Another occasional question that has become more frequent due to the new child seat/restraint legislation is how to fit seatbelts to the front of SII/SIII 109s. In some cases, this is as a replacement for the old inferior static line belts, but it also applies to earlier SIIs where belts were never fitted.
The complete Defender belt system is a simple fit to 109 hard tops and only requires the drilling of four holes through the ledge in front of the tub’s bulkhead for some bracket studs.
The system comprises:
- Inertia reel, complete with shoulder pivot and lower mounting (integral to webbing);
- Buckle and stalk;
- Inertia reel bracket and chassis tie (2 pieces);
- Buckle spreader plate with captive nuts;
- Buckle stalk spreader-to-chassis tie bar;
- Shoulder point diagonal anchor.
Most SII and all SIII will already have the shoulder anchor, buckle spreader and tie-bar, but if you do not have these, or they are in poor condition, they can be replaced with the identical Defender items.
The diagonal shoulder anchors simply bolt into the roof gutter and side panel B post.
The bottom end bracket of the seat belt webbing sits in the bottom corner of the seatbase, using two bolts through the sill and another through the rear seatbase flange, front tub flange and the sill’s vertical rear bracket. This is a direct substitute for the SII/SIII lower bracket, where fitted.
The buckle stalk spreader and captive nut plate sits underneath the tub’s front ledge and has two horizontal bolts that secure it to the underside flange of the bulkhead. One of these bolts also connects into the captive nut on the tie bar (annodised strip in photo), the other end of which is bolted to the stiffening web on the foremost tub floor support hoops on the chassis.
The big change is the mounting of the inertia reel. This is done by a two-piece bracket. The lower half is a 90 degree steel plate that follows the underside of the tub front ledge and front mounting points. The vertical face of the plate sits up against the front face of the tub mounts, and two bolt holes align with the outboard chassis outrigger flange bolt holes. The top horizontal part of the plate has two studs wich pass through holes you need to drill in the tub ledge. You can see in the photo that I have fitted a second pair of these lower brackets to strengthen the tub mountings – it’s the outboard pair (passing through the bulkhead removal bar’s foot) that are used for the belt mounting. A matching top bracket secures to the two studs from the lower bracket and holds the inertia reel directly.
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