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Any progress with the seats?

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http://www.pbase.com/ninerjoe/lotus_19_build

Yes some. I have the mounts done and welded on, and got 1 seat painted. Next step is to work on bonding the skins on, and then making the rest of the parts. Unfortunately It may be a little while as we are out of town for the next 2 weekends, which crunches time on weeknights. I hope to get a few nights work on it next week.

Thanks,

Daniel

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MG midget bodied Locostish car in progress

So life happened and I got pulled away from the project for a while. I've been able to get some work done on the seats and am happy to report that 1 seat is skinned. I mounted it with some off the shelf Menards rivets that I found. The are aluminum and painted white. The stud 90% of the top pops off flush are just below the head and stays retained so I like that. I debated using some kind of adhesive with the rivets and decided chances are I will be re-doing this and didn't want to have to scrape a bunch of gunk off. I may regret that due to vibrations and flexing, but I will keep that up to date.

I started withe the bottom. When I skinned this I didn't have Cleco's (I've remedied that) so I drilled the panel out, attached a few rivets. Drilled the rest of my holes, drilled out the rivets and cleaned off the burrs and re-installed.


I installed the back and then had to move away from the sheets that sat on the square tube and move to the ones with round tubes. I chose to just go about half way around the tube and then drill a hole riveting thorough the round tube. It would have been better to add a flange to the round tube and just rivet flat to that, and I might do that If I do this again, but these seats are an experiment and I thought I'd try this. I formed the metal around and relieved it by cutting out metal that needed to shrink and fold over. It doesn't look the best, but it is functional. I put generous radius's and cut back quite a bit from all of the edges to try to minimize any tearing that may occur in the metal. Again visually it's not the best, but it will be covered in fabric eventually.





So the drivers seat is now skinned. Next steps will be to upholster it. Sitting it is is surprisingly comfortable even without foam. I've used it sitting in the living room for about an hour at a time and was comfortable. When I foam it I will add a lumbar support.







It's obviously a lot of work to build a seat this way and I'm not 100% sure that it will survive, however the real cost to date is ~$20, so other than Time I'm not out a lot if I have to re-do it.

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MG midget bodied Locostish car in progress

So I had some rare garage time yesterday, and decided to give it a whirl. Needed a low-back seat, so I used Nocone's seat as a guide. Only made one so far, but the other will be identical. 18.25" ad its widest point and 17" tall. Pretty easy and fun.

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http://www.pbase.com/ninerjoe/lotus_19_build

Sweet! Those look great. It looks like you used tubing for the round. What did you bend it with and did it bend ok?

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MG midget bodied Locostish car in progress

Thanks. I used 1/2" square and round, both 16ga. Like you, I used a conduit bender. It was my first time using the bender, but it was actually pretty easy. A couple of times I had to tweak the bends in the vise, but the tube is really quite malleable.

Joe

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http://www.pbase.com/ninerjoe/lotus_19_build

Nice job, all. I've been thinking about making a pair of seats similar to the low-back vintage Kirkey seats. It's good that others are working on projects along the same lines. After seeing the high-back seats, I think a set of those would be nice to have.

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Cost to date: $---.--
Projected cost:$--,---.--
Expected completion: ------ ----

Very useful thread. I can't imagine spending as much for a seat as for a good shock.

Looks really good except that if you had used 3003 and annealed it you should have been able to shrink it around the tube. Has anybody thought about using 1/4" or 3/16" thick plywood instead of aluminum? It would be easy to staple and glue fabric to.

I used 5mm for the seat backs and and 12mm plywood for the bottoms. Definitely easy to staple on the fabric. Be sure to varnish everything.

Very cool process, looking forward to seeing the upholstered product!

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Ford 5.0 into an M3
mikaelvroom.com | @MikaelVroom