The belts out of my 68 parts car with black interior are like you described.
Deep shiny black, not green or blue but black. The belts in my 67 with white
interior are black, faded, but still black.
Brian
----- Original Message -----
From: "Mark McDonald" <tomswift@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: <mailing-list@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Sunday, July 28, 2002 2:48 PM
Subject: Re: IML: Blue Green Seat Belts
> I realize in the grand scheme of things this really a trivial matter.
>
> However, the question of whether or not Imperial seatbelts were black or
> blue-green when new is beginning to bug me-- partially because I feel my
> personal experience is being disregarded, and partially because I think
> it defies logic and seems to suggest, however inadvertently, that
> Imperials were not the high quality automobiles we think they were.
>
> I am %99.9 sure that the seltbelts that came in a Imperial with a black
> interior were, at least in 1968, as black as black could be.
>
> I say this because I have a distinct personal memory of them. For a
> period of time in the middle 60's, one of my uncles sold Chryslers at J.
> Truett Payne in downtown Birmingham, Alabama. Occasionally, he would
> take me into work with him and let me roam around the dealership at will
> while he worked. (I always tried to be a good kid, so the management
> put up with this.) During that time, I'm sure I drove several mechanics
> and salespeople crazy asking questions and poking around. I also must
> have crawled in and out of the front and back seat of every Chrysler
> product offered from about 1965 to 1968. I was like a kid let loose in
> a candy store-- only my "candy," in those days, was cars. Newports,
> Town & Countrys, 300s, New Yorkers, Imperials-- I literally spent hours
> in the seats of these cars, imagining I was driving them down the road
> and studying their interiors. I remember the bronze trim, I remember
> the toggle switches, I remember the fake stitching around the edges of
> the sunvisors and armrests. If I could put it into words, I could even
> tell you what these cars SMELLED like. (I will tell you a Plymouth
> smelled different than a Chrysler, and all Chryslers smelled different
> than a GM product. All GM products had more or less the same smell,
> oddly enough.)
>
> >From this I can tell you that the seatbelts in a black Imperial were
> indeed black. And not just any black, but a very deep, lustrous,
> glossy, almost shiny black. Imagine the sheen of a rayon or polyester
> blend shirt and you have kind of an idea of the shine of a new seatbelt
> then-- they did not look the way they do now: dull, dusty, frayed, flat
> or matte finish, etc. They were also a lot more pliable, like the
> seatbelts in a new car. Age has stiffened them-- as well as changed the
> color.
>
> I don't know how many different colors of belts were made, but if you
> ordered a burgundy interior in your '68 Imperial you got burgundy
> seatbelts. If you ordered a brown interior, you got brown belts. If
> you ordered a green interior, you got green belts. It is inconceivable
> to me that if you ordered a black interior in your Imperial you would
> get blue-green belts.
>
> I ask you: why?
>
> Why would they do this? Are we saying it was beyond the technology of
> the day to produce a black seatbelt? Are we saying the stylists and the
> guys on the assembly line were colorblind? Are we saying Chrysler
> didn't care about matching the seatbelts to the color of the interior?
> I mean, think about it. This was Chrysler Corporation's TOP OF THE LINE
> car. And it came with blue-green seatbelts??? It makes no sense.
>
> I'm not an expert on fabrics and dyes, but I do know that a true,
> colorfast black is a very hard color to create in a fabric. If you have
> an old sweater or shirt that was black when new, take a look at it
> today. Chances are it's faded, and may have a slight reddish or
> greenish tint to it. And fading can be quite uniform. I have
> personally seen maroon seatbelts that have faded to an almost tan
> color-- but I'm not concluding from that that tan seatbelts were issued
> with maroon interiors.
>
> I know we can't step into Mr. Peabody's Way Back machine and go back and
> settle this matter to everybody's satisfaction, but I hope we can give
> Chrysler a little more credit than that!
>
> Mark M
>
>
>
>
>
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