Hanging straps on balteus?

[M. Demetrius]

Don't sell yourself too short. Skills are teachable/learnable. Talent is a gift, skill is the result of practice. You once didn't have the skill of typing messages on electronic forum pages, right? And look at you now!! :wink: :!:

Riveting is not hard, just tedious, especially until you get the feel of moving the little bits of metal rather than smashing them. Cutting plates like those is slow going, but can be done with mostly inexpensive tools and practice. Cutting all those parts out of flat plate will take a lot of time, but mostly, after the first one, they are cast metal, not hand cut. I'm sure that's the same now as it was then.

Grit your teeth, buy some leather, rivets, a ball peen hammer, some brass sheet, and some kind of drill. Measure the plates (you can mark on them with a Sharpie and remove the black lines later with after-shaving liquid--denatured alcohol in there). Cut in any one of several ways, tin snips work, but you'll have to file the edges. Drill some holes for rivets. Stick one on a punched piece of leather. After one or two tries, I'll bet you can rivet like a pro.

I'm fully convinced you can do it, and I've never even met you face to face. Be confident. Start simple.