Replacing floating recliner with fixed captain seat.

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farmer dan

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Feb 21, 2012
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Hello all, my parents are looking into a 2003 33v winnebago adventurer. Only hold up is seatbelts. Or well lack of such. It has a dinette,  couch and a swivel rocker recliner. Only the couch have seatbelts. They wanna know if you can add a captains seat where the recliner is, and bolt it down and add seatbelts. Also, the dinette doesn't have seatbelts. Anyone low of the reason the belts were never added there? It seems the new models have belt on the dinette. Wondering g thoughts. We've tried to contact winnebago, but haven't been ablessed to get anyone in the office yet.
 
If this has the mid entry, there is a compartment beside the door forward that you can drill holes in the ceiling to mount the belts and captains chair.
If the dinette is on a slide you can get long elevator bolts and install the belts. Those bolts have big flat heads and will not interfere the movement of the slide
 
I wouldn't use elevator bolts for seat belts. Most elevator bolts are only grade 2, and offer little strength in that type of application.
 
Lots of times when I add wood flooring, folks want the seat belts removed. There are OEM elevator bolts holding them down. I have a pile of them in my shed.
 
Anyone low of the reason the belts were never added there? It seems the new models have belt on the dinette.
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A dinette bench seat is not very safe during travel, even if properly anchored belts are provided. Without a shoulder belt, passengers on the forward facing side get thrown against the table edge. Rear-facing passengers get whiplash because the backrest is too low. It's a chancy proposition at best.  The RV maker also has to anchor the seat as well as the belt, and that may not always be practical.

I don't think new vs old has anything to do with placing belts in the dinette or other seating behind the cockpit. Federal law requires that they provide provide enough belts for the number of passengers the vehicle is designed for. Many motorhomes are strictly two-passenger vehicles, but those with extra bunks or other sleeping facilities need to have more seat belt positions for the additional passengers that will use those beds. Thus the seat belts (or lack of them) is driven largely by the "sleeping capacity" (an RVIA standards term) of the RV.
 
Ernie Ekberg said:
Lots of times when I add wood flooring, folks want the seat belts removed. There are OEM elevator bolts holding them down. I have a pile of them in my shed.
Click to expand...

I'm a manager of a fairly large grain facility and when people say elevator bolt, I think of the type that holds the buckets to the belt on a leg elevator. There's no way would I trust that type to hold the pressures of a seat belt in an accident. Maybe we are talking about two different types of elevator bolt.
 
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