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Here is what $11 at the SSJY will get you. A big chunk of padding out of a very nice Audi Wagon's back seat. It looked like that seat had never been sat on and the foam was basically new. A perfect donor for the parts of the Swift seats that needed so much help.
I just started carving away at the foam with a large kitchen knife until i had pieces that roughly fit the parts on the seat that needed replacement. Regular contact cement does a great job of sticking the old foam to the new.
Here is the block I carved out for the driver's side bolster that was totally missing. After a bit more work I was ready to put the covers back on.
The covers came out of the wash looking pretty clean. As a matter of fact they looked nicer than expected, and the color was not too bad a match for my paint scheme. I would venture to say that it would be worth it for anyone to take the time to remove the covers from the seats on their car and toss them in the wash once a year or two as it's a pretty massive improvement. Just a little work with a needle and thread on the parts where the stitching had deteriorated and everything was good to go.
Remember those hog rings? When I was talking about this project with Dave Coleman he gave me the suggestion to replace them with zip ties. That worked well and the best part of this was I already had them.
Here is what my “new” seats look like now that they are all back together. Oh, and installed in the car. Wait a second! You must be thinking “Those didn't just bolt in asshole!”. Correct. They didn't. Here's the thing about seats and mounting them: It's really important to not cut corners because your seats are a very important part of the safety system in your car. Seat belts won't really help you much if the seat is no longer near the belts. If a seat breaks loose in an accident the occupant is going for a wild ride in a metal box with lots of glass windows and other unfriendly obstacles. I can't tell you the number of times I have looked at “sports” cars where the nifty race seats are held in with little more than love and maybe one or two mounting bolts. Please don't be this person.
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Here is a fly over of a couple of the mounting problems I solved. These will be different for every seat to car conversion so just use these pics to get an idea of what one can do. Out came the measuring tape, some 1″x1/8″ mild steel bar stock, the chopsaw, and welder. The good news was that the Swift GTI seat rails were pretty close to the mount points on the Starlet. One of the mounts just needed to be moved over an 1/2 inch so I ground off the factory mounting rivet and then welded the mounting tab back on slightly offset to match the hole in the car body. That was it for the front of the seat rails. On the rear of the tracks, one rail lined up with a stock mounting hole and just needed a matching hole drilled in it. Not so lucky with the outboard side shown in the next picture. To solve the issue I drilled and shaped a 3″ length of the bar stock to bridge the gap. Not exactly OEM quality but I am not worried about it breaking in a wreck.
Now that I have at least some basic seats the car is starting to be sort of useable. Driving the car is really highlighting the absolute butt-tastic suspension. It's a bit like driving a fairground go-kart where it's somehow both too tight and too loose at the same time. Terrible, skittery understeer, coupled with hilarious wheel hop in the rear and a total lack of composure over any broken pavement, makes this car much more suited to parking than driving. It would be very hard to make it handle any worse. Soon, I'll be using some creativity and really working to make it better. Keep in touch folks!
