Child Seat Cleat Install

We dug up a large, slightly concave fender washer from our bin-o-leftovers in the garage to create a quality metal-to-metal interface under the floorpan, providing us with ample space to inject the silicone sealant we used to seal off the back-back of the Rav4 from the outside world.


Oh, and that sealant is about as easy to use as filling holes in your dorm walls with toothpaste right before the end-of-year inspection. Everyone has a half-used tube of silicone or latex-based sealant sitting in the garage, and the stuff will last forever if you close the tube properly after using it. Make sure the sealant you choose is temperature-and metal-friendly, and you’re golden. We goobed it into the interface between the child-seat retention bracket and the floorpan then did the same from underneath to properly close off the contact point between the fender washer and the underside of the floorpan.

Watch Your Knee
Ouch. Kneeling around in the back of the Rav4 while putting the interior back together, we found a whole new kind of pain—right up there with taking an airborne automotive horn in the shin. The newly installed child-seat safety strap retainer bracket was black, and in a sea of dark grey carpeting, it disappeared nicely. Nicely enough that, as we returned the plastic carpet edging to its OEM locale, we kneeled with full weight upon the high-tensile steel bracket, right on the edge of the kneecap. The bracket did not flinch.