A belt buckle. A belt buckle with out a belt anymore. What do you do with a belt buckle that no longer has a belt but the buckle its self still has meaning? The solution that my father suggested was to make it into a drawer pull so I jumped into fusion 360. I first modeled and printed some test pieces to check my assumptions an measurements. This revealed that the nature of a hand made item lends to imperfections that can be difficult to measure, such as the ellipse of pipe making the buckle not being a centered ellipse. I accounted for it by adding extra space around the edges supporting the back of the buckle. With a few design iterations, I landed on the final version seen here where the buckle is clamped into place by two side pieces.
I remember my dad wearing this belt every day when I was a kid. It was made for him by his father as a pair for my dad and his brother. Made around the bicentennial dollar, my grandfather used steel tubing to make the surrounding part of the buckle. He added some metal rod bent and welded on the back for the belt to loop around and a hook on the other side. Then he chromed the whole buckle. It is an amazing piece of functional art that he made and is one that has been used heavily and is still in good condition.
Now, it can continue on with a new function as a drawer pull with the use of 3D printing.
What has meaning to you that you could repurpose?
