'91 Accord LX - passenger side seat belt won't retract

I've read my Haynes guide and scoured the Web to see if this is a simple
problem involving a fuse - something I can fix - before bringing the car to
my mechanic. I can't find anything. Has anyone experienced this or something
similar? Aside from being unable to ferry passengers in the passenger seat,
since it no longer has a functional shoulder belt, the seat belt warning
signal keeps beeping and beeping.... It's driving me crazy!

Several odd things: If I manually force the shoulder belt anchor up on its
track six inches or so, opening the door makes it immediately slide down
back to its 'passenger unloading' position. So it's not the retracting motor
per se; and it's not a matter of the car not being able to sense whether the
seat belt should be up or down.

So, even if I can't figure out the problem exactly, what *general area* does
this problem sound like it falls into?

 

Had the same thing happen to my car on the driver's side. Dealer
wanted something like $980US to replace the solenoid and motor
that retract the seatbelt. A bit much, so I just had them move
the unit back into the locked position, deactivate the sensor that
triggers the alarm and buckle myself in manually.

If you have mechanical skills and a place to work (I have neither),
it would probably be a simple matter to scavenge a working unit
from the junkyard and replace it yourself for much cheaper.

Eugene

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Eugene Mah, M.Sc., DABR
Medical Physicist
"For I am a Bear of Very Little
Brain, and long words Bother
http://radinfo.musc.edu/~eugenem/blog/ me." - Winnie the Pooh
http://www.netcom.com/~eugenem/ ICQ 3113529
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Had the same thing happen to my car on the driver's side. Dealer

I thought seatbelts were warrantied for the usefull life of the car?

Roger

 

I asked about this and they told me the seatbelts were, but not the
retracting mechanism. I didn't really push the issue much further.

Eugene

--
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Eugene Mah, M.Sc., DABR
Medical Physicist
"For I am a Bear of Very Little
Brain, and long words Bother
http://radinfo.musc.edu/~eugenem/blog/ me." - Winnie the Pooh
http://www.netcom.com/~eugenem/ ICQ 3113529
PGP KeyID = 0x1F9779FD or 0xE37A1591 PGP key available on request O-
---------------------------------------------------------------------

 

have the same problem with my 91 civic DX the passenger die belt will not
retract but there are some times where it will start working out of nowhere
and stay working for a period of time and then stop again