Episode 2.
Saturday morning early, 5/9/09.
Friend and I headed off to Vuyo's place to fetch some seats.
I am sure Vuyo was happy they were gone, as he now has some more space in his garage for other beetle bits
Got them home and packed them with the rest of the Type 3 goodies.
Rear bench seat does not appear to have seen too much action,
, still in pretty good condition, however, the plan is to redo/recover the entire interior in a tan colour vinyl.
You can see the original horsehair poking out of the front seats, that WONT buff out
.
Between the seats you can see all the door cards and the rear parcelshelf board. Except for one broken one we can probably re-use them all for the recovering process.
The frame of the front seats will need a bit of a clean and a spray, nothing elbow grease and a rattle can can't fix.
As I was pondering what to do with the seats, I remembered some special seats I got from a friend years ago, and was saving for that special occasion, well, this could very well be that special occasion. So I called up my DAD, remember those seats I have stored at your place? Exactly how deep in the storeroom are they
?
I'll check tomorrow was the reply
. Then this afternoon, got this great pic with measurements
Some background on these seats: Years before the Mclaren SLR was first unleashed on this world, a local company was contracted to produce some pre-production samples of the seats they designed for the car.
Now I have no idea if they got the contract, if they actually produce the seats, or if it was outsourced to China. What I do know, is that I have some seats with Mclaren Bucket prototype stickers on them, in carbon fibre, ready to be fitted to a Notch
. But dont take my word for it, take a look at the pick below, compare, and you decide for yourself:
The leather colour is also what I have in mind for the notch.
This is where I need some forum help though.
I need to a) Fit the seats, and b) Make them flip forward so the rear seats can still be used. First Idea is to mount the seat on the existing seat rails and adjusters, and fabricate a special bracket that allows the entire seat to be flipped forward. Perhaps a permanent mount with a swivel at the front and some brackets at the back that unclip/unhook when required?
You will see the seats have pre drilled holes, and I would like to re-use these, don't really want to drill any more holes in them. So any advice would be gladly read!
As mentioned before, after short but successful negotiations I bought some fasty sheetmetal from Blitz.
After further discussions it was agreed that I should just take the whole shell
. Ferdi was nice enough to offer to go and fetch it, since he will be the one doing the real hard work of cutting and welding
.
When he was finished with the loading, Ferdi developed a very neat new way of exporting a fastback. He calls it fasty in a box
. So next time someone wants to export some ACVW metal, we can save them large amounts on shipping:
Just unload, add water, and start your restoration.
***** Fin *****