Three Point Seat Belt Install

I got the aftermarket seat belts from the shop up near Brian, and I was not happy with the way they said to install them.   According to the instructions, the highest attachment, the one that you pull the seat belt through when extending it for latching with the lap belt, was supposed to be mounted just below the quarter panel window.  In my opinion, this is too low because it would be at, or below, shoulder level.  Every vehicle, even the Miata, has this point above shoulder level for two reason; one is safety......in a collision it would impart downward force on the neck/shoulder area rather than a dispersed force across the chest.  The other reason is that it would be difficult to reach back and grab the seat belt after entering the car.  I have seen Mustangs in car shows that had an attachment point welded into the roof rail, but we can no longer do that without damaging paint. 

Brian had asked the guys at the Mustang shop in Auburn how they do it, and they said they said they use a hole in the "C" pillar (the rearmost roof support) to gain access to the interior roof area.  The seat belt kit had some nuts and large washers that could have been inserted through one of these holes, but that would put the attachment point too far back.  I came up with the following solution:

I bought a piece of 1.25 x 1/8 flat steel from Ace hardware and some nuts that matched the size of the attachment bolt, and then drilled the following holes: 

Then I spot welded the nuts over the big holes:

Then I cut the flat stock between the two nuts to get the following two pieces:

Next, I drilled matching holes in the "c" pillar:

Using the length of the flat stock, I could feed the welded nut through the hole in the pillar to get it quite a bit further forward.  I then pop riveted the piece into place:

You can just see the end of the flat stock through the hole that I used.  Any further forward than this I was afraid I would run into problems interfering with the headliner. 

The next step was to install the anchor point for the belt retracting mechanism.  The instructions called for attaching this to the floor, and I used some supplied anchors:

Underside of car



Interior

After attaching the seat belts, things looked pretty good from the this viewpoint:



Note how much higher the attachment point is than if I had used the top of the quarter panel. You can also see there is some interference between the belt and the quarter window crank, but those windows were seldom rolled down, and a rear seat passenger could always pull the belt out to crank the window down.  (Lets face it, most people now don't even know what a window crank is.)
What I didn't like was how far away from the car body the retractor sat:

This looks pretty clunky to me.  I've got some ideas for how to make this better, but that is far another day.