DISCLAIMER: Modifying your safety devices in any way can be dangerous and fatal. If you don’t feel safe or confident doing so, simply don’t do it.
The other day I decided enough was enough after hitting my head for the - well I guess I’ve hit my head on it so many times that I can’t remember - on the auto seatbelt slider clip. The catch was that I didn’t feel like paying $100+ for the actual swap from Canada. Since I was getting rid of my rear seats and stripping the interior for another project, I discovered that there were two perfectly working manual seat belts in the back of my car.
The Tools and Materials:
-Drill and Drill bits
-Socket wrench with 10, 12, 14, and 17mm sockets
-Philips screwdriver
-Metal filer
-Vise Grip
-2x M10 125 40mm bolts (Schucks - $3 dollars)
-4x 5/16 Flat washers or some similar size ($0)
-2x rectangular 1/8" steel mounting brackets (~$20)
-Rag towel
-Sharpie
-Paper
-Scissors
Total Cost: 23 dollar plus gas
Pre Step 1 remove interior panels to have access and unbolt and remove any components related to automatic seatbelts. I’m not going to cover disassembly, its just bolts.
Step 1:
Unbolt and remove the front seats from the car.
Step 2:
Turn driver’s seat on its side and unbolt the lap belt retractor and and save your nuts. Find the rear driver side buckle and fit it onto the first bolt closest to the back of the seat. It fits perfectly onto the bolt; however, there is also a tab protruding into the seat bracket which needs to be taken care of. Instead of cutting it off - keep the plate affixed to the bolt on the seat and slide the the tab fits against a groove in the seats bracket. Mark this spot and drill a hole large enough for the tab to fit in. Bolt the buckle housing in using one of the two retained nuts. Sorry, no pictures for this part.
Step 3:
Same as step 2 for the front passenger seat. Make sure you did not use the seatbelt buckle for the middle seat as it does not fit the L or R rear seatbelts. It will say “center” on it.
You are now looking at this-
What you’ll eventually be wanting to see is this-
Step 4:
To line up the screw hole and tab of the manual belt retractor to the existing screw hole and slot where the auto retractor was you must file do some metal filing.
First place a towel down to catch all those filings,
then take your file and go at it until this:
looks something like this:
Do this for both sides.
Now that the top mounting bolt threading and housing tab of the retractor lines up vertically for the most part, you’ll notice that there is only one other bolt mounting hole located at the bottom of the retractor bracket, but there is no place to bolt it in. Unfortunately the mounting designs for the auto retractor and the rear manual retractor are different. There is a solution though - fabricate or have someone else fabricate mounting plates.
Step 5:
Measure the distance between the existing bolt holes you want to use and the lower retractor mount. To keep it simple I figured rectangular brackets would be easiest. The dimension I came up with were 6 5/8 inches by 2 3/8 inches and I decided that 1/8 inch thick would be more then strong enough.
Step 6:
Because I didn’t have access to tools or materials to fabricate my own brackets this was the hardest part of the project. After more then a few phone calls I eventually was able to get someone to do this as a side-job for just $20. The fruit of my efforts:
Step 7:
Now I needed to drill holes in the exact places where it would mount between the car’s chassis and the new manual retractor. To accomplish this I cut out pieces of paper matching the dimensions of the mounting plates. Then I lined up the paper cutouts with the chassis mounting bolt threads, marked them with a sharpie, and transfered the marks onto the mounting plates. Now you’ll want to drill the holes. To do this I aligned each plate on a vice grip.
Step 8:
Now test fit the plate to the chassis:
I marked where the retractor’s housing mounting hole aligned to the plate directly to make sure everything lined up perfectly.
Now, back to the vise grips to drill the last hole.
It should then look like this:
Note: the bracket housing bolt requires a nut on the opposite side of the plate so you’ll have to find a different bolt/nut combination rather then using the bolt that was used originally with that bracket housing unless of course you have a nut the right size.
Repeat steps 7 and 8 for other side
Step 9:
Slice this off of both seatbelt assemblies if you haven’t already:
Step 10:
The retractor is done - now for the easy part.
To mount this:
You will need a different bolt due to the size of the original being too large.
If I remember correctly, the size of the bolt was M10 125 40mm, but be sure to double check that. I bought mine at Schucks for 3 dollars. Important! the bolts should be of high grade as you are installing a safety device.
Step 11:
You can put your interior panels back at this point if you want.
The last part will be mounting the seatbelt’s base to the chassis for lack of a better grasp of automotive terminology. I used two 5/16" washers on each side in order to get the right spacing. I’ll leave the description at that, you will see what I’m talking about should you choose to do this swap
And this can be mounted in either of the bolt thread where the automatic seatbelt base housing once resided. I used the thread closest to the rear.
You’re done!
The result should look something like this:
Note about bolts used - just re-use bolts from both the automatic seatbelt assembly and the rear manual seatbelt assembly. Whatever fits 
Post-Thoughts:
-Belts feel great and hug you into the seat. I feel safer with them.
-I did not re-use my pillar panels because they were had huge slots in them for the auto-belt sliders.
-One complaint: sometimes the seatbelts “stick” and you have to tug on them a bunch to get them to give, especially the passenger side. If I had to do this over, I would take apart the retractor housing if possible and grease it.
