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This is the way I made my stock rear seat stronger and safer for the little
beaners.
First you have to acquire a rear seat, then you have to take it apart,
this is the easy part. The armrests are attached with nuts the studs are part of the armrest
itself. The rear cushion and bottom cushion are bolted with four bolts each.
After it has been disassembled you can sand blast it or have it
wheelbrated somewhere, it will look very clean after it is stripped of
paint and rust. Now is the time to check to see if it is square and check
for cracks. On the seat that I got with my Bronco I had to weld up one split
in the tube frame and then I tapped the tops of the frame together and
welded them to the top bar all the way around.
Next you will drill the spot welds out of the top two channels and the
four supports on the bottoms of the channels.
Next go to a machine shop with a break. They can make you new cross members
for the top of your seat. If you know your shop you can get new ones done
cheap. Mine were from scrap so they were free. Oh yeah, I brought out donuts
and bought the guys a soda while I was there. The steel they used was 14 ga.
Next you can weld 4 studs to the bottom of your back cross member. This will
serve as mounts for your seat belts.
Measure and weld the cross members to the seat frame. This is a good time to
check your frame over one last time before getting it ready for paint. My
seat had A LOT of tweaking to get done before it was straight. If you look
closely at the picture you can see the corners that had to be heated and
bent and you can see the long welds that I reinforced on the frame (burn
marks on both sides where the tube meets the bottom supports)
When the frame is complete paint it whatever color you want I took mine by
my friends paint shop and he let me paint it myself with auto finish (this
was free I paid him enough to paint the Bronco he owes me some small stuff
;-) )
So far it has all been structural work the hard part is done. Now all I did
was call Wet Okole and ordered custom seat
covers for the front and rear seats. They go on very easily and look great.
All you have to do to mount them is poke little holes in the fabric where
your bolts go through, and mount up the pads to the frame.
Turn the seat over and mount your seat belts to the studs you welded on the
rear cross member.
Now the arm rests... There are a couple different options here. You can order
new ones from a supplier or have your old ones recovered or leave them off
all together. If you are going to do this you might want to weld up the holes
for the arm rests before you paint the frame. I chose to have my original
ones recovered and that is all I am waiting on at this time.
The last
picture shows the seat completed with arm rests from Bronco Parts. They are very nice people
to work with.
by Jared Roeck
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