Seats & runners.
Think I'm going to fix the passenger seat in place as I've got fixed seats (none tilting for rear access.) The drivers side will be fixed height wise and the seat back angle too, but I'll put runners on it. In fact, I'm going to replicate the drivers side brackets & seat bars and put in a couple of spacers so if I decide to put runners in on the passenger side somewhere down the line, I can.
Seat runners. About £75 from demon tweeks and they are out of some 70's triumph. Rubbish. Standard seat fitting is a tad random so I'm ditching the lot. A colleague of mine (who has worked for a lot of marques) recommended that for one of the vehicles he developed they used BMW Mini seat runners as the mech is really nice and very adjustable and they are only an inch deep. That'll do. So I picked up a Mini seat for £15. Gotta love eBay
Stripped them down to get to the real deal...
Nice.
Also picked up some lovely hight tensile (but weldable) lightweight round tube for my seat bars. This is actually crash bar material removed from car doors!
Drilled out some Ø20 bar to weld into the tube to fix my runners to..
and then scribed and set up the tubes in the drill to take out to Ø20 so I could weld the bushes in. This is where I hit a problem. It may be high tensile & weldable, but it's extremely hard to drill! So hard, that after blunting a few (HSS) bits on the first hole (of 16!) I gave it up as a bad job. I'm going to get some box section instead - I can drill that. Yeah - I could weld some lugs on the side of the tube, but I want to put bosses through it. That's how I want it.
Anyway, seats. This is where I lucked in. A friend of mine used to work for Lotus. He was building a project and had some new Elise seats from the factory. Anyway, he moved projects and got some seats from other car within the group instead, so the Elise seats became 'spare' so he offered them to me at 'cost price'. Now, I'm not going to talk pound notes, but let's just say that it was the deal of a lifetime!! You can pick them up with a finger, they are very comfortable and look the 'nuts!
So I fab'd a front bracket to hold the front of the seat to the front of the runners, and then started the rear (making a good job of it) but I need some nice laser cut items to finish it, but I couldn't finish it until I knew the position, height & angle were right, so I put some gash brackets in to test.
As I'm waiting for my box section, I threw in a piece of wood around the right height and clamped it up! It took a bit of working out, not having any datums so a bit of guestimation was involved. I wasn't far out though - I never am
Just needs dropping about an inch and it'll be perfect. Dad reckons so anyway...
So I'll get my new material for my seat bars, fab those up and set them in next week, sit in it for a while, close my eyes grab the wheel and pretend it's finished, then copy the seat to runner brackets, strip the lot out and I'm done. Seats will go back in the loft for a while until rebuild time.