rumblefish's Duster project

Hey Rumblefish, I came across this thread & just now finished reading it. I think it's great you're taking the time to show this to everybody. I'd guess a lot of us had to figure this kind of stuff out on our own, with no one else to bounce ideas off of or help us out. I know I've been down a similar road before.

I noticed you asked a question back in July about the little thing with the spliced wire on the left fenderwell. I never saw any answer so I'll throw in my 2 cents here. It looks like part of the seat belt starter interlock system. Most people don't even know they ever existed. As I remember, NHTSA or some other Govt. PITA decided we needed to be forced to wear our seatbelts so they required the auto makers to install a system that required you to fasten your seatbelts before you could start the car. The systems had weight sensors in the front seats so if you put a heavy bag of groceries on the passenger seat you would have to fasten that seatbelt too. The factories had to engineer the systems in a hurry because the Govt. didn't give them a lot of lead time, which might partly explain why they didn't work very well. I think the systems were abolished after about 6 months. The story I heard at the time was that somebody checked the cars of the people that worked at the Govt. agency that had required the systems & found that 50% of them (it might have been a lot more, I'm old, so I don't remember too well!) had bypassed the systems in their own cars. I once had a discussion a few years ago about these systems with a person who worked in DC (& was very big on what she, personally, had accomplished for the public safety & good) at the time they were used & she insisted no such system ever existed.

OK. Enough of my rambling. To further answer your question, all of these systems had a switch under the hood to bypass them if they failed. The device in your picture looks like it has a button on it. Push the button, bypass the system, start the car, without using your seatbelts. The bypass was temporary. You had to open the hood & press the button each time you wanted to start the car. They were a big PITA. My wife had one on a '74 Dart & I had one on a '74 VW Beetle.


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