Series 3 Centre seatbelt brackets

I've not been able to spent much time on my SWB Landy rebuild recently, but I am still progressing slowly.

Some of you may recall I had a problem fitting the tub to the new chassis, where it seemed to be too far forwards. I think I've solved that now - I repositioned the angle body mounting rail that runs along the back of the tub (which I had replaced), such that the tub now sits about 5mm further back. I still needed some shims on the front outer mounting brackets, but I'm confident the door will now fit.

However, the inner front mounting brackets (the seatbelt buckle fixings, part 395258) now seem to be further out of position than I would have expected.

The parts guide shows to use shims 395414 as required, but (a) I can't find anyone with these in stock (I could make some myself, of course), and (b) adding too many shims here seems a bad thing, in terms of increasing the leverage on the bolts that are part of a seatbelt fixing.

Any good reason I shouldn't just elongate the holes in the front angle beam on the front of the tub, so they line up with the (unshimmed) brackets?

Thought I'd add a few photos to show the issue. Holding the bracket flat against the bracket on the chassis, the captive nuts on the bracket can only just be seen through the holes in the tub rail. It's quite a long way out, so I'd need quite a few shims to get them to align with the holes already there. Given the use of slotted holes on the chassis and bracket, I wonder why they don't slot the hole in the tub rail, to avoid the need for shims at all.

It's ironic that shifting the tub backwards to resolve the alignment with the outer front tub brackets in the chassis, has made this problem worse on the inner brackets.

Put the bracket to seat belt mounting bolts in place and make shims to fill the gap to chassis bracket.

Blackburn said:

Put the bracket to seat belt mounting bolts in place and make shims to fill the gap to chassis bracket.

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Hmmm. But to get the captive nut to align with the holes in the tub rail, that's going to need about 10mm if shims. That seems excessive.

I have all sorts of packers. I have an old plastic chopping board that's 10mm think and gets repurposed regulary.

rob1miles said:

I have all sorts of packers. I have an old plastic chopping board that's 10mm think and gets repurposed regulary.

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Although given that this is a seatbelt mounting, I feel it ought to be a bit more robust. That's why I'm concerned about packing it out that much.

I've used reinforcing plates with rounded edges to prevent pull through and spread the load. With packing you would want a metal collar so the bolt could pull down even in the rest of the packer was plastic. Will the be the 7/16 UNF seatbelt bolt? Beware by the way, I was going to use some brackets from a Merc I had lying about, turned out to be M11 fine, very similar to 7/16 UNF but not the same and not secure.