Mounting seats to the floor?

[Slider79SC]

It does need to slide because both my wife and I drive and she is a foot shorter than I am. I don't really want to cut the car either but I really like the seats and if I cut the mounts out correctly I can always put them back in and metal finish the area so that it would look just like factory...

[DW SD]

How about narrowing the mounts that came with the seats? Or changing those in some way to narrow?

Doug

[911teo]

Yeah but we need narrower and lower.. that's the key... right Jeff?

You need more room up there...

[DW SD]

Originally posted by 911teo
Yeah but we need narrower and lower.. that's the key... right Jeff?

You need more room up there...

What I am thinking is: If you narrow the base of the seat mount / track, you can drop it to the floor (between the Porsche seat rails).

Doug

[Slider79SC]

I f you look at the seat in this pic, you can see that the seat is the same width as the mounts. The seat itself actually is wider than the inside measurement of the factory rails. I don't think I have any other choice than to remove the factory mounting rails and build something new...

Plus the tilt knob would hit the factory mounts... dang!?!

[VincentVega]

I cut the stock mounts off and lowered them ~2", made for lots of headroom.

[Slider79SC]

Chris,

Did you make new mounts or bolt them to the floor?

[jpachard]

Mounting your seats to the floor is a very bad idea from a safety standpoint.
1. The floor is a flat piece of sheetmetal with very little structural rigidity.
2. In the event of a severe impact, something could pierce the floor and you or could tear off a section of the floor leaving your seat without any support.

Below is a picture of what I did for a tall client of mine;
1. Cut out factory seat rails
2. Weld up sub frame to which you can bolt a seat.
3. Mount brackets directly to sub frame.
4. Weld Sub frame to tunnel and logitudonal.

This setup lowered the seat by almost 2" and gave my client a good location to mount his sub belt without having to put a bolt through the floor..

[Slider79SC]

That looks very nice, did you use 1"x1" for the frame? And what thickness did you use for the plates?

Thanks

[jpachard]

The tubes are 1X1 and the plates are 1/8" thick by 4" wide. If you needed to lower the seat more, you could use 1/2"x1 to drop the sub-frame another 1/2"

I welded up the sub frame from the bottom before doing the final istallation in the chassis.

Cheers, James

[DW SD]

James,
Nice solution!

Doug

[North Coast Cab]

Does anyone know how much you can lower the seat rails if you have the DME under the dirver seat? I've been looking at solution to this problem as well.

John

[jpachard]

John, It's pretty easy to relocate the DME.

James

[Slider79SC]

Ok,

So I'm sitting in front of my car last night with the seat out and a cutoff wheel and grinder in hand and I just couldn't bring myself to laying into a car that I have countless of thousands of dollars in.

Do I really want to cut up my car just to fix an issue with the seats that only cost me $600 bucks???? I decided NO...

So I flip the seats over and begin to disassemble them, I removed the seat cushion from the bottom and pull the leather off the cushion. Next I break out the trusty fine toothed door trim saw and proceed to cut the cushion length wise and take about an 1" 1/4" off. Slip the leather back on, reassemble the seat and bolt it in place.

I get in the car and slip on my helmet and everything seems good, seating position is good, helmet clears!!!!

Good for now and I will see how everything feels next weekend at the track.....

Thanks everyone!!!!

[911teo]

Awesome! I am glad it worked out...

Good luck at the race track.

[arcsine]

Slider,
I have the same Yonaka's (although in cloth) and have the same issue. How thick was/is the foam before and after you sliced it down?

[Slider79SC]

Gary,

The foam was about 2 1/4" and I cut roughly 1 1/4" inches off the bottom of the seat foam. They still feel comfortable, I am going on a day long tour with our region tomorrow and will find out just how comfortable they are, but so far they feel fine. The foam is a pretty high density foam so I imagine they will hold up ok.

[911teo]

Slider
if the worse comes to the worst you can usually find some racing shells in the classifieds for $400-500 a pair. Then the sidemounds will be max $100 and they will also hold you better at the race track.

I bet you are now very proficient in taking the seats off and putting them back on very quickly.

I now take my Recaros off on my own in 5 minutes... You could do it before any DE event if you don't like the idea of racing seats in a daily driver....
This way u keep the car stock and increase your safety...

[arcsine]

Slider,
Thanks. If you could get back on how comfy it is that would be great. I'ld love to get an inch of headroom and this sounds easier than the making brackets way.

[Slider79SC]

I did the seat swap thing for a couple of seasons and it got a little old, I found these seats and thought they would be a good compromise between full race and nice street seats, I was very surprised to find out that they hold you in very well at the track.

I ran our spring austocross with them and I knew from the first moment that they were going to do great. They held me in so well that it allowed me to really push that day and I ended up with TTOD.... I was thrilled with their performance.