25mm mild steel luggage Buckle

Super Technical

For those of you who love the technical stuff…

Rolls of very high grade mild strip steel with very consistent thickness and width is lovingly loaded into an automated, multi-stage 80 ton press where forming and cutting tools and moulds bent, cut and shape the blanks into perfectly formed buckle bodies.

The completed raw buckles are then pickled in various acids and electro-cleaners, rinsed and a thick layer of copper applied through an electroplating process. The copper further rounds the edges and provides an excellent corrosion resistant base for the subsequent electroplating layers. In this case the last layer is 9ct (Karat) gold. A lovely finish, but rather expensive. The ‘carat’ of a metal denotes the percentage of pure gold in the alloy, with 9ct being 37.5% and 18ct 75% pure gold. We have found that 18ct plating is too soft and too expensive for common footwear use and so prefer a harder 9ct with just the right balance of colour, durability and shine. We are however equipped to apply gold in various purities all our mild steel, brass and zinc fasteners and trims in-house on request.

Cast and finished locally and electroplated in-house we can make you small quantities quickly in a wide range of standard and custom metallic finishes to exactly suit your needs.