Rapom's Rocket - just another Duster build thread

You may remember my junk yard seats from page one. I found these sitting loose in the cab of a Toyota truck and bought them for $60 for the pair. These are really nice low back buckets with enough leg and side bolstering to hold you snuggly in place yet not feel like your sitting in a bath tub. The manual knobs on the side of the drivers seat adjust seat bottom height and tilt, the slides have a very good amount of for/aft movement, the back tilt adjustment has a wide range of settings and the seat back releases fold the backs forward and release the slide catches so the whole seat slides forward making back seat access wide open. The drivers seat has a knob for lumbar support adjustment on the interior side which is not visible in the pictures. Last but not least is adjustable head rests. The passenger seat doesn't have all the adjustments but I'm really happy with them overall. The only problem with them was the drivers seat slider handle was missing (black arrow) but over the years of junk yard rummaging I found seats very similar to these and picked the handle which fit and was a perfect color match.

My Sister-In-Law does auto upholstery so I hope to get them in her hands some day for a redo in black leather but she is in NW Montana... not exactly close so I may have to get it done locally.

To install buckets some prep work should be done to the floor. Bucket seat cars had reinforcement plates to buck up the sheet metal at the mounting bolts. Fortunately the flats are stamped in all floor pans (red circles) so it was easy to cut some heavy gauge sheet metal squares and weld them in. The outboard seat risers, stamped into the floor sheet metal, seemed to position my seats low enough and at a good angle so I re-drilled the outboard sliders to match the floor's bolt holes then I fabbed up some inner brackets out of 1/8" angle. I went crazy with the hole saws to cut the weight down as they were unnecessarily heavy.