Seats- what a challenge

 The owner had a set of MGB sits, circa 1970, that he wanted to have installed.  This would give him headrests from a safety point of view.  This would be a great idea, and should be achievable because the seats bolt into the wooden floor of an MGA so you can put the bolts anywhere you'd like.  Unfortunately, the MGB seats are one inch wider than MGA seats and simply won't fit into the area between the frame rail at the outside and the tunnel at the inside.  Unless you dismantle the seats, make them one inch narrower, and then install custom upholstery.


So we then turned to the old MGA seats from the car.  Seats make a great bench project, so Vince brought the seats to his house to start on them. The seat bottoms are gone except for some rusty metal screen sections that fit on the bottom.  But the wooden portions of the seat bottom is fairly simple, and Vince brought along the seat bottoms from Ray's MGA as a pattern to make new wooden sections.  


Found two key problems with the original seats.  First, the driver's seat shows signs of the car being rear ended and the driver's body causing the seat back to collapse towards the back of the car.  The seat stop is a round hoop of steel that attaches at the bottom of the seat back, this piece is about 2 inches out of position and the metal stays that go from top to bottom in the seat rear are broken off at the bottom due to this deformation.


Broken off metal stay, plus view of bolt, washers trying to correct seat angle:


What the stay should look like:


Side view with bolt and gazillion washers trying to keep the seat back upright.  The two metal tubes should be at a 90 degree angle:


Here's a shot of the two seats showing the difference in seat back angle even with the gazillion washers trying to hold it in place.  Also, the bent seat back is spongy because of the lack of stiffness in the stop.


Then the passenger seat's seat back, which is not bent, has apparently seen a lot of water.  The lower end of the seat back frame is rusted completely through (seat back is going left to right in this photo):



So we need replacement seat back frames for both sides, lower seat wooden pieces, and new foam plus vinyl to create good seats.  Put another way, about the only part we can use is the seat bottom frame.

New complete seats are available, but cost over $2000.  Now looking into other options to avoid this expense.



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