Hey folks, Josh here. This will be my first “real” post so I figure I might as well make it heavy on the pic side as I managed to take quite a few different pics along the way. Anyways, I started with a helmet back in December but progressed to a full kit shortly thereafter and this belt\holster has been a while in the making but I am more or less done other than a few tweaks and adding “bulk” to the pouches. The belt itself is just an old belt I used to wear during High School so has natural wear on it and serves this purpose extremely well.
My inspiration for my Mando has always leaned towards Jango in design with my own flair. What can I say, I’m a sucker for some “gunslinger” aspects (I love the Dark Tower Series). For my belt I wanted a simple ammo pouch setup and a means of attaching dual holsters. Finidng plans for material attached to a block are all over the net but I wanted an actual functional pouch. I took designs for the “block pouch” and adjusted them to my needs. I drew up a design I thought would work and got it onto some material.
Once I had my material cut out I busted out my wife’s Singer and went to town, her sewing skills far surpass mine. But i did at least one just to say I did it. It became apparent that my wife sewed so much faster and I just ended up cutting material. Here’s mine
Then afterwards I started adding the snaps
All in all we made 4 of these and had a chunk of random material that worked out perfect for a larger wider pouch that fits my cell phone! Win for me!
With ammo pouches done and everything put on a back burner for a while I had time to come up with a working plan on holsters. This also meant I had to be pretty much complete with blasters (this will have it’s own WIP sooner or later). I got to a point on my blasters where was almost ready for paint so that meant I could make the holsters. With much apprehension I sat around with my tablet and phone looking over and over at photos of holsters. It ended up being a design for a Stormtrooper blaster holster on one of the random sights that gave me the inspiration for this. Tweaking the design to be a dropleg holster and more of a “Y” than just a rectangle and I was off to plotting on some grid paper.
Shown below is my design to which I will explain how I developed this. The starting point is the length of the blaster, mine being 9 inches along the entire top. To the left of this main line I drew out a horizontal line that represents the top of barrel to bottom of grip at the top and on the bottom the amount that would be covered up, plus a good inch to be on the safe side of things. To the right of my 9” line I took into account the width of the blaster, side amount needed, the width again and a diaganol line to match the rear. The edge slopes down so that some of the blaster is exposed for grabbing. And lastly, the top portion was a 45 degree line off the edges to get me about 3 inches to be able to sew a D ring into the ends.
Then it was time for drawing on the fuzzy backside of material, silver sharpie worked the best because paint pen used for pouches had dried out. Watching the Dark Tower while doing this helped get me motivated.
Here I have the design marked. I was happy with the fit so I was ready to double this over and cut it out.
It’s a good thing I made marks on the back and will be completely hidden since I marked up a ton. Once it was cut out and the blaster put in place I realized I had more material and could remove some of the excess (shown here with scribbling).
After satisfied with amount trimmed off a second set is traced around.
The material is then stuck in place with pins.
And my wife went to town sewing this up for me.
Once the holster was nearly completed with did up some leg straps and sewed those before closing up the clamshell design.
Here’s the nearly completed process
Backside shown with D ring and leg straps attached.
I had made my attachment straps to be adjust able and made loops to go onto the belt (shown in the middle hanging by itself). This made for a very low holster so I used the clips to attach directly to the belt.
This is thrown together quickly without using girth belt so the final hole placement will be tweaked. Having the holster clip directly to the belt is nice as I will be able to set it and forget it.
I know this post has been extremely lengthy but I’m hoping it was thorough enough to help someone else.
Key take aways from this are-
Make a plan and be flexible, there will be changes
We doubled up material and made sewing difficult even for a pro like my wife, with using a stout leather needle. I would only double over visible portions and not the entire setup.
Another thing with my design is that it is “lopsided”, meaning the way they came out the barrel is angled forward. This is aesthetics only since I have the adjust able straps and no big deal but something I noticed anyways and wanted to bring up. Changing the angle would fix this but my brain hurts so I’m not going to try to come up with a solution.
If you have questions please let me know. As for right now, I am done till I get to weathering the rest of my kit. Enjoy
