Bench to Bucket Conversion Advice
Finished. For the seat installation, I located the 'dimples' in the floor pan that mark the factory mounting bolt locations for the bucket seats (4 per seat), also visible underneath the car. You DO NOT use the bench seat holes. Because I did not want to remove the glued-down carpeting, I carefully center-punched the dimples from below (not fun) and drilled small pilot holes up through the floor pan and carpet. I then used these pilot holes to locate topside to finish the drilling. The carpet was thick and padded, so there was a lot of stopping to clear debris from the drill bits. This was a lot of fiddly work that went a lot more slowly than I thought it would. Doing this without the carpeting would be much easier. As noted above, a correct installation would have reinforcement plates welded on top of all inboard holes (under the carpet) to keep these bolts from pulling through in the event of a crash. Because I did not pull the carpet or have a welder, I substituted really wide, thick washers underneath.
Here are some pics of the seats I had to work with. Did a bunch of cleaning, but they had been abused by previous owners.
After many successive attempts to clean the very dirty buckets that have some red paint overspray:
A lot of the red came off with a light wipe-down with lacquer thinner. This was risky, but I wasn't going to use them if they were pink. Took many tries and a lot of work, but they came clean enough to use. Final step was a steam clean and leather treatment after this pic was taken. I may get them recovered at some point.
Finished installation:
Finished. For the seat installation, I located the 'dimples' in the floor pan that mark the factory mounting bolt locations for the bucket seats (4 per seat), also visible underneath the car. You DO NOT use the bench seat holes. Because I did not want to remove the glued-down carpeting, I carefully center-punched the dimples from below (not fun) and drilled small pilot holes up through the floor pan and carpet. I then used these pilot holes to locate topside to finish the drilling. The carpet was thick and padded, so there was a lot of stopping to clear debris from the drill bits. This was a lot of fiddly work that went a lot more slowly than I thought it would. Doing this without the carpeting would be much easier. As noted above, a correct installation would have reinforcement plates welded on top of all inboard holes (under the carpet) to keep these bolts from pulling through in the event of a crash. Because I did not pull the carpet or have a welder, I substituted really wide, thick washers underneath.
Here are some pics of the seats I had to work with. Did a bunch of cleaning, but they had been abused by previous owners.
After many successive attempts to clean the very dirty buckets that have some red paint overspray:
A lot of the red came off with a light wipe-down with lacquer thinner. This was risky, but I wasn't going to use them if they were pink. Took many tries and a lot of work, but they came clean enough to use. Final step was a steam clean and leather treatment after this pic was taken. I may get them recovered at some point.
Finished installation: