Category: Educational

Helpful guides for sizing up your belt, maintenance, recognizing common straps, and more.

  • How to Size Your Belt

    Held belts are designed to fit you just right, at the middle notch. It is easy to order the wrong size, that’s why this video makes it easy to get the ideal fit.

    You can triangulate your size with dressmakers tape, a correct pant size, and an existing belt. If you only have one of those three, you can still wager a good guess.

    Refer to Your Pants

    If you have absolutely no way to measure, observe your pant size and match it or round up one inch.

    If the pant size is an odd number, round up one inch. In this video, the pants are loose from age, even though my waist is larger than the size on the tag. I know, it’s weird.

    If the pants fit quite nicely at an even number, that is the belt you want, and it is probably your measurement too.

    Women’s pants do not correlate to waist size, so this point applies mostly to men’s wear.

    Fit an Existing Belt

    For this method, you can use any belt that notches up tight on your waist. After that, you need a yard stick or measuring tape.

    The distance between the buckle’s prong and the notch that fits you is approximately your waist size.

    Official Held Belt Sizing Chart

    Measure Your Waist

    This is the absolute best way to measure for the right belt, but it does require dressmakers tape.

    See the video to understand where to measure. It is important to measure at the hip bone, as this is where pants and belts traditionally rest.

    You can substitute dressmakers tape with rope or string. Simply mark the point on the string that meets back up to your hip after wrapping around, then measure that with a yard stick or measuring tape.

    Ordering The Right Size

    If you have all three of these numbers, then you are surely ready to put in your next Held belt order.

    The tightest notch on your belt should be equal to or one inch smaller than the actual measurement of your waist.

    Standard issue designs are made in small batches to keep an inventory ranging between sizes 28 and 38, accommodating waists from 26 to 40 inches.

    Custom tailored orders are always available, just contact the shop directly.

  • How to Change Your Buckle

    Standard Held belt designs feature a single or dual snap set that allows for the free exchange of buckles.

    Once you have removed the buckle and you are reinserting it, it can be a little confusing. This video offers pointers within the demonstration to help avoid mistakes.

    For example, the ring keeper must go in first, this piece holds the strap down after it is notched.

    A center bar buckle extends in a full circle and self-contains the strap, eliminating the need for a keeper ring.

    Not all buckle types are interchangeable. Especially flat panel buckles require a different type of design with smaller notches.

    Look for additional buckles available in the shop as an add-on at checkout.

  • How to Maintain Your Held Belt

    Offering some tips about maintaining your “classic” Held belt.

    This is by far the best selling design in the catalogue and these steps apply broadly across other models. The “classic” has the attractive appearance of a standard black leather belt, but it is actually waterproof vulcanized rubber, making it the perfect belt for workers.

    The belt in this video has been exposed to all kinds of labor, from dish rooms to construction sites, for four years. It has taken on paint, oils, extra weight as a tool belt, and it has years to go before coming out of service.

    Proper cleaning, oiling, and clipping extends the life and appearance of the belt against all of the abuse it goes through.

    Removing Paint and Cleaning

    The rubber strap accepts paint but it is removable. Using standard mineral spirit paint thinner and a microfiber cloth, it can be rubbed out by hand.

    If your belt does not have paint stains, any oil and grease that the strap is exposed to can be removed with dish soap and water.

    Although it can take water, make sure to quickly dry the belt and wipe off all remaining dust and debris.

    Oiling the Strap

    Rubber is not unlike leather, its microscopic fibers will dry out and lose integrity. It turns out that non-silicone based leather oil is beneficial, although silicone and rubber go hand in hand, it is not ideal for a wearable product.

    Huberd’s brand shoe leather oil is a natural legacy product from a small company based in Colorado. The product was created in nineteenth century Oregon, and was a solution for timber manufacturing waste at the time and remains so today.

    Common olive oil is a known classic moisturizer for wearable rubbers like rain boots. It is an option that most people have on hand.

    Clipping Frayed Edges

    This step applies to almost every Held strap.

    They are super strong, but nothing is impervious to wear. Depending on how hard you work your belt, it wears gradually at the edges.

    The edges can be clipped routinely. For best results, obtain 5.5 inch angled scissors. These are good to keep with your sewing kit anyway.

    By bending the backside of the belt toward you, it makes targeting the frayed sections much easier, while the angled scissor gives you a more ergonomic experience.

    Reinforcing the Notches

    We offer reinforcement grommets. A good tool belt will include these type of brass grommets, as belt notches always expand faster under extra weight.

    The belt in this video had grommets added after more than three years of use, when the used notches began to lose their integrity.

    Grommets are very difficult to press into Held’s dense straps without a 2-ton press like the kind used in the shop. That is why we offer mail-order service. Refer to the repair and customize section of this website.

  • How To Distinguish Leather Straps

    A fun 1980’s themed how-to guide video series for HELDgear.com.

    This video goes into inferior leather products, including fake leather that is designed to trick the customer who is enticed by an impossibly low price tag, or the vegan who doesn’t account for labor conditions.

    HELD straps are a repurposed industrial material sourced from domestic factories. They are built to work, whereas most leather and vegan belts such as “PU Leather” are built to look good but rapidly decay, buckles break, contributing to waste, pollution, and exploitive labor, as they are rarely sourced from American manufacturers.

    The leather industry has papered over the inferiority of their product with jargon. For example “top grain” leather is actually below the top surface, under the most durable layer of cow hide.

    What is called “genuine” is not what most people believe it is. At best, there is a cosmetic layer of pure leather glued on top of particulate matter. At worst, it is ground up leather mixed with filler, bonded with toxic glues.

    In some cases, a genuine leather product is recycled, derived from used or scrap waste, but any business claiming this should always be vetted for their sourcing and labor practices.

    HELD straps are vulcanized sheets of fabric: cotton, polyester, nylon, or a blend. This involves tree-derived rubbers heated and cooled to fully embed the fabric sheets. The result is one fully formed material built for high stress conditions.

    Industrial strength fabric is embedded within the rubber, similar to bicycle tires, and the composite product is immensely stronger than one or the other alone. It is excellent for hanging tools, rock climbing gear, and other auxiliaries.

    One reason for the lack of raw hide leather in department stores is that many cows sustain all kinds of skin infections, from insect bites to disease. This leaves porous, unattractive mars on the surface of the leather. Raw hide leather is extremely durable, but if it comes from an abused cow, the actual surface of the hide is discarded and likely ground up for genuine leather products. This denotes a problem with animal exploitation in agriculture.

    Pure raw hide leather straps from free range cows are difficult to find and very expensive. Top grain is the solution for leather fabricators who need a product they can sell that will last a few solid years. No good for vegans, however, and HELD is here to offer products for everyone.

    The manufacturers we buy from pay living wages to workers. The HELD belt is a fractional runoff from a massive industry in which thousands of feet of conveyor belting is produced every day.

    That we source a portion of our straps from unused production ends helps with industrial waste solutions. Weighed against manufacturing processes in the textile industry, and short life of inferior products, every Held belt around someone’s waist reduces at least two more units in the landfill from an inferior product.

    When a Held belt becomes undesirable cosmetically, the strap can be repurposed in whole, as in belting a bed roll or something like that, or in parts, like hinges on a trunk or to hang a sign.

    We hope this video helps you understand what you’re buying before you buy it, whether or not you choose HELD.

    Photo of discarded leather by Mark Ahsmann.