Belt guides?

I bought some from here Belt Guides. They are a bit agricultural in design. I think Daihatsu did another design which is a cast polished design, which looks much nicer, but you would have to import those from Japan.

They guides were not a guarantee of smooth running belts however. I think my main mistake was to follow the advice of someone on here to reverse fit the guides! After trying other improvements, I finally swapping the guides back to their correct sides which resulted in much better running.

The other thing I would recommend, especially if you are tall and have the seat right back is to file open the rear belt fascia panel slots. It's the top section that needs filing down. Just follow the moulding line in the plastic, but file as much plastic away as possible. I actually did most of the filing as scraping with a sharp extendable knife, although there is a slight risk that the knife will skid across the facia finish. Otherwise, very easy with the knife.

 

I have the original cast polished ones I think. But are not much of a big improvement as to how well the belt will roll up

 

I find that I have to run the belt above the belt guides to get a comfortable fit, so I blank the driver's side guide off. I'm only 173cm tall.

 

Regarding the slow retraction of the seat belts, there are various ways of making them behave. But once we've cleaned them we'd like to keep them dirt and grease free, but this isn't easy or realistic when we're using the car in the hot summer weather, as dust, sweat and sun cream are likely to contaminate the belts.
I've found that using padded seat belt covers really help in this regard. Not only do they keep the belt away from skin, it also means that when putting the belt on you never actually have to touch the belt. This all keeps down the amount of dirt and grease contamination (even more essential when we consider the amount of dust kicked up through summer driving with the roof down), helping to maintain strong retraction of the belts.

In addition, I find the belt covers make the seatbelt more comfortable to wear, especially next to bare skin.

 

Is the slow retraction of the seatbelt something that a lot of copen’s have. I know mine has this problem.

 

Hi Frido,
Yes mine is the same.☹️. I discovered that taking it out of the 'guide' on the side of the seat helps a little bit but short of dismantling the whole thing to clean and lubricate it (not going to attempt THAT!) I don't know what other solution there is. Yet another lovely quirk of owning a Copen! ‍♀️

 

Hi,

I worked on that today. I bought 2 new seat belts and replace only the passenger seat and I have to say that it works way better.
On the driver seat I just tried the sanding a bit to enlarge the guide and it improved already well, even not at the level of the new system.

Comparing the original ones and the new Genuine part, it seems that Daihatsu has improved the guide and the spring for retractation is a bit stronger (also maybe because it's new).

I wil wait a bit before ereplacing the driver seat belt, even if I have bought it already, just to see if sanding the guide would have been enough.