Hi Everyone, I'm looking at buying a 1996 Newmar Mountain Aire. It's a big 38ft gasser with all the bells ans whistles from 20 years ago. It has a slide that has the regular couch and a free standing table and chairs that I would like to convert to a booth dinette and sleeper couch. Since will be travelling with 3 young children I would like all 4 positions in the dinette to have seatbelts and belts in the couch.
I've read threads where people have camper dinettes, which are all wood construction, and mounted them in their motorhome. Then looking to mount seatbelts they use carriage bolt (and large washers) right through the slide floor!!! To me this seems dangerous. If an accident occurs and the dinette moves but the person does not
... things get a bit messy I suspect.
My understanding is that in general, motorhome dinettes with seatbelts from the factory have a inner metal frame. The seatbelts are mounted to the dinette frame and the dinette frame is mounted to some metal structural members in the slide.
Sorry this is getting long winded but here are my questions:
If I purchase a good motorhome dinette with the steel inner supports. Does this era Mountain Aire have structural steel or aluminium in the floor of the slide? Has anyone had this done in another coach and did something a little different (metal plate under the flooring or something like that)?
I know the standards for seating and seatbelts were not in place till the mid-2000's so there could be a lot of different ways the manufacturers could have made hard mounting points for seatbelts so I'm open to suggestions.
Thank you in advance for any advice or insights.
David