Fox T-Bird/Cougar Forums

I changed out my front Seat Belt receivers today from the cracked shiznitty ones to very nice clean ones i just obtained.  I Pulled my old ones which are made by Allied Chemical for Ford.  I replaced with the same part numbers from 2 different cats, both were Bendix brand.  I had to paint the left side Blue to match my others, came out pretty good.  The really odd part aside from the different sub-contractor branding, is the drivers side receiver that came out of my car, although Blue plastic housing, had brown belt webbing.  The passenger side was blue/blue.  Both were definitely original to my car.  Here are a few pics:

Wow, my 84 TC has tan interior.  On the driver side the lower belt is blue/greenish and the upper belt is tan.  I had thought someone had replaced it but most likely not since everything is original.

If i had to make a educated guess.....the parts were grabbed off the line, and since the webbing was 100% enclosed in the plastic housing, the manufacturer just popped in whatever they had available.  They never foresaw the plastic cracking and disintegrating to reveal the odd color matches.

Weird.

My 80 tbird has red interior, but blue seat belts. They might be very faded black that looks blue, but it makes me wonder what the heck... It's only got 70k on the clock and never been wrecked, so whatever it has it what it came with.

My DS seatbelt (original) between seat and console also has brown webbing inside a blue sleeve. The PS seatbelt is blue webbing in blue sleeve.

It does seem odd.  Stupid cracked plastics...

I've got light blue sleeves in the '84 and red seat belt webbing inside.
The '86 had red sleeves and red seat belt webbing, probably the only car I've owned where the webbing is actually correct. Well, maybe the '88 XR7 with red interior, that probably had red webbing.

But yes, it does seem that there was no matching of those, since the sleeves were determined by the interior color, not the webbing.
I've seen that time and time again.

I have an NOS set of extenders for my car just waiting to go in.  I'm leery of installing them because I CONSTANTLY sit on the driver side one that's in the car now.  Its cracked towards the top, bit mostly in tact..... I don't want to break the new ones....

Both the belt webbing and covers on my Thunderbird are gray. I guess that's kinda rare.

Odd findings.  Mine are both grey plastic and webbing, I just assumed they were all matched like that?

my Ranger has tan interior and one red belt webbing, so it was clearly a Ford thing, and not specific to our cars.

I think bendix and the other subs didnt care much because the sleeve is all that could be seen. I doubt they counted on a bunch of old t bird guys calling them out on it 30 years later.