Reproducing Seat Belt Tag

[911T1969]

It's way past due for the replacement of my original seat belts on my 1969 911T. I am going to use the original hardware and have someone sew up new black webbing, but that's not the topic in this post. I've been trying different ways to reproduce the seat belt tag. You know the small ribbon sewn onto the belt down by its anchor point.
I first thought about making a stamp - the kind for addressing envelopes. I never got around doing that, so I found a way to use my inkjet printer to print directly onto a ribbon. I went to a fabric store and bought some ribbon that was 1.5 inches/ 38mm wide. It is slightly wider than the original (about 35mm wide). I bought pure white and off-white. I think the off-white looks better, so I'm sticking with that.
It took a long time messing with the fonts. I found a "Porsche" font online. The other font is DIN 1451 Mittelschrift Alt which I found on a model railroad website. Porsche uses this font a lot. This font is used in Europe for road sign lettering. The "REPA" logo was hard to duplicate exactly. I played around with different fonts to duplicate it. I italicized the "R" to make it lean and then intermixed capital letters with lower caps.
After making the logo, I printed it out on a page. I had to print a few pages, adjusting its size to match the original. Next I cut about a 3 inch section of the ribbon and sprayed the back with a spray mounting adhesive. I then carefully applied the section of the ribbon on my printed page, lining it up with the already printed logo. I then re-ran the page through the printer and printed again, this time printing directly on the ribbon. I then peeled the ribbon off the page. I wasn't too happy with the results. The ink bled, smearing the fonts. I tried different print settings, none which worked. I also tried spraying the ribbon with clear satin spray paint to soak into the fibers. It still bled. So, I gave up on the direct printing method.
Then it occurred to me. Why not make an iron-on transfer decal? Some of you might have done this with your kids. There is special iron-on transfer decal printer paper that you can buy. I had a sheet already. I put the logo at the very bottom right of the page, checked "mirror image" and hit print. Follow the instructions with the paper. I found the highest iron heat setting that wont melt the ribbon without steam works best. It takes about 2 minutes of heating to transfer the mirror image to the ribbon. Peel the transfer paper off before it cools. No bleeding of the fonts! To print another, move the image over on your computer and run the sheet through again, or you can just put a bunch all over the page. Check out the picture. The original is in the middle. The inkjet direct print is on the right and the transfer decal is on the left. Sorry the photo is a little fuzzy, but you get the idea.

[HawgRyder]

Once again the ingenuity of our Pelicanites shines through!
Great idea...this will save a lot of money for some people that need stock looking belts and no longer have to search the planet for them.
Thank you
Bob

[Tim K]

Nice work!

Tim K

[AlexJ]

When I was younger, I use to fabricate that to "homologate" rally seat belts that were out of the date... They were still in good shape... why not?!

[skinnerd]

The seat belts in my 1977 Porsche Martini Edition were torn, ragged and needed a refresh.
I'm sending both the front retractible units over to SeatBelt Planet for new webbing and a checkup.
While at it, I thought I'd try my hand at the great seat belt tag idea from above.

This was the current condition of my seat belt webbing tags:



Not in the greatest of shape.
So I got on my computer and replicated the tag fonts the best I could.
There is actually a "Porsche" font you can download for most word processors.
I found some blank tag material on the interweb.
I did try to print from my ink jet directly to the tags, but like above, the printing was not sharp and somewhat light.
So the heat transfer method was to be the process of choice.
The heat transfer paper I found required a laser printer...not the ink jet I had at home.

I load up a bunch of copies of the tag on one sheet and reversed the images, saved it to a thumb drive and headed to the local Staples as they had a laser printer.
I ended up with a couple pages of heat transfer paper looking like this:



Upon returning from Staples, I got to work.
I pulled out the wife's iron and after some experimenting with both temp and time, I achieved a pretty good result.
See below:



So I've boxed some of these replica tags up with the seat belts and they'll be winging their way off to SeatBelt Planet later this week.

Was is worth it?
Costwise, unlikely. Probably ran me just under $40 to do this between the blank tags and heat transfer paper.
But I do like challenges and fun projects.
The tags won't be seen by most, by I'll know they are there and what it took to get it done.

[brshap]

Very nice work. It's the little things that make these projects special.

[Bill Douglas]

I'm not sure this is completely legal LOL

[skinnerd]

Oops...the seat belt police have shown up.

[Zeke]

Originally Posted by Bill Douglas

I'm not sure this is completely legal LOL

Nice touch for concours status but keeping the paperwork should solve any and all problems. Or leaving the newly manufactured label in a place that doesn't show.

[skinnerd]

Yes, where these tags are sewn on the belts is tough to see in most cars.

[GH85Carrera]

I had the seat belts on my daily driver 383,000 mile 86 El Camino rebuilt by Seat Belt Planet. As thay are just 6 miles from my house, I just brought them in the front door. I was doing all new carpets, and adding some door speakers to the El Camino and with the out seats it was impossible to drive.

I had to drive my 85 911 there. Several of their staff came out to get pictures of my 911, and most were "car guys" and had various nice cars.

They can replace the webbing with any color, or pattern you can imagine. Super nice folks. They did my seat belts in 48 hours, and I went to pick them up and they are perfect. Send the entire mechanism, and they take it all apart, and clean refurbish the mechanical parts, and new buckles for my Elky. As you can imagine, after 383,000 miles they were just worn out.

They sewed in new labels. It would not be concours perfect for a 911 show car as they are modern and accurate labels. All DOT approved.

[skinnerd]

Finished belts with my labels look great for the Martini 924.
On to the next project.

[skinnerd]

Just finished another set for someone.

I re-did the 3rd tag due to the defect by "all."
This time I used a "rubber stamp" font to do the date which more closely
approximates the rough nature of the stamped date on these tags.
Starting to get the hang of the artistic part of the process as I've got the temps
and times on the iron finally dialed in.
Came out alright I think.