I’ve had a 97 Seabring for a few months now and my driver side seat belt fully retracted and stuck in the locked position. It used to play some games with me but now its been stuck for a few days. I just discovered that my front passenger side seat belt is doing the same thing. I’ve never heard of seatbelts braking, let alone two of them. Is this common? Is it possible to work on a seatbelt without replacing the whole seat? Is there some trick to unlocking seatbelts that I don’t know about?
In older cars, you could remove the interior molding around the seatbelt and expose the whole mechanism. In my '75 Chrysler, there’s a ratchet wheel in there. I never really investigated what makes it lock up but maybe you just need to lube it.
Also, is there a possibility that the car has been in a bad frontal collision? It seems like I’ve heard that seatbelts sometimes permanently lock when there’s a bad wreck.
In a lot of cases, there is a pendulum-like device encased above or near the seat-belt feed mechanism. Sometimes the pendulum can get stuck in the forward position (the position it would normally get into during hard deceleration) and lock the belt. A lot of times (on non-convertibles) opening and closing the door will jar the device inside into freeing up.
In your case, without tension on the seat belt, try thumping the area near where the seat belt is fed and maybe this will get things working again. Without seeing your car or knowing exactly how the belt is fed, I can’t say for sure if the belt could be worked on without significant amounts of labor and/or seat replacement.
All the seat belt retractors I have ever seen have been enclosed.
I would NOT recomond you try to take one apart and repair it.
If you were to screw the job up, the first indication might be your face exiting the windshield in an accident.
Facial reconstructive surgery is way more expensive than a new seat belt.