Indestructible Belt

This is Nick, one of our founders. He’s lying underneath 100kg of weight suspended on the Indestructible Belt, betting his life on the fact it will hold.

The strap is constructed from a woven polyester outer casing which houses a Dyneema® core inside. The Dyneema® reinforces the entire strap and creates an astonishingly high strength belt. It’s so strong that you’d need to hang more than 4 tonnes off it before it would break. That’s the same weight as a Hummer, a very large adult hippo, or more impractical still, 10 Alaskan grizzly bears. The strap is also extremely difficult to cut through – something our factory discovered first hand when they were assembling the belts.

The Indestructible Belt is built with an ultrastrong core made from Dyneema®, the single strongest fibre known to man today. Weight for weight Dyneema® is up to 15x stronger than steel. Which is why it’s used to make bulletproof vests, anti-ballistic vehicle armour for tanks, and the ropes used to tie down giant ships and deep-water oil rigs in violent, icy seas. Now our Indestructible Belt lets you use the exact same technology to stop your pants from falling down.

COBRA® buckles are born out of a long history of metalworking and mountaineering deep in the Tyrolean Alps. Back in 1996 AustriAlpin was started with the aim of developing and producing unbreakable components for mountaineers and ice climbers. Now their products represent the gold standard in safety hardware for high-consequence industries around the world – industries where if your kit fails, you die. To this day every COBRA® buckle is manufactured in the picturesque Alpine town of Fulpmes.

One of the greatest advantages of Dyneema® is that it combines extreme strength with very low weight. Unlike other high-strength materials it’s so light it floats on water. It’s also the material that was used to create a 30km long tether designed to pull a capsule back down from space – despite reaching space it weighed just 5.5kg and only needed to be 0.5mm thick. Combined with the lightweight aluminium buckle it means the Indestructible Belt weighs only 120 grams, but can support objects thousands of times its own weight.

To construct the strap we partnered with an industrial manufacturer in the north of France that ordinarily makes extreme strength straps for military and aeronautical applications, not belts. They specialise in weaving the world’s strongest fibres like para-aramid, meta-aramid, and the ultra-high molecular weight polyethylene we know as Dyneema®. The strap for our belt was specially developed for Vollebak, so you won’t find it anywhere else.

The connection between the strap and the belt is critical too. So where the two parts meet we’ve double folded the strap, so there are three layers of it. We then stitch it down with 12 rows of ultrastrong bonded polyester thread. Rather than being made from a single strand, bonded thread is made up of multiple intertwining strands which are sealed together with a coating and heat treatment, creating a heavy-duty, high tensile strength thread.

The belt comes in its own custom case, built from anodized aluminium 6082T6, a corrosion resistant metal often used for high stress engineering applications like building bridges and cranes. The case is milled with a highly precise 5 axis CNC (Computer Numerical Control) milling machine, and is fitted with a hidden 3D printed latch made from Nylon PA12.