E36 seats

[ChrisO]

When I had my 97 M3 my 95 LTW seats with the mechanical tensioners plugged in fine to the body harness

My 98.5 M3 has the side airbags and pyro tensioners, I was in the middle of swapping the pyro tensioners onto my LTW seats because the plug styles on a 98.5 are completely different then a 97 but the pyro tensioner bracket wont sit on the older seat frame nice.

How do mechanical tensioners work? I'm tempted to just put the mechanical tensioners back on the LTW seats and put them in my 98.5 M3 and stare at a airbag light when I drive. I don't understand why the drivers side mechanical tensioner on the LTW seat still has a wire coming out of it also, if they are mechanical. Could doing this be unsafe or make my airbags not work if I got in an accident? Basically the only wire that would plug into my new M3 is the passenger occupancy detector.

[wasnt m3]

Any time you have an airbag light, the airbags are disabled.

[Daggerty]

You could plug in the other one and tie it up under the seat. You could probably strip  the covers off of it so it's just the wiring, then jump the wires for the seat belt buckle warning.

[ChrisO]

Thanks for the responses, I ended up going the safe route and spending hours swapping around the seatbelt bolts, it was horrible but at least it'll be safe now.

For anyone wondering, if you are going to swap pyro seatbelt tensioners on to seats that originally had mechanical tensioners, you have to swap the seatbelt bolt too because they are different for pyro and mechanical. The seatbelt bolt in a mechanical tensioner seat is shorter and doesn't allow the pyro tensioner to sit flat and tight with the seat rail