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Seat Belts

January 18, 2014

Some time ago I was informed that the passenger seatbelt didn’t lock so this afternoon I chose to look into it. I had a good idea that some tissue or trash had made its way into the retractor and was interfering with the mechanism.

The first thing was to put the b-pillar trim so I could get at it (sill plates were already off) and when I pulled the carpet back I could see the problem, I’m still not sure where all this trash came from but it was under the back seat as well. I vacuumed it up and pulled the mechanism out so I could clean it up as well.

Even once I cleaned it up it still didn’t work, I could see the ratcheting piece wasn’t doing what it should. Still not sure what makes this thing tick I pulled the belt out fully so I could see if that made a difference, yuck, it was a mess between the trash and the rust the belt was like a rock so I felt it shouldn’t be used. Fine it doesn’t matter why it doesn’t work now, I’ll just have a black belt there.

In comparing the belts I noticed that the hardtop ones had an extension on the mounting tab, this was because on the 4-door hardtops had the belts mounted back 2” further because of the b-pillar reinforcements. So I guess I’ll need to rebuild the original one.

The first thing I did was pull the original one apart so I could clean the frame on it. Once cleaned it was painted and set aside to dry. I then pulled the parts one apart with care so I could see what went where (I still had one together as a reference).

With the paint dry I placed the recoil spring in place and wound it up enough to get the spool back in so it would help hold the spring. The main axle bolt was put in place but not threaded as I still needed to finish tightening the recoil spring. With everything loaded I was able to place the ratcheting spring (that was broken on the original) back on and test. Everything worked as it should so it was installed and buttoned up.

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