There Is Nothing Safe About Safety-Belts!

There are things I’ve run across working on old Ford’s that I just don’t understand that previous owners have done. I was pretty worried about potentially offending the ones I bought the truck from with this post up until about 10 minutes ago when I checked my e-mail and in a weird way, was relieved to know that I probably wouldn’t. All reservations are off now!!!

Ingenuity comes at many different levels. When you mix ingenuity with somebody who must've been smoking crack, this is what you get:

Yup, that's my over the shoulder seatbelt retractor on the driver's side with the cover removed. You know, the one that is suppose to unroll and retract the belt harness? Well, this one made me bust out laughing when I first saw it! SOMEBODY for SOME REASON decided to unwind the original belt webbing, methodically take apart the retractor, insert a lap belt from a Chrysler product up into the retractor mechanism, and re-mount it back up on the wall of the cab.

So what are you left with? A driver's side seat belt with 2 latches and enough room for a person to sit behind the wheel who couldn't possibly have sat behind the wheel! OR, maybe that explains why the steering wheel was so small! I'm not one too offend "larger" people- heck, I'm one of them myself, but there's just no other reason I can think of why somebody would take the time to do this! And of course...

This had to go. It's that simple.

Now, I often get asked by people how I know as much as I know about things. Computers, Trucks, whatever. The simple answer is, I'm not scared to get into something and figure it out. I'll break it 2 times just so I can fix it the right way once even if it costs me as much to do so as paying somebody else to do it the first time. Eventually, you build up a large enough foundation of knowledge and experience that things start to pay off. 15 years or so now, and I'm to the point there really isn't much I'm not scared, or competent to handle.

Pssshaw- seat belt retractor? I'll have this whipped out in 15 minutes! I was happily surprised to see the original belt wasn't cut, so I knew I would be in business.

So the first thing set out to do was remove the retractor and get it on the bench where I could work with it. Here's where problem #1 came in. The first bolt in the entire damn truck I've had issues with had to be the single bolt that holds this retractor into place. Why you might ask? Because red lock-tite thread locker is the Devil!!!

You know how often your seat belt bolts come loose, obviously the genius who thought up this setup didn't want it EVER coming out again. I broke my Craftsman T-50 torque bit on it. I was having so much fun I decided to pound a 1/4 inch allen head bit into it... After breaking that, I decided to try a metric one I borrowed off of Jared, which didn't let it budge...

Not to be defeated, and certainly not a setup I'm willing to live with, now it was time to get out the welder. We'll just jam a 3/8 ths inch bolt into that sucker, throw some high-heat globular welds on it and see what we can get!

SUCCESS!!! With baited breath I was able to barely turn the sucker out and finally get it out of the cab. I put it down on the counter top and cleaned up my mess I made in the cab.

Taking a quick overview of the assembly, there really wasn't much you could do with it. These are pretty simple setups. It works just like a ratchet strap mechanism on a pendulum for locking the assembly when you encounter a shock to the vehicle, and a spring that will pull the belt back when there is no vibration. I can handle this.

What's the first thing I do? Well, there is this Orange cap that says "Caution: Do Not Remove".... Hmmmmm.... That sounds like a good place to start....

You know... In retrospect, I think more adept words could have been put onto that cover. Maybe something like "Caution: Highly Sprung Death-Coil From Hell Inside" would have been good for starters?! Maybe that wouldn't have fit on the cap... All I know is this- the orange cap went ricocheting off my forehead at some point, and I'll spare you the photos of the multiple, greasy, paper-cut lacerations all over my hands... But hey, the cap was removed, I didn't die, and that's called progress right?!! :-)

If any of you have ever tried to fix a recoil starter on a lawn mower or what-not, then you'll know just about how impossible it is to wind one of these back up. Add in the fact I don't have the most dexterous hands, the stuff is greasy as all get-out, and the size of that orange cap is about 2 inches in diameter, I knew this was not going to be fun.

For literally the next hour I worked on getting that sucker wound back up and into that cap. I just couldn't do it. I needed a better solution. I finally did come up with something after a quick break for food. I put one end in a vice, stretched it across the garage nearly 10 feet, clamped the the other end in my cordless drill chuck, and slowly hit the trigger winding it while I held the coil between two pieces of wood. After removing one of the pieces of wood I was able to slip it back into the orange cap.

Finally putting that part behind me, it was pretty simple to just unpin and remove the short Chrysler belt that was wedged into the ratchet assembly. Now all I had to do was thread the end of the original belt back into it, pin it with the retaining pin, slide the ratchet shaft back into the gears- and oh yeah- rewind the orange cap with the proper tension again.

This sounded like another good use for the vice. Putting the assembly into the vice, I spun the orange cap around and around and around about a gazillion times until the retraction force felt "just about right" and snapped it back into place.

All I needed to do now was bolt it back into place, throw the cover back onto it, and call it done. A quick trip out behind the garage and I grabbed another bolt from Jack's brown cab, and back into place it all went! I'm still of course left with the lingering question for the person who originally did this: What were you thinking?!