Date:         Wed, 4 Apr 2001 22:50:34 -0400
Reply-To:     Tom Carrington <tcarrington@RELITECH.COM>
Sender:       Vanagon Mailing List <vanagon@gerry.vanagon.com>
From:         Tom Carrington <tcarrington@RELITECH.COM>
Subject:      Re: Westy child restraints-how to use a booster?
Comments: To: maded <maded@GTE.NET>
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You can buy the parts from VW to add shoulder belts to a Westy. Helmut
Ziedler wrote an excellent article that is up on my website at
http://volksweb.relitech.com

The bad news is that you will have to wait until Thursday or Friday to see
it, as I am still working on moving the site to different servers!

TomC
tcarrington@relitech.com

-----Original Message-----
From: maded [mailto:maded@GTE.NET]
Sent: Wednesday, April 04, 2001 3:30 PM
To: vanagon@GERRY.VANAGON.COM
Subject: Westy child restraints-how to use a booster?


>
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Our 82 Westphalia camper has the std back seat (that folds into a bed) with
two lap belts.  This has been satisfactory for use with our high back,
shield and harness type of child seats up until now.

 Now that our little one and her friends have reached the magic 40# they can
no longer use these shield type of seats.  It is recommended that children
40-80# use shoulder belt positioning booster seats.  This of  course is not
an option with the  Westy bench seat.  We have found only one seat with a
harness that is approved for use with 40-80# children, it costs $100.  We
have also found (but not yet fully researched) a kind of harness that is
supposed to be approved for use in busses and cars with lap belts, rather
like an aircraft 5pt harness in an inverted Y shape.

Is there any way to add shoulder belts to the Westy bench seat?  What have
others done to solve the booster seat problem?  If the 5pt "inverted Y" type
harness can be used where to anchor the end of the "Y"?  Any such anchor
below shoulder height can contribute to spinal compression injury.

We will of course get the safest seat we can.  It seems a shame we can't use
the boosters we have already though.  Whatever solution we can come up with,
we will forward it to the list, maybe it can be saved for reference.


Ed Lowe, Seattle
82 Westy diesel
85 Golf diesel
92 Cabrio
97 Passat Tdi