Introduction
An important part of car seat maintenance is cleaning it up on a regular basis. But in the race of cleaning the seat and backrest of the seat itself, we often miss out an important part.
And that’s the car seat belt buckle. You might ask- why on earth i should clean car seatbelt buckle? Well, just like every other fabric made part of the car, car seatbelt buckles also get dirty over regular use.
And without going through the steps of cleaning it up, you might see it gets dirty to dirtier over time. And that’s definitely not something that you would like to see.
Go through the two simple methods of cleaning a car seat belt buckle, and get rid of the problem once and for all-
Steps on How to Clean Seat Belt Buckle
This is the heart of this post today, where we will be taking you through the steps of cleaning car seatbelt buckles. But there are two different approaches to it. And we will take you through both of them.
Method 1: The Hand Cleaning Method
This method includes no additional types of machinery and all you need is just hand and a few household cleaning essentials. This method is meant to be a part of your daily or weekly car cleaning routine.
Here goes the list of items you need for this method-
Items You Need
To continue with the process, you will be needing these few things-
- White vinegar.
- A clothespin or clip.
- Soft fabric or cloth.
- Vinyl Upholstery Cleaner.
- Car upholstery dryer.
Once you are done with collecting the stuff, here goes the method-
Step 1:
Pull the belt of our at first, as much as possible. Because many of the belt itself will be hidden down in the track.
Once almost all of the belt is taken out, attach a clothespin or clip to attach them somewhere near the backrest. This will prevent the reel from pulling the seatbelt back.
Step 2:
Take the vinyl upholstery cleaner into a container, and put a few drops of white vinegar into the mix. This will be the solution that we will clean the item through.
Now, take a sprayer and put the mix into it. Do firm spraying on the whole seat belt buckle. Make sure you have done it on each and every dirt spot of the buckle.
Step 3:
Once you are done with cleaning, keep the car seat belt pinned until or unless it is dried up completely. You can take help from a car blow dryer to fasten up the process.
Step 4:
Once you are done with the drying up process, you can check for whether it has some more stubborn dirt to clean or not. If the dirt is of the regular kind, they should be gone by the end of this process.
Once everything is clear, unpin the seat belt and let it be as it was.
Method 2: The Deep Cleaning Method
Now, this is the advanced sort of cleaning process for the car seat belt buckle. Here we will go through a complete deep cleaning process, for the permanent and stubborn kinds of dirt. Specially, coffee splits, pen marks, etc are the kind of dirt you have to deal with in this step.
Let’s go through the list of essential items at first place-
Items You Need
- A car pressure washer(that has adjustable spray pressure settings into it).
- Cleaner or degreaser or mild kind.
- Scrubbing pads for car seats.
- Clips or paper clips.
- Towels or microfiber cloth.
Done with collecting them all up? Here the steps of the car seat belt buckle deep cleaning process-
Step 1:
Open up the car door and fetch out the car seat belt from the roll. Remember that, you should give as much effort as possible. But once the roll is finished, don’t over-pressurize it.
Once you are done fetching the whole belt out, attach a pin to make sure that it doesn’t roll back.
In case you can not find anything perfect to hold down the belt, you can extend the belt outside of the car, and close the car door. The car door will hold up the belt into its place unless you open the door next time.
Either way, make sure that it’s stable enough to continue the rest of the cleaning process.
Step 2:
Take the car pressure washer and keep the settings lower. By lower, we mean that keep the pressure settings into a range of 500-800 dpi, which is 1 gpm in other terms.
Once the pressure washer is adjusted, hold the belt tight and spray one side of the belt at first place. Make sure that the pressure is on the place where the buckle is dirty.
Once you are done with one side, go with the other side. The process is still the same. But make sure that the pressured water doesn’t reach harm to you.
Step 3:
Once you are done with cleaning the part of the belt outside the car door, take a towel and continue with method 1 for the inside part of the belt. As you can not use a pressure washer inside the car, you have to stick to this method anyway.
Step 4:
Once you are done with both insider and outsider parts of the seat belt buckle, let it dry in the open air. If you want to get it completely moisture free, you can dry applying a blower dryer instead.
Make sure that everything is put in place just as they were.
Bottom Line
Done with the complete process on how to clean seat belt buckle? Great! Now one last advice is to make sure you go through a regular cleaning routine with not only the seatbelt or seat but also every other part of the car.
Good luck!