How To Make Seat Belt Buckles From Styrene Sheet

[Jdurg]

I'm currently building a 1/16th scale 1988 Corvette Convertible and trying to add as much detail as I can. While the MPC Kit has a lot of pieces, seat belt buckles and other seat belt gear were not included. Since this is a Convertible, the details on the inside are easily seen so I wanted to spruce it up. Part of that is creating seat belts and all the hardware. Having a few sheets of styrene (0.015 and 0.040 mm thick) I was able to create some seat belt buckles myself.

The tutorial I have here is for the more modern, top button release belts that you see in modern cars. For my 1988 Vette build, they used the older side-button buckles which were also encased in an interior colored molding. I have not yet finished the putty and sanding and painting on those two buckles, but once they are done I'll update this thread with further tutorial images.

Anyway, to do this build you will need a VERY sharp X-Acto blad, a ruler, a sharp pencil, some Cyanoacrylate Glue, and some putty.

The first thing I did was create a mock-up of my pieces on paper so that I could have a plan of attack on this build. In the first image, you will see a lineup of all the separate styrene pieces you will need. Please note that this is for the creation of ONE buckle. To make a full set, you'll need to multiply all these parts by the number of buckles you need to make.

A: 0.015 mm styrene (Outside portion of buckle).

B: 0.015 mm styrene (Outside portion of buckle).

C: 0.015 mm styrene (Inside spacer to create gap in top of buckle).

D: 0.040 mm styrene (Structural part of buckle, and also forms the button release on the top of the buckle).

E: 0.015 mm styrene (Side portion of buckle).

F: 0.015 mm styrene (Side portion of buckle).

So cut these out and set them aside. For part D, you can at this point round over the corners and edges to make it a bit smoother.

The first part of the actual "build" is to take some superglue and glue together the internal parts. The part that was used to make the button, and the gap creator piece of thin styrene.

With parts C and D bonded together, you then want to take parts A and B and glue them to the outside of the now bonded C&D. Again, use the CA Glue to ensure it bonds quickly and strongly, and be super certain that the tops of parts A and B are in line with each other on the opposite sides of the buckle. Also, as you can see in the image here, parts C and D are much wider than the actual external buckle part. This is fine, and in fact it's a good idea to do this since you can now use your sharp X-Acto blade to trim the excess off and leave a nice, smooth, flat surface for the next step.

With A, B, C, and D glued together, you can now glue the side pieces of styrene to the buckle. The key thing here is to make sure that the tops of the side pieces are level with the tops of sheets A and B. If the side pieces are wider than the resulting belt buckle, that's fine as you can use your X-Acto blade to trim it down.

At this point, you now have your buckle fully built. It's just a matter of cleanup. The longer appendages at the bottom are really just there to make things easier when trying to glue everything together. For the one prototype I built, I ended up cutting the excess off and rounded the bottom of the buckle out as well as the sides. This gives the buckle a rounded rectangular profile to it which looks good. I then added in some squadron green putty to fill gaps, and sealed it up with some more superglue which was then sanded further. Primer and color coats were added, followed by adding a black wash into the "gap" where the seat belt latch is inserted.

This was built for a 1/16th scale kit where I can also use the thin styrene to make the belt latch for the kit. If you are building this for a smaller scale kit, I would suggest picking up some seat belt hardware photo-etch parts to get a good idea of what size you are going to need to build your buckle(s) out of. Below are pictures of the one part I did build and paint up. Picture quality is poor, but this should give you a good idea of how it looks. I am QUITE happy with this and can't wait to get the full production versions of the buckle used in the 1988 Corvette.

The lighting makes this appear white, but it's actually the same color tan as in the previous photo.

[mopar68]

Awesome, Thanks for posting this up Justin. I'll have to give it a try.

[Jdurg]

Thanks. I just painted a silver coating on my '88 Corvette model, and tomorrow I'll put on the interior color for it. It looks AWESOME. I'll be starting the latch and other hardware shortly. This has turned out incredible. So easy to do, and so incredibly accurate.