<VV> What to do with old Corvair seat belts? Fun!

[Roger Gault]

Just to be contrary...
About 10 years ago, I was trying to re-adjust my driver's side seat belt on
my '65 convert.  The webbing had sort of fattened up over the years of
sitting all day in the sun and I had sort of fattened up over the years of
eating my wife's cooking.  The webbing was pretty tight and hadn't been
moved in a long time, so I gave it a good yank (with one hand).  It was
really disturbing to see the buckle and a couple of inches of webbing in my
hand.  The belt just pulled apart in a fuzzy mass.  I figure it was good for
about 0.1g of deceleration force (25 lbs of pull vs 250 lbs of fatman).

Roger

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Frank DuVal" <corvairduval at cox.net>
To: <Sethracer at aol.com>
Cc: <virtualvairs at corvair.org>
Sent: Thursday, May 03, 2007 7:38 AM
Subject: Re: <VV> What to do with old Corvair seat belts? Fun!


> Back about 1990 I visited a sled type crash facility at the University
> Of Virginia. It used a sled to mimick the interior portion of a car
> instead of a whole car. The test just finished at the time was seat
> belts as removed from junked cars. These included sun damaged, dirty,
> worn, etc, examples. Even the shredded ones (where the retractor had
> mangled them) were holding well in the tests. It was not the result the
> grad students were expecting! Yes, there was a degredation in holding
> power, but not enough to effect the outcome of injuries in a crash. At
> the time they were testing the effect a crash had on occupants in wheel
> chairs (think transport vans) and how to better secure them.
>
> Frank DuVal
>
> Sethracer at aol.com wrote:
>
> >Hey I finally figured out what to do with old seat belts. Ones that you
> >would never use because of old webbing. (Note - if you have original
belts in
> >your Corvair, you are on borowed time!)  - Seth
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
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