fbekholden.com

here we go

Bought a Mazda BT-50 bench bucket seat that i want to install in the ute for long distance stuff seeing as I don't think I am ever going to get the rattler back on the road , made a start on installing it yesterday .

Like all the other stuff done to the ute, I don't want to modify the ute itself , rather make the bits fit the existing holes so I can undo any changes without getting a welder or spraygun involved.

To that end, I cut up a set of original seat mounts and planned to use them on the donor seat if possible , turns out it wasn't going to be that easy but it wasn't going to be all that difficult either

First up I removed the front seat out of the wagon seeing as it s a whole lot easier to remove then a ute seat plus you can see the back of it to figure out how best to mount it.

The old and the new

I marked the original mounts on the floor of the shed





And looky here , they are exactly the same width

So I wandered up to EKMart and found a pair of old seat mounts and got to work - removed the Mazda ones and sat them side by side on the bench , the original ones have a curve in them , the Mazda ones are straight so a direct fit wasn't going to happen.





So next trick was remove the bases off the Holden runners and adapt the Mazda runners , this involved drilling the Holden rivets out and carefully removing the ends of the Mazda runners with a hand held milling machine.



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Mounting positions were drawn on the bench as well so I could line them up , a couple of extra holes were drilled in the Holden base and the rear brackets were welded onto the Mazda runners , runners bolted back onto the seat and then installed the seat into the wagon.

Height seems OK at the rear , I ran out of time to play with it today as I had some other errands to run. The front is too high with the stock bracket plus it sits at the wrong angle so I am going to need to take a piece out of it and then weld it on. once I am happy with it - then its off to Drews at Northside Motor Trimming for a retrim Flew out this arvo so had to call and early end to shed time



All in all a bloody easy swap , and once its retrimmed shouldn't look too out of place in there and will make long days driving to and from Nationals even more pleasurable.

Good job.
I put an early Rodeo one in my sedan before Renmark I think it was. The FB runners bolted up to new holes that I drilled in the seat base. It was easier than I expected.

Nice clean job!

Nice work Blacky. Other errands eh? 8 ) 8 )


FB ute fixer upper, EK van on rotisserie

Good stuff Blacky,

I don't know what happens to the time either, work, kids, wife, house then the spare 2 hours you get for the shed is spent looking for stuff !!!!

Bum will be nice and new after a long trip with that seat.

Greg

Well done Blacky on upgrading the seat. I'm using the same seat in Ammo's ute.
I cut 4 base plates and bolted these to the existing mounting points. I did shape these to fit the floor.
Trimmed of some of the Mazda seat mount and sat the seat in position.
Once I have sat my butt on the seat and happy that I had some movement of the seat forward and back, tack welded plates to the seat mount.
Welded, ground and painted black. Hacked up the trim on the original bench seat to fit the Mazda seat. This mod give a bench seat with pull down arm rest.

Cheers,
Roger

Errol62 wrote: Mon Mar 28, 2022 7:34 am Nice work Blacky. Other errands eh? 8 ) 8 )

Did a bit more last night , was going to do it yesterday but the young bloke needed a hand to pull the cab off his HJ45 Cruiser


Excavators are such a useful device

Anyhoo , front mounts needed to be lowered somewhat as the seat was in full boy racer hat backwards mode , measured them up and they needed to be cut like so


Cut and welded , dummy fit and found to be good - aforementioned son nowhere to be found to give me a hand to remove seat for final welding so left for today.




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Brackets finished off,fitted and seat bolted back in , next step is the console, I want to mount it to the seat about 100 mm off the floor, so I don’t need to drill holes in the floor to mount it plus it will move with the seat.






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Sheer bloody luxury lad ………

Nah looks good Blacky

Cool man!

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Brilliant work mate


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Got a bit more done today, started the console mount .

I cut off a few of the hogrings to expose the seat frame, then made some brackets to weld to it and glued them on