Making Buckle Straps

Straps are how armor actually stays on a body, and nearly every build needs them. The good news: buckle straps are one of the simplest things you’ll ever make in leather, and Prince provides free patterns and multiple methods, from bare-minimum to polished.

Watch: How to make leather buckle straps for armor (guide and free patterns)

Choosing the leather

• Thickness range: roughly 5 to 10 ounces. Below that range straps are generally too flimsy; above it they get hard and clunky to work with. Prince’s favorite for buckle straps is medium, in the 6 to 7 ounce range.
• Retaining straps run thinner: around 4 to 6 ounces in Prince’s practice, since they hold pieces in place rather than take load.
• Simplest option: pre-dyed or latigo leather needs no finishing. Vegetable-tanned gives you more options for tooling and color if you want the strap to match a decorated piece.

Watch: Tips and tricks for leather straps (thickness picks and cutting)

The simplest buckle strap

1. Cut the strap

   Start from a straight edge, note the width and length you need, and cut. A dedicated strap cutter is nice; a straight edge and knife work fine.

2. Punch for the buckle

   For the strap to hold a buckle it needs two rivet holes plus a slot for the buckle tongue. Punch the holes, connect them into a slot where the tongue passes through.

3. Finish the ends

   Trim the strap ends. A strap end punch gives a clean shape in one strike, but if you don’t have one, just cut the shape by hand. In Prince’s words: don’t worry about having the proper tool for every scenario; work with what you’ve got until it makes sense to expand your toolset.

4. Punch the adjustment holes and rivet it on

   Punch the holes the buckle tongue will use, then attach the strap to your armor with rivets, choosing which side faces out by preference.

Buckle choice

Buckle style is partly functional, mostly aesthetic, so go with what suits the piece. One functional note from the tutorials: heel bar buckles need a keeper (a ring or small strap) to hold the buckle tongue in place, so factor that into the design if you use them.

Common questions

Where to go next

The hole punch set from the starter tools list covers everything a strap needs. For the hardware side of assembly, your pattern’s tutorial demonstrates rivet setting in context.