An answer to a question no one asked recently, but something I needed to figure out when I bought the car - if like many of us you need to put kids in the back then you'll need rear 3-point belts. After hearing a lot of different things from various sources (there are hidden mounts in the back, there is a c-pillar mounting location, leave some brats and kraut in the trunk overnight with Rammstein playing and magical elves will install them) for my '73 Bavaria there are no mounting points already there for the retractor. That being said, working with my restoration shop and the fabled Pawel at Quickfit in the UK it was pretty easy to set up. Unfortunately, the elegant solution that works on 2002's and coupes, where you hide the retractor under the parcel shelf and route the belt through a small slit in the shelf, does not work on E3's because the wheel well/shock top leaves very little room under there. So without doing a lot of fabricating the solution was to mount the retractor on top of the shelf with a reinforcing plate underneath, then hide it with a decorative cover, which Quickfit can supply premade in any color. It took under two weeks to get the parts from the UK (the downside is shipping from Quickfit is a bit pricey.) The rest of the setup uses the existing hip mounts for the factory belts. The covers are actually not that obtrusive and the belts have worked great. Hope that's helpful for someone.
Rear 3-point Seatbelts
- Thread starter Sean Haas
- Start date
well done. I'd say it's pretty OEM-looking
corvair kid
Well-Known Member
Very nice. I'd thought about doing something similar, but realized that the aftermarket speakers on my parcel shelf are in the way. I've heard that the rear three-point belts from a Series III Jaguar XJ6 (which have a similar parcel shelf-mounted retractor) work perfectly in an E3.