LANYARD MAKING

Lanyard Material
Lanyard making material varies from a simple cord or beaded chain to 1.0” wide flat synthetic or cotton webbing. The most popular length for a neck lanyard is 36” when the cut material is measured end to end. The finished length, after it’s formed, is slightly less than 18” since some of the material gets used up in the production process and is no longer contributing to the length. Learn more about Lanyard Materials

Lanyard Hardware
As seen in the section What's A Lanyard there is one large loop (which goes around the neck) and a smaller loop at the bottom where the lanyard hardware goes. The two most common pieces of hardware are snaphooks and bulldog clips. Snaphooks are by far the most useful for attaching many different kinds of objects from id cards to pens. Bulldog clips are typically only used for attaching badge holders with a small oblong hole at the top. Learn more about Lanyard Hardware

Lanyard Making Instructions
The method used for creating the two lanyard loops depends for the most part on the material being used. For cord and soft ribbon-like materials such as light weight polyester and cotton, the loops are formed by squeezing a metal crimp on to the material with the two ends meeting inside the crimp. For most woven nylon webbing material from 3/8” to 1.0” the two loops are formed by stitching the overlapping two ends together. This type of stitch is known as a bar tack - a straight zig-zag stitch across the width of the material.

Machinery
Machinery for making lanyards ranges from light to heavy-duty and from manual to automatic. For large scale crimp lanyard production a foot press fitted with metal stamping dies to hold the crimp is usually necessary. Lanyards made from nylon webbing use either an industrial bar tack machine or computer controlled models capable of stitching a variety of different patterns which can be selected from a user operated control panel. Both types of sewing machines are capable of varying the length of the stitch which is important for materials with different widths.