tgergen

Trying to swap out my euro seat for the stock one and cannot get the seatbelt bolt out of the Tequipment bar. What gives??? Anyhting special I need to do? Seems like it will snap if I try harder.

TIA, Tim

Moogle

the rollbar has tension in it, you may try loosening all the bolts first

when my dealer restrung my belts, they said it was a PITA. good luck

ArcticFox

Great...LOL. So there is no nut on the other end of that bolt I take it...I wouldn't expect there to be one, but thought I would ask...I figured the bar was tensioned.....but I couldn't budge it. I will have to enlist a friend to help. Thanks, Tim

GT3 Racer

If you have a difficult time getting the bolt out and you did not install it I would be willing to bet it was cross-threaded by the installer. Regardless of the amount of tension on the bar the bolt should back out with little effort. Be careful the bolt supplied with the Tech equipment was a piece of garbage. I retapped the holes and put in a high grade bolt.

Bob Rouleau

tgergen = The roll bar comes in three flavors. A little too wide, too narrow and just right. It is not uncommon to need a body jack or something to either squeeze the legs or puch them out a bit. In two of the three cases, the bolt will be in tension and while it should unscrew you may have a hard time getting it back in without help. Whike it's possible to cross thread the bolt, it would take a really ham fisted brute to do it. It should back out. If it requires a fair amount of force to do it, that's the sign that the there's a fair amount of tension there and if you take it all the way out, the bar legs will go "sproing" and you'll have a hard time getting it back in place. Ask me how I know!

RevUrGT3

Bob, I can attest to that... I wussied out and I did not install the bar, I took it to a local shop but I got to see the whole proces.. oh my, it is a PITA. BIG time. It took to guys to get it right...

Good luck tgergen!

ArcticFox

There seems to be a bit of slack in the bar...ie: it is not pre-tensioned on there...I think the dealer corss threaded it with a fricken impact wrench. I just hope it doesnt break...

Here goes nothin...

tgergen

Sheez. No dice. I was able to get the bolt all the way out of its seat, but the damn bolt will not come through the bushing that sits in the rollbar mount. So, I can't get the bolt out.....AND I can't get that damn thing threaded back in either....lol

It would seem that there is some sort of clip or saftey on the bolt to prevent it from coming all of the way out. Tomorrow I will attempt to totally remove the bar to figure out WTF is going on. I am just too tired to deal with it any longer....things WILL get damaged if I continue tonight. I will post results tomorrow. Tim

ArcticFox

Wonder why my pc logged me in with my OLD name...strange. Well tgergen and ArcticFox are one in the same in case you were wondering...Tim

ArcticFox

Finally got it out...

The dealer that installed the bar, McKenna I think, must have used an impact gun to do it. The threads were desrtoyed on the bolt...three rows of thread were missing....stuck on the body attachment point. Being as the threads were a partial mass of metal on the bolt, it would not come through the metal spacer...but I finally muslced it out.

So, I had to chase the threads of the body attachment point with a tap that luckily the hardware store had (7/16" x 20 pitch -- believe it or not, an SAE size, which surprised me) and bought a nice grade 8.8 shouldered bolt they had too! After tapping the hole, the new bolt threaded in nicely and I am all good to go now. What a PITA. I wish somebody would have just done it correctly the first time....oh well. At least it is done. Thanks for the help on this, Tim

Racerron

FYI Arctic Fox,

All seat belt mounts are SAE or UNF actually, I still don't know why even the metric cars are that way, just one of lifes mysteries.

0396

If it's the car I'm thinking about,the previous owner installed it...McKenna bought the GT3 used

ArcticFox

No, the previous owner bought the car from McKenna. He said everything was done at McKenna and had documents to back it up.

edit: I should say he had documents he provided me asking for work to be done to the car (a word doc), which included the bar install, steering wheel adjustment, brake pedal adjustment, etc.

edit #2: Now you got me second guessing myself so I reviewed the paperwork! LOL. He bought the car new with 43 miles on it. BUT, it is entirely possible that he did the install afterall...but it is a moot point now anyway I suppose. Tim

GT3 Racer

ArcticFox: I am confused. The bolt that goes into the threaded bung in the seat belt and the the roll bar tube is a 11mm x1.25 bolt and you chased it out to a fractional sae size and then put a grade 8.8 bolt in which is a metric grade. Do you mean a grade 8 bolt? Please explain.

ArcticFox

Roger that...Grade 8.

I found the bolt that came out to be either 7/16" with a 20 thread pitch or 13mm x 1.25. Although, when I measured to diameter of the bolt, 13mm was a closer fit.....but when I measured the thread pitch, I found a SAE pitch of 20 to fit better! When I did the calc, I found that the difference between a 13mm and a 7/16" was 0.1125", I figured it was close enough. So I just went with the SAE size being as I could not find a 13mm x 1.25 shouldered bolt anywhere! Luckily, it worked out perfectly!

Sorry about the 8.8 thing...I was talking bolts with a buddy just before I wrote that and screwed up. Tim