Seat height

James.

I'm not sure how you are going to do this, there are a lot of different seat configurations.  You might be making this more difficult than it needs to be.

I would suggest that you just buy a set of sliders from Vintage (they are cheap), mount your seat to them then set them in the car to determine where to drill the holes.  After the holes are drilled, you can decide if you need to add some sort of spacer to raise them.  

Really depends on your height, leg length etc.

And if VW pan you have the pan recess to deal with.  I used a strip of oak on either side to keep seat tracks above the shag carpet.

Yeah I've been looking at mine too (still in the assembly stage). They sit so low without any jiggering so I'm either doing the oak thing or these brackets.

Troy you are probably right.  I have a tendency to overthink things and get stuck in the details!  :/

The main thing I am looking for is whether the seats will end up being only a couple of inches off the pan (flat pan, no recesses) or will there be 4+ inches under them.  I have the sliders and I am building brackets to attach them.  Just wondering roughly how much room I have to work with.

You'll want to be lower than you think you will.

Sitting behind the windshield makes the whole experience a lot more enjoyable. This means being low in the car. I'm built a bit like a gorilla (long torso and arms, short legs). My great struggle is to get low enough, and my seat is sitting essentially on the floor (of my tube-framed Intermeccanica, which is a lot like a pan with dropped floorpans).

You can always take it up, but there's a limit to how low you can go. Putting dropped pans in is the best possible investment a guy can make in a pan-based car (IMHO).

Your mileage may vary.