I made a short video showing how to create the loop around your three gears:
Yellow rectangle show the keys and mouse clicks used.
Shortcuts used:
"O" to put the origin on an existing part
"shift+C" to move selected element to the origin.
...and the trick to be on the correct side of gear: select the control point, right click, change winding from CW to CCW.
Note that I slightly goofed in my video, I put the origin in the middle of pin instead of gear, so the chain was out of plane, and I had to correct that...
I don't see the point of your other example, why don't you use a single chain element?
Yellow rectangle show the keys and mouse clicks used.
Shortcuts used:
"O" to put the origin on an existing part
"shift+C" to move selected element to the origin.
...and the trick to be on the correct side of gear: select the control point, right click, change winding from CW to CCW.
Note that I slightly goofed in my video, I put the origin in the middle of pin instead of gear, so the chain was out of plane, and I had to correct that...
I don't see the point of your other example, why don't you use a single chain element?