Repairing & Rebuilding the Seats

I needed to do some clean up in the garage and needed a quick hit on the car, so I grabbed the seats and did some work on them. I cut the old seat tracks off and welded a repair piece into the rail on one so we could wire brush it.

Some more light work today…..I am making templates of the seats to figure how to make the Roadster seats into Coupe seats. Really no surprises – both the Roadster seat frames and the Coupe leather seat covers appear to me mirror images of each other. What I am missing is the height measurement of the coupe seat. I don’t think I will have a problem cutting the frame tubes and making the seat backs to have the same curve but I really need the height measurement of the internal two vertical supports.

Well no guts no glory….let’s mock this thing up. From all of the templates it looks like if I make mirror images of both short sides I will be really close.

I cut a 1″ piece of the solid stock to use as a locating pin.

I used a wood pipe clamp to pull the sides together.

I decided to make the sides the same size and will use the outside measurement of the tape measure since there are no weld beads to interfere with the measurement.

I used an axial clamp (thanks to Santa) to make sure the tube aligns properly.

Here you can see where I tacked the outside bend and this is with the two seat backs next to each other.

And here’s the final mock up all tack welded up.

Here’s the finished seat back.