… on me I’ll understand.
Things are SLOOOW in the garage. It’s easy to find motivation for basic wrenching… but fab and welding… I can hardly get anything done in an hour time-slot, and that’s about all that I’ve been able to afford.
But what I am working on is primarily getting the new Recaro’s in the car. That has been complicated by my height, and my desire to keep the car driveable for people who are not my height. I hacked up the seats in my parts car to get a set of sliders… but it’s not as easy as mounting the Recaro’s on top of those sliders, because that would put my ears on the roof. It is probably my most intense fab project yet. I’ve got a plan and I’ll document it as I go. I do wish I bought side mount seats though… instead of bottom mount.
The seats themselves though, which I never did photograph, look like this…
… and this…
As I said before, one seat was in better condition than the other. The solution to that has been to recover them. Brown and Red coming. Beyond that though, the frame of the stripped down one was bent. I managed to get it straight in the vice, but I think I’m going to add a few gussets and welds to help keep it that way. Proper respect to the welder.
But I get no accolades for my fab work.
And that sucks… because the chassis itself needs some help.
wah oh! When I unbolted the stock seat, the welded nut on the inside rear fell on the ground.
And on the other side, 3/6 of the spot welds that hold this bracket on have come apart. The kick panel is actually cracked on the highlighted spot where the weld above it has come apart, but the one below has held strong. If you don’t know AE86, this bracket is probably the dumbest piece of engineering on the whole car because it sits about 40mm higher than the seat mount on the opposite side.
I really wanted to chop it down to level… and now I have a really good reason to.
All this going on… it’s really tempting to pull everything out of the interior and do some reinforcment welding… and then paint over all the ugliness. It’s tempting… but at the rate I’m going that would probably have me back on the road in 2012. No dice.