Fixing In Seat Belt Mounts

1st April 2006

Fixing in the seat belt mounts seems to be one of the most unknown topics regarding beach buggies that is around. This may be to the multitude of different ways of fitting them. I decided that I needed 4 point fixings as I had bought one Willans Club 4x4 3" harness strap ,3" belt with a rotary buckle from eBay which was a steel at the price I paid for it. I had been searching eBay for the other for months and decided eventually that I would have to buy a new second belt from Demon Tweaks to match. I had purchased several different combinations of Willans belts during the search for the other matching belt , the problem is that many people do not advertise their belts correctly and the difference between Club and Saloon belts when the belts are called Willans Club complicates the purchase. I was devastated to buy two new Club Willans boxed belts only to find that the harness straps were for a Caterham and where to short for my installation.

Importantly I ended up with belts that had clip-on ends not bolt on as the fixings I was going to use were eyelets that I intended to fix through the base of the floor. I had originally intended to extend my roll bar backwards onto the rear seat area so that I could hook the belts backwards instead of through the floor behind the seat. I was not entirely happy with this fabrication as I wanted the rear seat area as clear as possible. The reason for this was that I wanted to build a speaker box that was removable on the rear seat area. The problem with this was that The speaker area would encroach on the harness diagonal and until the box area had been manufactured I could not easily gauge a height. With this in mind I settled for the floor mounting positions. The floor on the buggy is not very thick and the harness companies recommed using spreader plates to ensure that the eyelet cannot pull through. I intially purchased eight spreader plates with the intention of placing the spreader plates underneath the chassis. It was soon apparant that the eylets would still pull out as the area in contact with the chassis under the loop was minimal and I would have to buy speader plates to fit ontop as well as underneath the chassis. The rear mounts went in very easily and I placed the lap belts under the seat sub frame slightly back from the loops in the seats.

The belt mounts were pretty secure going through the floor and I was suprised by how firm the spreader plates made the fixings. The belts just clipped onto the eylets making removal for maintanance easy.