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Went to install a set of belts in my 72 cutlass supreme, and looks like old owner didn't leave the holes for belt mounts when they did the floor pans. Now I'm trying to figure out how to put them in or how to fix the problem. Should I weld on plates?, buy some mounting tabs? Any suggestions would be appreciated....
My car is not a show car, but need it to be functional/street legal. I am not going to re-do the floor pans because there fine other then no holes. So looking for a fix, maybe quick but something that will last a while/be safe.
There should be factory holes, that take a specific bolt, size is 1/2-13. I have my back seat holes still but the fronts are no longer there. So I did some searching and came up with these style plates.
The stock mounting is just a ~12ga plate, maybe 2" by 5" with a low profile nut in the middle, spot welded to the floor in a couple of places. You can make something similar with hardware store stuff quite easily. I just spot welded flange nuts onto double-stacked 16ga plate.
The rear ones are easy because you can get to them. The transmission tunnel for the front buckets is also OK. The front outer ones though, those are right above the frame so that will be challenging if the body is on the frame.
I would've hoped the replacement pans had the plates on them, or whoever did the replacement was smart enough to put the plates on the new pans.
I'll grab some pictures today. While I'm thinking about it though, note that 72 rear seat is different than the earlier ones. Notably the rear outer mounting holes. At least for retractor belts. The retractors mounted further out and higher than the standard belts. So depending on what you have back there and what you're installing, you may be in for a surprise when trying to fit the rear seat (as I was). The rear seat frames are also different. The seat back has a notch for the retractors and the bottom has a taller/narrower rear edge.
Hopefully that part of the pan is original or they drilled the right holes. I haven't been lucky enough to do large pan sections so I don't know what the repops have marked out.
AFAIK, retractors were an option on the rear seat in '72, but I don't know what all the floorpans looked like.
Here's a picture that shows all of them. This is the passenger side. The hole on the right is the hold-down for the seat back. The socket cap to the left and down slightly is the '71 non-retractor mount. Then you can see the retractor is further outboard and higher up than the hold-down.
Then here's a few pictures of the front seat belt retractor mount. It's 11" forward of where the quarter panel ends at the top of the rocker and about 3.5" inboard of the big fold in the rocker. It's at the front of the raised portion which would make just putting a plate behind it pretty tough. I think you can scoot the retractor back an inch or two without any major problems - it'll just be slightly awkward to grab the buckle. Note that in the first picture the front of the car is to the left, while the others the front is to the right
July 31st, 2018, 07:00 PM
