How to get rid of airbag MIL now that you have harness

[stinkyonion]

I got rid of the stock seatbelts when I placed harness bar and harnesses. Have driven all summer without a ticket. I bought the schroth profi II which are DOT approved and hope that if officer does have an issue that the DOT approval literature I keep in trunk will bail me out. Nevertheless, have MIL for airbag. It turns out the bullet connector by the seat just controls the audible seatbelt alarm. The MIL is caused by the shoulder strap electrical connectors behind the firewall liner. Havent yet determined if a resistor will get rid of this light, because hard to measure the resistance across the shoulder strap connector because it is so small, perhaps 0.3 ohms. Previous attempts to fool ecu with resisters (carbon cannister delete thread) ended in failure, so rather decided to take apart the shoulder strap retractor mechanism and reattach as little as possible.

Disclaimer. It has some warnings, but they are not that impressive, no words like "explosive", etc. However, after taking it apart, it appears that the ECU sends voltage to the shoulder strap mechanism that fires off a charge, which propells a toothed slider about an inch into the shoulder belt retractor gear coil in order to tighten the shoulder strap and fix it. The charge is about the size of a pea. I did the whole mod without any explosion and frankly felt safe, but proceed at your own risk.

First, remove and disconnect shoulder belt retractor assembly.


Then you need to remove the detonation slider chamber (my description) from the shoulder strap retractor assembly. This rectangular metal tube has the electrical wires coming out of one end, and the other end is in the retractor assembly. It is held in place by two metal straps that are fixed in place by barbs. I ground off the little 3mm barbs with a angle grinder in like 5 seconds, and then used a large channel lock to bend the metal straps back.
Then the detonation slider chamber could be removed (see photo).

The slider can be removed from the chamber by slowly pulling on the plastic nib in the center of chamber with needle nose pliers (see photo). Then just secure the chamber to the rollover bar upright, there is now nothing in it to fire off like a cannon, and the charge seems to small to do any damage (see photo of inside view).

The whole thing can be reassembled if you decide to return to stock belts.