Well, things are bumbling along here at Five Cent Racing's Custom Upholstery Division. Before I get "real" heat installed out there, I'm keeping the place toasty by occasionally running my Weber grill in short bursts. The place gets nicely warm, but everything now smells like Barbecued Chicken.......
I have successfully finished narrowing (or, as the Hot rod guys call it; "Channeling") the passenger seat. Somewhere in the middle of all this, I remembered what Wolfgang said about it possibly being easier (I suppose, MUCHO easier) to just paint the old seats I've been using, but these new seats are a PERFECT color match for the rest of the car!!
And so, I press on......
It seemed easier to keep the frame intact on the more complex side - the side with the recliner mechanism, so I removed the opposite side and started hacking 1/2" at a time off of the cross members until it seemed to fit into the seat well with enough extra room to accommodate everything. In the end, I removed about 2-1/2" of width.
Having gotten the width corrected, the next step was to put it all back together and still keep the seat back hinge or pivot points intact. That's easy on the recliner side - nothing has changed, but on the other side the pivot point has to precisely align with the recliner side or the seat back won't pivot correctly. the recliner mechanism has a fixed pivot point on the mechanism, while the other side has a big bolt going through the seat back frame and into the seat bottom pivot bracket, which is threaded. Those two points, 16 inches apart, have to align as two points of a hinge.
I got around this by simply buying a piece of hardware store threaded rod to run through the seat bottom pivot bracket, used a power drill to spin it and threaded it right across the seat bottom til it got to the other side where the frame (before welding) could be adjusted to perfectly align the rod with the opposite pivot point. the rod is at the bottom of this picture. Eventually, the frame will be welded just Northwest of the hammer head, and in the lower left corner near the vice grips holding everything together, made straight by a couple of cross-brace jigs which bolted to the original glider mounting holes on the underside of the frame:
So, once everything was lined up and the width was correct, all that was left was adding my "bird poop-looking" welds to everything and making it permanent. I had used a spot weld drill to remove the original spot welds so I just re-welded right through the holes to the new positions. Someday, I have just GOTTA take a night course and learn how the hell to MIG weld......That would make life SO much easier!
Anyway, bottom welds behind us, I moved on to tackling the seat back frame. It's really difficult to totally remove the upholstery material from the back because it is hog-ringed to the frame and much of the cushion material was formed-in-place around the frame members. A Hog Ring is simply an open ring (in the shape of a "C") of thick, stiff wire which is attached with a pair of special pliers such that the pliers close the ring onto whatever is in their mall and hold it fast. I must have removed about 50 hog rings to get everything apart and, on the seat back, that got me about half way there so I quit while I was ahead. There are also complex seat cushion tensioners with VERY heavy springs holding everything together and some of those were removed as well and then the upholstery material simply folded out of the way.
Anyway, once the seat bottom frame was channeled, the seat back had to be adjusted so it still had a pivot point in the right place. That looked complex, but I took the same approach as with the base - made a new frame bracket to move the pivot point inboard and then used the old frame bolt and bracket to align with the new pivot point. This picture shows the old frame pivot point bottom center, and the new frame bracket cut into the bottom frame cross-member and being located simply by using the original pivot bolt to "point" at the center of the new mounting hole. Once everything was aligned in 3-dimensions, I simply poop-welded the new bracket to the old frame (carefully keeping all of the upholstery material away from the heat and flash with spacers and heat shields).
The new bracket is thicker than the old one (again, Home Depot flat steel stock about the same thickness and width as the original metal) and is angled over to the original frame side member and then up the side member 4" to give me lots to weld to along the side for front-to-back strength (I needed lots of length for my poop-welds). That thing will now hold forever and three weeks. Here is the bracket before being poopified:
So that gave me a new pivot point, and the old one on the frame side member was simply removed. Once THAT was done, it became obvious that there was a wire-form of some sort embedded within the seat back cushion material which had to be "notched" in the lower corner of the seat back to accommodate the new pivot point, etc. That had to be re-bent, to reposition the corner of the seat, without heat and it's a 3/16" thick steel wire so a lot of grunting with big water pump pliers ensued but it's now done.
So, the goal here was to get the seat bottom to fit the very narrow seat space in a VW pan, keep the fore-aft glides in place, allow room for the recliner mechanism to fit and still work AND get all of the color-matched trim bits back onto the seat to hide all of those ugly mechanical thingies that make it all work. Oh! and not make the seat bottom any taller off the deck as the original, Porsche 914 seats were (with their original glides and full-seat recliners).
This is what I ended up with:
The recliner actuator handle is right between the body sill and the seat material in the foreground, the seat sits at approximately the same height as the original (OK> it's 1" taller, more-or-less, but what the hell, that's the best I can do and retain the fore-aft glides) and everything seems to fit. The seat backs will hang over the central tunnel about 1-1/2" from each seat, but your eye won't see anything amiss because all of the trim piping in the seat bottoms and backs will line up because only the very bottoms of the seat bases were narrowed, NOT the top of the set base cushion - pretty sneaky, that, I thought.
Sorry, but I don't yet have a side-by-side comparison of old versus new seats. I'm cleaning up the second one now from 20 years of storage dust and may have just such a pic in a day or so, and then I'll be taking the next one apart to begin the dissection process.
This has been quite an educational and fun project so far. PLUS, I've found a local source of the Hog Rings I need to put everything back together!!
Stay tuned!