Rear seatbelts - My how to |
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mattm123
Groupie Joined: 14 Jul 17 Location: Guildford Status: Offline Points: 69 |
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Posted: 26 Jul 17 at 15:35 |
It took me a long time
to work out what the best way of getting 2 x 3 point seat belts into the back
of my T3 Westfalia so I thought I’d share my learnings in case it's of use to
someone else.
The easy seatbelt number 1-
with my van being LHD this is the one
on the passenger side of the van, also with my van being a Westie the mounting
points are all there to do this. Brickwerks do a nice nice kit and a good setp
by step guide which uses the origional mounting points and also has a
fabricated bracket for mounting the inertia reel to the 3 x mounting holes in
the rear behind the R&R bed.
Unfortunately Brickwerks were out of
stock when I needed to buy my rear belts so i ended up getting this belt from
JustKampers. The belt they sell is a Securon inertia with a variety of
universal fittings for all sorts of situations. What this Securon kit
(JustKampers) doesn't have is a way of mounting the inertia reel off of all
three chassis mounting points!
So to get this kit to work like the
brickwerks one i did the following 1. Drill out the centre chassis
mounting hole to take the standard seatbelt bolt 2. I had in the garage some 3mm metal
strapping from some previous building work, i drilled three holes in this ( two
small at each end and a larger one in the middle) and then mounted this over
the three chassis fitting holes 3. I then used the short fitting plate,
supplied with the kit to mount the inertia reel to the chassis and the now
attached 3mm plate. ( easier by far to get the Brickwerks kit!) https://photos.app.goo.gl/32lpQ8zNtM6K6fke2
The tricky seatbelt number 2-
From the research i did i could find 3
methods of putting the seatbelt in on the side with the cupboards:
1. Use the factory standard mounting
points as per the passenger side but then cut holes in the cupboards and route
the seatbelt though it. To me this seems like a pretty bad idea as the seatbelt
routing is going to be quite winding and if you are in a crash the belt is
going to try and "straighten out", applying force to the cupboard
internals, when the ply or fixings fails the seatbelt is going to achieve its
aim of running straight from the reel to the shoulder of the passenger and the passenger
is going to lurch forward by a considerable distance.
2. Mount the inertia reel under the
rock and roll bed - This one i tried and then removed immediately when I
realised the following. The problem with this method is that although the reel
is mounted nicely to the chassis under the bum of the passenger, the belt comes
around the back of the bench seat meaning that in a crash the force is transferred
to the back of the seat, in a more modern car you can have seats which are
designed to take this force, the back of the rock and roll bed in a T3 is
almost certainly not designed for this!
3. Mount the seatbelt reel the top of
the tailgate - Getting some information on how this works was hard, this was my
starting point, this company will fit them for you and they have this
information on their website
http://www.quickfitsbs.com/PDFs/vw_camper.pdf
But its not that obvious what you need
to do to get it to work, so this is what I did.
1. Go to a seatbelt manufacturer, I
went to Fdts-seatbelts.co.uk , Sue is the lady that runs it and she was
brilliant! they have everything in the world seatbelt related and a lot of knowledge.
I ordered from her the following:
1x Horizontal inertia belt with 3.2
Meter of webbing onto which she put 2x Narrow buckles which fit into the original
lap buckle receivers (if you've done the first seatbelt with Securon you'll
have a spare) 2 x metal space (to be cut) 1x narrow mounting plate 1x bolt and nut 2x Plastic trim pieces to cover the
holes you need to make in the overhead cupboard
https://photos.app.goo.gl/gfWJSVvYnC7QKpRN2
2. Take the rear overhead cupboard out (
really easy with just 5 x bolts ), you need to do this so you have access to
drill the hole in the tailgate lip, as the tailgate stops you getting access
from the outside
3. Drill a hole from the inside to out
to take the bolt that you’re going to put the seatbelt reel on, this hole will
drill through the inside skin, through the void and out the thick horizontal
section in the tailgate gully
https://photos.app.goo.gl/PtqpukhkHKRia7LH3 https://photos.app.goo.gl/dJPN974goK3xX9GW2
4. Angles are going to be the problem
now, the inertia reel needs to sit horizontal to work but the plate and bolt on
the outside will only sit nice and flat at an angle that is too acute to get
the inertia reel onto. So what I did was drill out the narrow mounting plate
slightly so that i had a bit of play in the angle which the bolt sits at.
Then i created 3 x angled spacers from
the 2 metal spacers, they cut ok with a hacksaw
https://photos.app.goo.gl/N7ILxGTHFajhWQdr1
1 x spacer for the outside - this is a
really thin wedge to help pick up the angel created between the outside bolt
and plate
2 x internal spaces - these are two halves
from the same cut which will set the reel at horizontal
I then painted the outside pieces,
applied a liberal amount of RTV silicone on the outside and bolted it all
together, adding another plate to the inside between the van and the angled spacer https://photos.app.goo.gl/h4gZP3ElcucMYVmh2 https://photos.app.goo.gl/cDrFAIG6RhUnEoLU2 Ok so with that done all that is left
to do is cut out the two holes in the overhead cupboard one at the back right
next to the inertia reel to allow the belt to pass through the other on the
bottom face of the cupboard an inch or two back from the front face, put the
seatbelt through, put the plastic trim pieces into the holes so it looks good, bolt the two receivers
into the factory mounting points under the R&R bed.
DONE! Edited by mattm123 - 26 Jul 17 at 16:17 |
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clift_d
Yardie Joined: 02 Dec 12 Location: Hackney innit Status: Offline Points: 382 |
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The other option is to take both belts from the same side, similar to this image on the Seatbelt Services site
One belt would be as per the Brickwerks kit. The other belt would be an installation with two receivers at the seat anchors, a belt with two tongues and the inertia reel and seat belt pillar loop on the rear pillar adjacent to the tailgate. |
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1988 1.6TD Westfalia Club Joker syncro
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