About Those Seat Belts…

The seat belts in a 1969 Mustang are entertaining. If you remember, the following was the standard procedure for new passengers attempting to fasten their seat belts for the first time in my original Mustang:

• The shoulder belt would be located and attached to the longer of the two latches from the center of the car
• The person would realize that there wasn’t a lap belt and go searching for one with a puzzled look on their face
• The lap belt would be located and pulled out
• And would stop after about 18 inches
• While the person’s hands would keep going
• Causing the lap belt to be ripped out of their hands and retract back into its case
• The lap belt would be pulled out more carefully a second time
• The lap belt wouldn’t reach the shorter, remaining latch
• The shoulder harness would be detached
• The lap belt and shoulder harness would be attached to their correct latches
• I would laugh hysterically
• My passengers would not

Even though the situation described above provided hours of entertainment, I was strongly considering replacing those belts with a more modern, three point design. This would have provided a more standard experience and upped the safety of the car because the belts would be new and not look like this:

In the end though, three things gave me pause enough to change my plans:

1. The belts don’t look right. They don’t have the same buckles and just look “off”
2. The new seat belts are expensive. It would have cost about 200 dollars to buy two three point belts and two rear belts. If I’m going to pay that much, I really want something that looks right.
3. The reviews on the three point belts contained numerous complaints about them being too short

I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not a …small… individual. I would have been fairly annoyed if I had spent the money to buy the new belts and then had them be too small.

With that in mind, I went off in search of other options. After a bit of searching, I stumbled upon this video from West Coast Classic Cougars.

 

In addition to telling you everything you ever wanted to know (and then some) about classic Mustang and Cougar seat belts, the video also gave me a lead to a company in Texas called Python Restorations that takes old seat belts and restores them. In particular, they’ll take the old, tired webbing and replace it with brand new webbing. This alleviated my biggest concern with using my old belts – the fact that I didn’t trust the belt to hold in a collision. With new webbing, the old belt system will be as good as any new system I could put in.

So that’s the new plan. I disassembled the buckles from the belts:

with the original thought that all I would have Python Restorations do was re-web the belts. As I was doing so though, I noticed a few rust spots on the buckles and on the belt clamp cylinders as well:

Most of the buckles have some small amount of rust on the belt clamp cylinders. There’s not a lot there, but when I called the guy at Python Restorations he said it was trivial for them to clean the buckles off and since I kinda really want that part to work in an accident I decided to let the professionals handle it.

Aaaand since I was doing that, I decided to have them upgrade my buckle bezels from the standard interior look:

to the deluxe look:

Yes, I could have probably got by with my existing buckle bezels. They weren’t terrible (though most aren’t in as good a condition as the one pictured above), but considering the rest of the interior is going to be brand new, I wanted my buckles to be new as well. I also could have done this upgrade myself but the idea of getting the seat belts back “ready to install” was enticing enough to allow my lazy side to win out this time.

In preparation for their journey to the great state of Texas, my belt-box has transformed from this:

to this:

I should get the belts back in a couple of months. Thankfully, between now and then there won’t be much need for them with the car being prepped for paint and the interior removed.