Well, it took a couple of weeks with a delay due to illness, but the leather harness is done. The previous 3D-printed jetpack from a few years ago just had a plastic mounting plate with some woven nylon straps attached, so this was a significant upgrade. It’s the first (heck, the only) thing I’ve made out of leather, and I’m happy with the results. I based it off of a pattern I found online, but I made a number of alterations for body shape (mostly making the vertical straps cross in the middle, and the necessary changes to accommodate that). I also made some changes to make it more feasible to adjust the size later as needed. The resulting combo is just shy of 20 pounds, so that’ll take some getting used to when wearing it.
The cushion layer unsnaps, and the rest of the harness is attached to the jetpack with four 1/4″ screws that go into the tanks. Inside the tanks, I added some shaped brackets with heat-set inserts to secure the other side of the screws.
Having the straps cross in the middle required further changes to be able to take the thing off without lifting the harness over my head. I added buckles to the top half of the straps, and attached the bottom part of the straps to an inner second belt that snaps in place on both sides. So the process of taking it off consists of unclipping the outer belt, unsnapping one end of the inner belt, and unclipping one side of the diagonal straps. Not ideal but workable.
To make the waist more size-adjustable, I made the inner belt out of three pieces — one horizontal strap, and two larger end pieces with the snap attachments. Those are connected via Chicago (screw-together) rivets, so to adjust the size I can just punch new holes and move where the rivets connect them. Similarly, the outer belt straps have extra material on the inside, so they would need new holes punched and rivets moved to resize. (The stitching on those pieces is only on the outer layer, so that doesn’t affect it.)
I learned a fair amount during the process of making it, and if I were to make it again, I’d customize the design even more — partly because it was over-engineered for my purposes, and partly because the pattern was designed for making it with a laser cutter, which I wasn’t using. But I’m happy with it. Now I need to get the control glove set up, and I think the whole thing should be complete.