Riveted Woven Belt

The leather store near our workshop always stocks large bins of scrap - production offcuts from across the country. The surface quality of the leather is usually great so I was inspired to make products with it. The issue is that leather from different parts of the hide has different stretch properties which pose unique challenges for making functional objects. After months of testing various solutions I found that a woven belt solves this issue in two ways. Firstly by using an 8 strand braid I leveraged the collective strength of many similar parts. Also, crucially, the woven pattern creates a mechanical stretch across the whole belt that makes stretchiness in any individual strand insignificant.