Seat Belt Update - Fronts
Latest work completed with successful update of seat belt design.
Huge thanks to Vaughn & Georgio at Motorretro in Sydney and Pawel at Quickfit Belts in London.
My method for Front Belts - and I'm hoping the photos will help explain.
Existing cavity in the door post cut & reinforced with 5mm steel seam welded into the top of the sill and a right angled tab welded internally in the cavity. Drilled & tapped 7/16th for seatbelt mechanism mounting bolt. We strengthened the seatbelt mount by welding the supplied tapped bracket to the body, which allowed threaded bolt to go through both the reinforced bodywork as well as the solid, now modified, base of the mechanism.
We used 20x10mm flat steel bar which was cut & shaped to fit the vertical recess in the removable panel in the rear window recess. The bar was cut to fit and oversized holes were drilled & countersunk to hold recessed head bolts that replace the standard three. Finally a 7/16 tapped hole for the seatbelt bolt to fit. This design allows for the possibilty of having to remove the rear window at some stage, and is much stronger that simply bolting through what is a removable panel.
After careful measuring - several times - which involved refitting the wooden dress trim, we drilled a pilot hole carefully through the wood & steel of the panel and expanded the hole out to suit the swivel & spacers needed for the belt for the finished result.
Modifying the lower trim panel (the vinyl part) was fairly straight forward - involved cutting a slot at the right height in line with the stitching on the trim, large enough to let the belt run freely, so trimmed clear of any material and finished with escutcheons. We angled the mechanism back by a degree or two, to allow the swivel belt at shoulder height to be set back from the edge of the dress trim by approx 30mm. Quickfit Belts supplied stainless steel escutcheons which we modified simply by sanding any sharp edges that may cause wear on the seatbelt material (I made aluminum ones for the rear belts, much easier to sand).
Rears to follow.
Cheers
John