Seat fixing - fitting to the car

Fixing the seats

This turned out to be a real pain and very time consuming - working out where to drill the holes to fix the runners. In the end I may end up changing the head restraints (which are currently mounted on the seat) to ones mounted on the roll over bars. Otherwise the head restraints touch the rear bodywork, the seat belts touch the head restraint and the head restraint restricts rearward seat movement - apart from that lot it is fine!

GD had supplied four fixing bolts, washers and spacers for each seat.  The long bolts and spacers go at the front of each seat. All the spacers were sprayed satin black to blend in (not that you can see them) and to reduce the risk of corrosion.

The carpets under the seats were turned back. Here I had to remove the seatbelt anchorages from the floor. A measurement from the rear bulkhead of 560 mm was used to locate the front fixing points on my seats, but check your own as Keith Akerman used 640 mm. The front hole nearest the transmission tunnel was about 75 mm from the tunnel side and about 90 mm away at the rear mounting point. A template of the bolt holes was used to determine the other location points.

Template taken from bottom of seat, marking the bolt holes

8 mm holes were drilled through the floor to take the fixing bolts. The holes I drilled in error (I had the runners in the wrong position), will act as drain holes!

The bolts were put loosely in the runners, before the seats were positioned in the car.

Bolts loosely fitted to runners

The seats were then trial fitted, before holes were cut in the carpet. Getting all four bolts through is not easy, so the rear holes were slightly larger.

The carpets were re-fitted with the seatbelt eye bolts. The holes in the floor were then marked with chalk and the carpet placed over them. The chalk was transferred on to the back of the carpet by pressing it with my fingers, before holes were cut in the carpet. Finally the seats were put in to the car and with the spacers at the front. The length of each bolt was noted, the seat removed and each bolt shortened to the appropriate length. The seats were fixed in place using the bolts, nylocs and penny washers from underneath the car.

Driver's seat fitted

Now just the passenger side to do.

Handbrake

Once the seat was in place, I could hardly get my fingers around the handbrake. I solved this by fitting a 3 mm spacer at the front handbrake mounting. Because the rear had no spacer, this caused the front of the handbrake to be move away from the car side and this created enough room to use it. Useful!!

Spacer between the handbrake and front mounting can be seen

The leather that covers the handbrake and the escutcheon were re-fitted.

Attaching the seat belts

I am fitting four point harnesses. I have had these in my Caterham and five point in my other two race cars. The five point were great in the race cars and stopped me submarining under heavy braking, but they could hurt the gentleman parts at times! So four point it was. You feel so secure with them on and they stop you moving about in the seat.

The harnesses are the clip in type in black to match the leather trim. It was simply a case of attaching them to the eye bolts on the fixings on the roll hoops and to the anchorages that I had located on the floor. The belts were then adjusted to suit me. At this point I took the opportunity to shorten one of the eye bolts so that it did not protrude from the fixing under the car.

4 point belts fixed

To keep the IVA inspector happy, I will edge the belt fixings with rubber trim to make sure that the curves are of sufficient radius.