,
 |  |
While the covers were washing I got the padding foam off the frames and took a look at what was going on there. You can see that the broken spring has actually just come unhooked from its tang and that's an easy repair. The bigger issue is that both these seats are suffering from DST. DST? WTF? DST stands for Dreaded Seat Twist. This is the result of the frame of the seat bending on the side where the recliner lock holds it. The welded on rib on the camera left side of this frame is what the seat recliner bolts to and where it ends on the vertical tube is where the seat is bending. The area in the circle in the above right picture is where this issue occurs.
Here is a much tighter view of the problem area. You can see that where the rib ends becomes a stress point and the thin wall tube couldn't hold up to a driver's weight being bounced along for thousands of hours. Particularly if the driver was of a somewhat corpulent nature. The repair I decided upon was simple but did require some welding.
First off, I laid 
a bead along the seam we saw in the last picture. This would have probably lent enough strength to the part but I wanted the seat to be stronger than that as it is likely the Starletabusa will be getting flogged pretty hard on the track and, as a BMW M Coupe owner, I can say first hand that seat flex is a drag. The process to add some re-enforcement went like this: I found a bit of sheet metal and cut it with shears to roughly fit the area to be strengthened. Then using a “whack and tack” method I shaped the part with a hammer as I welded it into place. The pic on the right shows the final result. Now that part of the seat has much more material supporting it, and the whole seat is a much more rigid structure.
Here is where the project got much more difficult. Take a look at the deterioration of the padding on the driver's side seat bolster. Because these seats have such tall bolsters they wear very quickly. This was going to require some creative methods to put right. One more trip to the SSJY got me everything I needed to fix this problem.
