What's up mates! In this video I am going to show you how you can create and paint seatbelts for your scale model Also I am going to share why this is a better option than PE seat belts in my opinion First I made a tool to make the buckles I used a bank card as it has quite sturdy plastic The thickness is about 0,8mm the larger step is 1,5mm high and the smaller is 1.1mm For the buckles I use copper wire and the thinner it is, the better. The Idea is to make a tight coil around the tool. Using a curved scalpel blade I cut trough each row This allows me to have individual pieces which will be the buckles themselves On a hard surface I flatten each piece I put the details on a piece of tape foe easier handling and then I glue a straight piece of wire in the middle of each section Those details are for the chest belts…
I will do them first. I cut off the excess material Using the bending tool as a guide I cut out a strip of masking tape that will be the belt, it can be as long as you need it. you can always trim it later I fold the end together to have a sturdier guide also I taper it a bit so it is easier to put it through the buckle. The goal is to thread the belt trough the buckle so that it is hanging on the central beam The sticky side of the tape should be facing the inside so you can fold the tape and stick it together. This will form the lower part of the belt When folding the tape together I leave the back side at about 8 mm to leave space for the lower buckle For the lower buckle I bent a piece of wire at 90 degrees and I place it on the sticky side and fold the tape over to hold the buckle in place.
The upper portion of the belt has to be treaded trough the buckle and folded around the upper section. You can leave this as long as you want.. it has to reach the back of the seat so you can glue it. For the lap belts I use the wider step in the tool. I made some buckles with that step but without the center beam. Here it is much simpler as we just have to tread the belt trough the buckle and then fold it together. Of course you can bend yourself much more complicated buckles. I cut a strip of tape a bit wider than the lap belt and folded it together to form the pad that sits underneath the buckles. Then I superglued it to the belt. For easier painting I attached the belts on a pop stick This is what I used for the painting.
The choice is yours of course. I started by airbrushing some drab on both sides of the belts. Then I painted the buckles in black I added some black to the drab color and applied thin lines to simulate seams To give the dashed line appearance I used the base color. For the buckles I used a steel color from Cytadel To do the highlights I added some white to the base color. Highlights should be applied also after the installation of the seatbelts on the seat. For the pads I used brown color. All the colors I used are too shiny so I applied matt varnish. In my opinion the DIY seatbelts are better than PE belts because they accept the form of the seat much easier and are generally easier to shape. Also superglue works very well with them, unlike the PE details If you like this video go ahead and watch more of my tutorials.
Thanks for watching and until next time happy modeling..
