Home made seat belt buckles

[jrlx]

Hi All

A fellow modeller (Paolo6691) asked me if I could give some tips on how to make seat belt buckles, like those I did for my Gnat and Fokker Dr. I builds.

I gave him some tips but I thought I should post them here. Maybe these tips are useful for other modellers.

I don't use any special tools, just a pair of straight-nose tweezers for bending the wire and a nº 11 x-acto blade to cut it. I've been using wires from a multi-threaded electrical cable, which are reasonably thin and not too rigid nor too flaccid. I hold the wire between my index finger and thumb, as straight as possible, and start bending it from one extreme. I use the width of the tweezer's tips as a measuring reference: for 1/72 this width is enough for the sides of the buckles. The sides are created by successive bends.

I haven't practised much, I just make a new buckle if one doesn't turn out properly.

The tools can be seen in this post of my Gnat thread.

To make the explanation easier to understand, I've just taken a few pictures of the different steps for making a rectangular buckle.

1. Here's the straight wire and tweezers, preparing for the first bend:

2.The tips hold the extreme of the wire:

3. The first bend is done:

4. The tweezers hold the wire right next to the bend, in order to make the second bend:

5. The second bend is done, this is how the wire is at the moment:

6. The third and last bend is now done:

7. The x-acto blade is used to cut the wire and we have a new buckle

Please note that the wire was previously painted with silver paint, because it is a copper wire. I didn't apply primer first, so the paint chipped while I was bending the wire. I would advise you to use primer, if you wish to paint the wires before bending them. If you have a steady hand, you could also paint the wires after glueing them to the tape belts.

I hope this was helpful.

Cheers

Jaime

[CedB]

Nice tip Jaime, thanks for sharing

[wyverns4]

Cheers Jamie. A different way of doing it.

Right, off to the bench to have a bash!

Christian, exiled to the armpit of the world

[jrlx]

Thanks Gents, always happy to share!

Christian, if you use a different method I'd be interested in hearing about it.

Cheers

Jaime

[CedB]

Hi Jaime

I had bookmarked Rato Marczak's method but never used it... I didn't get around to making the triangular former but may be faster than one at a time with the tweezers?

HTH

[Kuro Nezumi]

Very good! Should come in handy one day!

[jrlx]

Hi Jaime

I had bookmarked Rato Marczak's method but never used it... I didn't get around to making the triangular former but may be faster than one at a time with the tweezers?

HTH

Thanks for the link Ced, I had seen this site once but completely forgot about it in the meantime.

Cheers

Jaime

[PlaStix]

Thank you for posting Jaime. I have bookmarked this for future reference!

[jrlx]

Thanks Stix. If a lot of buckles are needed, the technique in Rato Marczak's link is certainly quicker!

Cheers

Jaime