Well, after over a year, I finally turned my attention to the Dodge bench seat that I purchased for the truck. I never really felt it was a great fit from day one, but for the past year I have more or less relegated it to the garage until I decided it was time to drag it out and measure it up.
Yesterday, I did just that. But not before I decided to drag out the sandblasting gun and a full tub of garnet to see if I could clean up some of that bad rust on the frame. I spent a good hour with the blaster and in the end decided that for the effort, it just wasn't worth it, so I hit it with a plastic seaweed style wheel. I went through four of them just trying to remove old rust from the back seat frame. It was better, but the seat has many areas that you just can't get into. Ideally the sandblaster should have gotten into those hard to get at areas, but the gun (Blackridge from Supercheap) was pretty useless. Either it worked for ten seconds flat and spewed out its cannister load in crazy time or it just refused to do anything. I really found the whole experience very annoying and time consuming with a pretty weak result.
The plastic wheel worked better but these things are expensive and don't last that long, especially on old rusty seats. For paint, they seem to work ok, but on a job like this probably the old trusty angle grinder is your best tool. Anyway, after several hours of trying to clean up the seat, I finally decided to see how it looked in the cabin, and whether it would fit.
Well, it didn't.
Yep, I will say that again. The damned seat didn't fit after all that. I mean, it was super tight, and it actually DID kinda fit, but it was just way too squeezy in there.
I had never been totally convinced right from the start that this seat was going to be the one I would use, as I always held out for an original seat for a fair price. But that didn't happen. I chased a couple of Chevy seats in vain and even considered using an XF XG to XH ute or panel van seat, but at 1350 length, I always thought they were a little too small, and a little too "modern" for the look I was aiming for.
This old Dodge seat certainly had that old style look that I was seeking, but now I was faced with the reality that it was just too big. My wife suggested I just chop the seat, but I told her it was much too much trouble to do that.
Later that evening, I decided to have another look at the seat to see if it was even remotely possible to chop a couple of inches out of it, and the more I looked at it, the more I realised it was probably quite a feasible thing to do.
So, today, that's what I did...
Here is the seat before I started hacking into it...
Looking down through the window at the passenger side of the seat you can see just how close that seat comes to the door. By the time you recover the seat you won't have room for door trim. And the other side was just the same
This is the area I chose to take two inches from. There were fewer thing to interfere with the chop and it lined up perfectly with a row of springs on the base. I'd decided to take the entire row of springs out from the base.
I didn't have any steel tube to slip over the cut line, so I slipped a couple of nuts on the line, welded the line together and then welded the nuts together and then welded the nuts to the line. Surely it won't break now!
I cut a sleeve out of the bar I removed from the seat and used that to reinforce the bar.
I welded the shortened rods together and slid a nut over the weld and then welded that to the rod for extra strength. Dumb idea? I dunno. Seemed sensible.
Hey, look at how much space we have now! That's more like it!
Plenty of space now. You can get your whole fist through the gap now!
Whoa! She's looking extra sexy now in red rustoleum. Whattaya say, boys? My wife is gonna love me. I think I missed the plastic drop sheet.
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