Video Transcript
A thigh strap is a useful accessory if you're planning on tightening down the retention on your Ragnarok style holster or something that is similar. Because the downside to tightening down the retention that tight is when you go to draw the handgun, typically will happen on a lot of different offsets and holster hangers, the entire holster will bow outward from the body and then you're drawing the gun actually into yourself at a weird angle. What a thigh strap will do is it'll keep your holster perpendicular to your leg, it's not gonna move all around. You can get that firm grip on the pistol, snatch the gun out, even if it does have a lot of retention and you're going to have the same straight up and down consistent draw stroke, regardless of how much retention you actually have. So our thigh strap, we've been producing this guy for quite a while, but we have made some improvements and some updates. So this is one and a half inch elastic, heavy duty elastic with some non-slip material on the inside just to help keep it in place on your leg. And recently we've actually added a grommet here to the front, which is actually going to allow this to swivel and be a little bit more mobile on your leg as you're running around and doing stuff. Then we originally had with the original thigh strap design. Now every thigh strap you will see comes with a small hardware packet. These are the screws, posts and rubber washers you're going to be using to adapt this product to a Safariland holster, such as this guy right here with a UBL, or one of our UBLs and QLS receivers, or UBL on its own with no receiver to your existing holster.
Let me show you guys how to adapt one of these to an existing holster. This is one of the Safarilands that we offer with the UBL. And I want to add a thigh strap here to the bottom. So I'm going to remove the hardware packet and remove the hardware on the back of this holster. Then we're going to open our little hardware packet up. And you will see you have three rubber washers that are fairly thick. Three Chicago style posts that are all the same length. A long post, a long screw to go with that, and three shorter screws to go with these three right here. This hardware should allow you to adapt this thigh strap to most holster accessories on the market. And we're going to figure out what we need on this guy right here. So because the grommet is fairly thick, we have the grommet, we have some little scoop of webbing on top and then the elastic underneath. We have a little bit of an offset right here that we're going to have to build off of on the holster to keep the hanger or the UBL in this case level so the pistol is not being tilted into the body. It is still nice and neutral. The way we're going to do that and sort of build out that depth is by using two of these rubber washers on the top side of the holster. Now in this case, so it turns out I cannot use the Safariland hardware, but that's okay because we have some longer screws that we include that still work with the Safariland posts that are built into the holster. So I'm still going to keep my rubber washer there. So then I'm going to take another one of these small screws, drop it in. And I'm not going to tighten it down all the way because I still want to be able to flex the UBL and fit the thigh strap in there. So now I'm going to take the thigh strap and I'm going to position it so that the female buckle is at the front of the thigh strap. It just makes it a little bit easier to buckle it in when it's sitting here in the front and it's not in the back. So you'll see the grommet there is exposed to the screw. And I'm then going to take the tallest one, probably, and tighten that sucker down.
Now, a big part about this holster is you don't necessarily want to tighten down this screw right here down all the way or as tight as possible because then it's going to make the friction on this thigh strap or on the grommet itself. It's going to make it very stiff. It's not going to move very easily. However, that's not necessarily the end of the world. If you do tighten this down a little bit more because this is elastic, like it can already flex on its own pretty well. But the grommet is still going to help facilitate some movement and just be a little bit more comfortable. What this also does is it drops the thigh strap lower. Traditionally, what we were doing and what a lot of guys were doing early on, say like eight years ago and even before then, they were actually having to run these one and a half inch thick thigh straps in between the bolts of their UBL, which you'll see would move this thigh strap up a whole inch. And that's just a little bit less comfortable than dropping it down to here. But it's also kind of the perfect height because as soon as you start dropping the thigh strap further down, you do start to get some of that tip that you're trying to actually avoid and kill off by having this in the first place. So this really is the happy medium of it's just low enough to keep the holster stable to your body, but it's not so high that it's uncomfortable. So that's how you can adapt a thigh strap to an existing safari land, maybe a holster that you're issued, maybe a holster that you just purchased so that you can have just a little bit more consistency in the draw, even though this is a active retention holster.
But let's say you have one of our thigh straps. We'll take this nice green one right here. And you want to actually build out a UBL and a QLS and the whole get up and have the whole setup for your Ragnarok that already has a QLS fork on here. Now I will say for those of you who have not ordered from us before, if you order a Ragnarok from us with all of these accessories all at once, we will assemble this for you. We'll take care of all of this. But if this is a product that you've purchased after already buying some of this stuff, here's how you're gonna put it together. So again, we're gonna remove the packet of hardware. And again, just like we did on the Safariland, we're gonna use two rubber washers to build that sort of depth up to then fit the thigh strap in between. So we're gonna take our short posts, run it through the UBL, and the rubber washer hold in its place nicely. Boom, good to go.
Receiver plate, short screws. I'm not gonna tighten it down all the way. I will give you a little hint or tip here. If you run into some binding of the screw in the post, which can sometimes happen where the post starts to spin freely and you just can't get enough pressure to tighten it down, you can either get a flat head screw driver or something like metal to stick into this end and then really drill it in. Or you can take the spare rubber washer that we include and actually use that to push against the rear of the post because it gets a little bit more friction in your skin. And you usually can bypass some of that sort of binding up that's happening and then continue to tighten down. So now we have that gap that we talked about so that I can fit my thigh strap in there. And again, I'm a right handed shooter, so it's gonna be on this side. I want the female buckle to be on the front. Then we're gonna take the long post, stick it all the way through. And you'll see it kind of protrudes a little bit and I'll tell you why. We're gonna do the long screw. You can do the short one if you want. I'm gonna do the rubber washer trick.
And what we've done here is we've measured out a screw post and a screw to be just the right height where if you tighten these down all the way, they're literally touching themselves and they won't come loose, the thigh strap can still spin freely, but this is nice and secure. Arguably more secure than what's going on here where we can't drill this down all the way into the hardware on the safari land because then the thigh strap is just not going to move at all. This right here is the most secure when it comes to the screw not backing out because it's fully engaged. There's no pressure pulling it outwards. And the thigh strap can still move nice and freely. Now I'm just gonna tighten up the top. And so that's what it's gonna look like. And you'll see the rubber washers built out the depth just enough compared to the thickness of the thigh strap that this is still sitting nice and level. And now I can take my Ragnarok with the fork, drop it on and there we go. We have the quintessential T.REX ARMS, Ragnarok holster.
Now we have quite a bit of an adjustment length in the thigh strap itself. You'll see that on the inside, there's this piece of one wrap that is being used to sort of hold the tail end. But based on how thick your thighs are you are going to loosen or tighten this so that it is comfortable. And then you can use the one wrap to help retain this. It also prevents it from coming loose, as you wear it. So you can adjust it on the fly easily and you'll be set and you'll be good to go. If you have any other questions about our thigh strap and its compatibility with other products on the market, go ahead and email us at team@trex-arms.com.