looking for a rider I'd never seen before.
Younger than me by at least ten years.
Sitting alone or with people who weren't paying attention.
I found him after about 90 minutes.
A guy in his early 40s sitting on a curb across the street eating a burrito.
Plain black t-shirt. Leather vest with no patches yet. Heritage Softail parked behind him.
He was alone.
He was just watching the crowd go by.
He had the same look I'd probably had the year before.
I walked over.
I sat down on the curb next to him.
I didn't introduce myself.
I set the chain bracelet on the curb between us along with the note.
I said — "read the note."
I got up and walked back into the crowd.
I didn't look back.
That's the rule.
I drove home from Sturgis that week with my own Willis Judd bracelet on my left wrist.
I've been wearing my own bracelet for 4 months past day 365.
Total time on a copper bracelet: 16 months.
I'm 54 now.
I rode 5,800 miles in the last 12 months — about 800 more than I usually do.
I did a 600-mile day in October. First one in about four years.
I didn't have hand cramps. I didn't have morning stiffness. I didn't think about my hands once.
I don't have a transformation to report.
I have nothing to report.
That's the point.
If you're a rider somewhere between 40 and 75 and you have hands that work — listen to me.
You're probably not going to be handed a bracelet by a stranger in Sturgis.
The chain is small and slow and most riders never encounter it.
But the brand is real. The bracelet is real. The mechanism is real.
The chain is just a folk way of getting around the natural disbelief.
You don't need a stranger to hand you one.
You can just buy one.
The brand is Willis Judd.
Solid copper, not plated. Real neodymium magnets in three rows.
$80.
Sixty-day money-back guarantee.
If you wear it for 60 days and feel nothing, mail it back, get your $80 back.
For a guy without symptoms, you might not feel anything dramatic.
That's fine.
The bracelet isn't a fix. It's an insurance policy.
You're buying the version of yourself who's still riding at 78.
Bart told me something on the phone that I think about a lot.
He said — Mike. The chain isn't a secret society.
It's a way of doing kindness.
We don't sell anything. We don't profit. We don't recruit.
We just keep moving these bracelets through the riding community.
Because every rider who gets one and wears it for the long haul is one more rider on the road at 80.
That's a good outcome. That's all we want.
Bart said — if you want to buy your own and skip the chain, do it.
The point isn't the chain. The point is the bracelet.
I'm passing this letter to you the way Walt passed the conversation to me.
The way Bart passed it to Walt.
The way Frank Iverson passed it to Bart in 1986.
I'm not handing you a bracelet in a Sturgis crowd.
I'm doing the next best thing.
I'm telling you about it.
If you wear one for the rest of your life, you'll be riding at 80.
If you don't, you might not.
That's the experiment.
You can run it on yourself with $80 and a 60-day window.
Click the link.
Order one.
Put it on your left wrist.
Don't take it off.
In 20 years when you're 70 or 75 or 80 and you're still on the road, think about a stranger at a Sturgis bench and a note tied with a leather string.
That's where this came from.
That's where you came from now too.
I'll see you out there.
If we cross paths, look at my left wrist.
If yours matches mine, nod.
That's how we know each other.
That's the chain.
