Remember the good'ol days when your truck didn't have to have a 3 point shoulder seat belt? Actually, I don't... my first car was a '77 Chevy Impala that of course had 'modern' safety equipment for the time.
This truck was the first thing I had ever driven (minus tractors on my granddad's farm) that didn't have a shoulder belt. Not wanting to find out the hard way if the dash-pad would save my teeth in an accident, I set out to correct this issue. Since I had just blown my entire budget on the purchase of the truck, I had to do the seatbelt upgrade on the cheap. I'd read a lot about putting in used S10 seatbelts found in junkyards, but this didn't appeal to me. So, I set out to find the bare-bones cheapest set of new seatbelts for the driver and passenger side (sorry middle seat rider, you better hold on to the dash!)
Everything I was looking at saw in the $220+ area. Also, I didn't like the way the LMC seat belt retractors looked (more on this later...) I eventually came upon
The rebirth of El Scrocho where he used some seat belts from Wesco Performance. I went to their website and came up with a winning combination of parts for a grand total of only $149.70 ($174.53 after tax and shipping).
Here's what I ordered:
- 3 Point Retractable Seat Belt Bench Seat High Post (2 @ $69.95 ea.)
- Seat Belt Hardware: Angle Bracket - #A904L - Installation Foor Mount Seat Belt End (2 @ $2.95 ea.)
- Seat Belt Hardware: Shoulder Bolt (2 @ $1.95 ea.)
I could have bought the angle bracket nuts-bolts-and-washers from them, however to keep the initial sticker shock down from the CFO (love you baby!) I decided to get those at the local Home Depot instead.
Wesco does offer a '3 Point Retractable Seat Belt Mounting Hardware Kit' for $10.95 each (you need one for the passenger and one for the driver side) which include the angle bracket and shoulder bolt along with a lot of other stuff we don't need for our trucks (we have the all the mounting points in our 67-72 cabs already). So, just buying the hardware I needed saved about $12.
I noticed that El Scrocho used custom angle brackets and moved the mounting point for the driver's side forward to clear the cab-mounted fuel tank. My fuel tank is no longer located in the cab, so I was able to re-use the existing mounting holes. I did have a problem when mounting the retractor... the angle bracket from Wesco had the retractor housing rubbing up against the doorway rubber seal. This was much more prominent on the driver's side than on the passenger side. So much so that I decided to mount the retractor backwards so that it is facing the rear. This puts a 180 degree twist in the seat belt as it goes up to the shoulder sash end. I have not had any problems whatsoever with this.
Final words: The seat belts work great and they are certainly the cheapest new solution around. The ELR (emergency locking retractor) is a little touchy but you get used to it pretty quickly and learn just how fast you can pull on the seat belt before it locks up. The only thing I'm not in love with is the 'globe' image on the seat belt button.
Original Seat Belts:
The new stuff:
