Shannon blogged earlier this week about our discovery that our Graco car seat is kaput, thanks to a small break in the plastic tongue which lets the handle release the main latch. Luckily, some friends of ours - the same ones who came over at one in the morning on the day Genevieve was born - lent us their unused Evenflo Portabout seat.
I just tried installing it, and found that no matter how I adjusted the LATCH strap, the damn base wouldn't stay secure; there were always at least a few (dangerous) inches of slack in the strap. After too many sweaty minutes, I came back inside to see if Evenflo publishes the manual online. A few quick Google searches turned up no manual, but a bevy of recall notices for this exact seat, right down to the date of manufacture and serial number. Turns out the LATCH strap was "improperly routed through the base at the time of manufacture," which can "allow the base of the restraint system to be properly tightened to the vehicle anchorage brackets." Death, QED.
Luckily, rerouting the strap through the base was easy to do (thanks to a PDF'ed instruction sheet), and effective: the base is now mounted securely in the back of the car. Still and all, car seat manufacturers are batting .000 with me pitching this week: the Evenflo recall is bad enough, but at least corrigible; I'm still irate about Graco's idiotic policy of mandating the return of a defective seat before replacing it with a new one, which smacks of endangering the baby in order to save it.