• Hi Guest!
    If you appreciate British Car Forum and our 25 years of supporting British car enthusiasts with technical and anicdotal information, collected from our thousands of great members, please support us with a low-cost subscription. You can become a supporting member for less than the dues of most car clubs.
    There are some perks with a member upgrade!
    **Upgrade Now**
    (PS: Subscribers don't see this gawd-aweful banner
Tips
Tips

Seats are finally finished!

Share this page

D

David_Doan

Jedi Warrior
Country flag
Offline
I started a thread earlier in the year looking for advice on seats.

Lots of great input here. I ended up getting everything from AH Spares.

As shown in the pics below, my metal frames were in pretty bad shape. New one's can be had for about $400 a seat ($150 for the bottom and $250 for the back). There's no way I was going to invest an additional $800 in these seats.

DSC_7159.JPG


DSC_7148.JPG



I ended up saving the existing seat backs with some JB weld and some aluminum. The bases were recreated from wood. After I built mine, I found that the Austin-Healey 100 had the same seats and the early ones were wood .

DSC_7163.JPG


DSC_7220.JPG


And the final product...

DSC_7230.JPG


The flash made the vinyl look shinier than it is. I'm very happy with the products from AH Spares. The dash and door pockets are next. Vinyl by the yard is not listed on the AH Spares web site but they sell it for about $20 if you request it. Shipping from the UK is EXPENSIVE, But total cost from AH spares is still a lot less than Moss.

Lots more detail on rebuilding the seats on my blog - https://doanfamily.net/blog/

I really appreciate all the help and support here at BCF.

David
 
The wooden seat bottoms look awesome. Did you coat them with anything to make them more waterproof?
 
Trevor Jessie said:
The wooden seat bottoms look awesome. Did you coat them with anything to make them more waterproof?
Click to expand...

Trevor,

Thank you, All the wood got 3 coats of clear poly.


Morris, bugedd, bayless.

Thanks for the compliments.

P.S.

Morris, I'm jealous of your COP setup. I've not seen anything about it in a while. Still using it? Reliable? My son is more into computers than cars, I thought that would be a project to get him out in the garage.
 
David,

Nice job!

Is the new seat-base foam like the old OE stuff you took out?

Specifically, density and firmness wise?

I know the OE stuff is a dense latex foam. Is that what the replacement is?
 
AN5Sprite said:
David,

Nice job!

Is the new seat-base foam like the old OE stuff you took out?

Specifically, density and firmness wise?

I know the OE stuff is a dense latex foam. Is that what the replacement is?
Click to expand...

The new bottom seat cushions are some kind of foam. the density seems appropriate. I noticed that I sit a little higher now, but I'm pretty sure I "bottom out" when I sit on them. The old seat pans were so bad and the old foams disintegrated if you touched them. I'm guessing that I'm pretty close to factory now, but I have nothing to compare to.
 
great work and the seats are beautiful! its a shame most people wont know the work that went into them.
 
seanb said:
great work and the seats are beautiful! its a shame most people wont know the work that went into them.
Click to expand...

I'm embarraased to say how much time I spent on them including reseaching materials, refurb/fabricate the frames, install the vinyl.

The last part was about half a day, the rest took a long time - rust sucks.
 
those seats look awesome! and the bases are cool! I feel your pain on the rust - my bases looked like yours and i bought new, but probably have 2 days labor in the seat backs wirebrushing rust, sanding, priming, painting...
 
Back
Top